Response to Commentaries

I feel fortunate for the distinguished and diverse group of commentators that the editors of Neuro-Psycho-analysis have chosen to address my article, “Is There a Drive to Love.” Their original and intellectually rewarding perspectives on love, drive, attachment, and the desired relationship between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences have enriched my thinking about these issues. In responding to them, I consider in sequence the two major concepts discussed in my original paper: “drive” and “love.”

Drive

Most of the commentators (Glick, Leuzinger-Bohleber, Panksepp, Paul, Watt, and Weinstein) see some merit in the Freudian concept of drive, while being painfully aware, as I am, of its limitations and its need for a serious upgrade and overhaul. In contrast, Mario Mikulincer and Phil Shaver see no room for drive-based models in contemporary psychology and in the cognitive neurosciences. These prominent researchers, who have been leaders for the last twenty years in the study of the links between infantile patterns of attachment and adult love relationships, also doubt the utility of a bottom-up approach that attempts to correlate between neurobiological findings and psychological phenomena. Their view may be summarized by the subheading “Behavioral systems instead of drives” that appears in their commentary.

The categorical rejection of the drive model by two such eminent scientists renders much of what was discussed in my article irrelevant, and it may have far-reaching implications for psychoanalytic theory. However, in my view, the consequences of a total rejection of the drive model resemble the negative consequences that followed the refusal of psychoanalysts in the past to acknowledge and apply Bowlby's attachment-based behavioral systems model to their clinical work and to their theory building. Because of the centrality of this issue, I have chosen to address Mikulincer & Shaver's concerns in some detail. Accordingly, the f