You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book updates and attempts to popularize Panksepp's Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Behaviour, published in 1998. In The Archaeology of Mind, Panksepp and his co-author, psychotherapy clinican Lucy Biven, aim to explain why his neuroscientific research on basic emotional systems is relevant to all mental health professionals. The essence of their case is that primary-process emotions arise from subcortical emotional action networks in the brain. These subcortical systems are shared across all mammalian species, so understanding how they function helps us to recognize ‘how much all mammals share in the ways that they emotionally respond to the world’. The authors argue that there are seven primary-process systems— SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF and PLAY— always written in capitals to signal that they designate ‘specific functional networks of evolutionarily very ancient regions of our brains’. These networks underpin and feed into the secondary emotional learning systems and tertiary conscious emotional experiences, which are the most easily recognized aspects of human emotion and which psychologists usually study.
The authors make the case that we cannot have a credible theory of mind without a credible understanding of the basic emotional feelings we inherit as evolutionary tools for living. They argue that this perspective narrows the distinction between emotional and physical disorders, and that the mind and brain are one thing, which they call MindBrain. They go on to suggest that current psychiatric diagnostic categories such as schizophrenia, autism and depression