02 NEUROSCIENZE E PSICANALISI.pdf - WikiMotorio

• Here, I want to illustrate a third point of convergence: that betweenPavlovian fear conditioning, a form of procedural memory mediated bythe amygdala, signal anxiety, and posttraumatic stress syndromes inhumans. Early in his work on classical conditioning, Pavlov appreciatedthat conditioning is appetitive when the unconditioned stimulus isrewarding, but the same procedure will produce defensive conditioningwhen the unconditioned stimulus is aversive. Pavlov next found thatdefensive conditioning provides a particularly good experimental modelof signal anxiety, a form of learned fear that can be advantageous. It ispretty evident that under natural conditions the normal animal mustrespond not only to stimuli which themselves bring immediate benefit orharm, but also to other physical or chemical agencies…which inthemselves only signal the approach of these stimuli; though it is notthe sight or the sound of the beast of prey which is itself harmful tosmaller animals, but its teeth and claws. (41, p. 14) A similar proposalwas made independently by Freud. Because painful stimuli are oftenassociated with neutral stimuli, symbolic or real, Freud postulated thatrepeated pairing of neutral and noxious