The depth-psychology corpus treats 'panic' along two distinct but intersecting axes. The first, originating in archaic and mythopoetic thought, locates panic within the domain of the god Pan — a numinous irruption that is sui generis, uncaused, and irreducible to ego-corrective mechanisms. Hillman's reading, elaborated most fully in Pan and the Nightmare, insists that panic belongs to a register of experience where anxiety and sexuality are taken so concretely that psychodynamic explanation becomes inadequate: panic is not a symptom to be overcome but a visitation from the archetypal field. The second axis is clinical and neuroscientific. Panksepp's affective neuroscience designates a distinct PANIC system — equated with separation distress rather than fear per se — and traces its pharmacological signature through antidepressants and anxiolytics. Konstan's classical scholarship adds a third register: antiquity understood panic not as individual psychopathology but as collective, nocturnal, military terror attributable to Pan's intervention. Levine and Hollis occupy an intermediate zone, treating panic as a somatic contagion and as the phenomenological surface of deeper existential angst respectively. Hollis provocatively frames the 'going through' of panic disorder as an obligatory confrontation with catastrophic reality. Across all these positions, a central tension persists: is panic a disorder of the nervous system, a mythological communication, or the existential limit of ego-consciousness?
Rape, panic, and nightmare belong where anxiety and sexuality are taken so concretely that the psyche has
Hillman argues that panic, rape, and nightmare share a common ontological structure in which the numinous overwhelms consciousness with such literal concreteness that standard psychodynamic explanation fails, placing them beyond the ego-corrective model.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972thesis
the traditional Western approach to fear is negative. In keeping with the attitudes of our heroic ego, fear, like many other affects and their images, is first of all regarded as a moral problem, to be ove
Hillman identifies the heroic-ego bias that frames panic as moral failure, positioning his archetypal counter-reading against the Western tradition's negative valuation of fear.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972thesis
Roscher opens the way for a mythological perspective: the demon instigates both the desire and the anxiety. They do not convert into each other, owing to Freudian censors and the mechanical hydrostatics of libido-damming
Hillman contrasts Roscher's mythological perspective — in which a divine demon instigates panic directly — with Freud's intrapsychic hydraulic model of repressed desire converted into anxiety.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972thesis
in antiquity, however, panic was understood not as an individual disorder but, typically, as a collective response to an indistinct threat arising in a specific kind of situation
Konstan establishes that the ancient understanding of panic was collective and situational — nocturnal military terror attributed to Pan — fundamentally unlike the modern clinical category of individual panic disorder.
, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006thesis
The 'going through' of a panic disorder, or indeed any anxiety state, obliges us to consciously catastrophize, that is, look at the terrible reality.
Hollis reframes panic disorder therapeutically as an obligatory confrontation with catastrophic reality, reversing the usual avoidance strategy and situating panic within the Jungian topography of Pan's woods.
, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places, 1996thesis
A panic attack is a strong autonomic disturbance with an irresistible urge to escape to safety. Anxiety states may have no apparent object.
Konstan surveys modern clinical definitions of panic attack as objectless autonomic disturbance, establishing the conceptual contrast with antiquity's collective and object-directed terror.
, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006supporting
one of these is the system that functions primarily to elaborate separation distress (i.e., the PANIC system discussed in Chapter 14) as indexed by measures of separation calls in species
Panksepp distinguishes a dedicated PANIC/separation-distress system in the mammalian brain, separate from the FEAR system, forging a neurobiological basis for panic that diverges from fear-based models.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting
the drug did not diminish the anticipatory anxiety associated with the disorder — namely, the fear that an attack might be forthcoming. While the antianxiety agents tested had diminished anticipatory anxiety, they did not diminish the frequency or intensity of the panic attacks themselves.
Panksepp presents Donald Klein's pharmacological dissociation between anticipatory anxiety and panic attacks proper, providing neuroscientific evidence that these are distinct processes mediated by different neurochemical systems.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting
Panic contagion can spread to the whole group almost instantly. FDR presciently warned us about avoiding this kind of contagion.
Levine describes panic as a somatic contagion propagated through postural resonance — a positive feedback loop where mirrored fear postures escalate into collective panic — grounding the ancient collective model in somatic neuroscience.
, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting
he is bordering on panic, and in the moment of panic people develop a primitive psychology. This is an inner panic which the man realizes in his dream state.
Jung links inner panic experienced in the dream state with regression to a 'primitive psychology' and magical thinking, situating panic as a threshold phenomenon at the limit of ego capacity.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
Pan bestowed victory upon the Athenians by sending panicky terror
Hillman cites the mythological precedent of the Battle of Marathon to show that panicky terror sent by Pan was understood as a divine instrument capable of determining historical outcomes.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
the rage can become utterly overwhelming, causing panic and the stifling of such primitive impulses, turning them inward and preventing a natural exit from the immobility reaction.
Levine describes how overwhelming rage triggers panic, which then suppresses primitive survival impulses and locks the individual in a vicious cycle of fear-potentiated immobility at the core of trauma.
, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting
some, such as panic attacks, depression,
Panksepp identifies panic attacks as among the psychiatric disorders most strongly shaped by social variables and the neuroscience of social bonding and separation distress.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting
When Pan is dead, then nature can be controlled by the will of the new God, man, modeled in the image of Prometheus or Hercules
Hillman argues that the death of Pan — and by extension the evacuation of panic from modern experience — enables the Promethean-Herculean fantasy of mastery over nature, at the cost of severing participation in the archetypal world.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting
the deeper work in the analysis took its bearing from that anxiety we all share when we encounter the largeness of the journey ahead
Hollis distinguishes behavioural desensitization from deeper analytic work, proposing that phobia and its affiliated panic symbolize existential anxiety about the scope of the individuation journey.
, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places, 1996aside
fear is sometimes clear, sometimes not clear — clear when we find something manifestly harmful like fire through fear that we will meet death by it, not clear when, while the mind is occupied with something else, it (fear) has insinuated itself into our nature
Konstan draws on Epicurean doctrine to distinguish conscious from insinuated fear, providing a classical antecedent for the modern distinction between fear with an object and panic without one.
, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006aside
Support vector machine analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging of interoception does not reliably predict individual outcomes of cognitive behavioral therapy in panic disorder with agoraphobia.
Khalsa references neuroimaging literature showing the limits of interoceptive biomarkers in predicting CBT outcomes for panic disorder, situating panic within current debates about biological versus psychological treatment mechanisms.
, Interoception and Mental Health: A Roadmap, 2018aside