Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

Name: Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions
Author: Jaak Panksepp

Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions is a work by Jaak Panksepp (1998).

Core claims

Panksepp’s taxonomy of seven primary-process emotional systems (SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, PLAY) provides the first empirically grounded cartography of what depth psychology has always intuited: that affect is not a byproduct of cognition but the phylogenetically ancient bedrock of psychic life.
By demonstrating that core emotions arise from subcortical structures shared across all mammals, Panksepp effectively dissolves the anthropocentric fallacy that Hillman attacked from the imaginal side — both thinkers converge on the recognition that emotion is transpersonal, not personal property.
The SEEKING system — Panksepp’s most original contribution — reframes desire not as Freudian libido or behaviorist reinforcement but as an autonomous, expectant, forward-reaching energy that maps with striking precision onto Jung’s concept of psychic energy as a purposive, goal-directed force.

How does Panksepp’s SEEKING system compare to Hillman’s phenomenology of desire in Re-Visioning Psychology, and does the neuroscience confirm or complicate Hillman’s claim that desire is a “divine influx” rather than a human property?
Neumann describes the evolutionary shift from “medullary man” to “cortical man” in The Origins and History of Consciousness — how does Panksepp’s demonstration of subcortical emotional consciousness challenge or refine Neumann’s developmental schema?
Given Panksepp’s evidence for cross-species emotional continuity in the PLAY and CARE systems, how should we reassess Hillman and Portmann’s concept of animal self-presentation as developed in Dream Animals and the Eranos lectures on the animal image?