ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the first phase of a psychoanalytic treatment of panic disorder through clinical data of a female patient with severe fear and panic anxiety, intense bodily symptoms, sexual excitement, and strong arousal of executive functions. Before introducing the topic, it reports some work on the aetiology of panic disorder and then turn to Freud’s libido and anxiety statements. De Masi, pursuing a useful integration of psychoanalysis and neuroscience, emphasises a mutual psychosomatic short-circuit between body and psyche, in which terror reinforces the somatic reactions and the psychic construction. Alexander and colleagues bring together Freudian psychoanalysis with classical conditioning and neurobiological research, as summarised by Blechner: All these accounts of panic attacks refer to an increase in sensitivity of some alarm system. The discovery that is possible to feel pain in both body and mind, as a feeling and also as something thinkable, has also been an important achievement for the psychoanalytic process.
