I was looking for material that relates to the transition between instinct and cognition and came across Animals In Transition by Temple Grandin. (Simon & Schuster, 2005) The author is an ethologist and also autistic. In addition to university teaching, she lectures widely on both autism and related topics. I reccomend it to anyone interested in psychology on any level, animal lovers and clinicians.

Grandin presents the disconnection of autism in the context of instinctual animal behavior. As she does, she points out the differences between fears and anxieties, that fear is an ancient amygdala response, while anxiety is a modern frontal cortex activity. Fixations and fears occur on a primary process level, while we generate anxiety as secondary.  Usually, the object associated with fear is hyper-acutely defined, a unique and dominant item amidst a sea of trivia. She notes that the perseverance of the traumatic memory, long after a phobic response has been extinguished, can lead to PTSD responses in anmals. She continues with information about training animals without punishment and how to handle odd cases. The inference for people is equally clear, but unspoken. Thus, when treating fearful people, we would do well to remember that we can talk them out of a behavior pattern by cognitive therapy and hypnosis, or directly extinguish the fear response by successive approximations or pairing with a non-phobic stimulus, but the initial fear remains. This initial fear may recur at times, subject to random encounters in the world. 

Grandin generally has dichotomized her topic area, and from the dichotomies, she presents differences that explain behavior in general. As an example, she treated the manner in which our fundamental hormonal balance shapes mood and such. Her emphasis was on the manner in which changes of endorphin levels lead to inverse changes in the level of affective social interactions. This explains a lot about addictive behavior and easily generalizes to other everyday situations. Her breakdown of drives and neurotransmitters into "fast" and "slow" categories allows a very useful insight into our responses.

Anyone who wants to train an animal will find this to be an "animal's eye view" of the process. Grandin obviously loves all kinds of animals, and her advice is based on her own feelings of "what if I were being trained". From a clinical viewpoint, Grandin has opened a wndow into primary operations below the borderline level, and has allowed us a peek at the issues  we face in therapy, and how to avoid getting stung.

She is also funny. uses plain language, and is concrete. "A good read" as they say.

dave