Revisiting metapsychology, psychopathology, and developmental issues in neuropsychoanalysis

Abstract

In this issue of Neuropsychoanalysis, three original articles cover topics that range from metapsychological concepts to novel perspectives on psychopathology. Readers will find much to contemplate: nuanced explorations of several recent neuroscience models that have stimulated lots of neuropsychoanalytic ideas, such as the free energy principle, the default mode network and the basic emotion systems; and original research on the development of the basic mother-infant relationship, which adds to the literature on that topic with a rich qualitative perspective. If there were any doubts about the role Freudian metapsychology would play in the new discipline of neuropsychoanalysis, one would be well advised to look to this journal’s very first edition, featuring the article “Affect and the Integration Problem of Mind and Brain” (1999), by the master metapsychologist Barry Opatow. That brilliant offering foreshadowed metapsychology’s placement as the bridge between mind and brain. Over the years, highly profitable metapsychological explorations of dreams, consciousness, drive theory and defenses ensued. Still, perhaps nothing could rival the neuropsychoanalytic generativity of Karl Friston’s theories about free energy and predictive coding. This leading neuroscientist of the modern era (Bohannon, 2016), in his 2010 article “The Default-mode, Ego-functions and Free-energy: A Neurobiological Account of Freudian Ideas,” co-authored with Robin Carhart-Harris (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2010), ushered in a renewed appreciation of the significance of Freud’s economic metapsychological perspective. His collaboration with Mark Solms eventually led to the Solms’ landmark reworking of Freud’s Project, “New Project for a Scientific Psychology,” which we published last year (Solms, 2020). Adding to that developing literature, in this current issue we are offered two articles inspired by Friston’s revolutionary neuroscientific work and grounded in psychoanalytic principles. Novac and Blinder’s “Free Association in Psychoanalysis and its Links to Neuroscience Contributions” presents an encyclopedic review of the evolution of this fundamental psychoanalytic concept and establishes it as a unique process amidst other types of spontaneous thought, such as mind wandering and meditation. It is “examined in the light of the literature on free energy, predictive coding, error prediction, and down-regulation of the default mode network.” This view establishes it not only as a psychoanalytic technique, but as a “fundamental mental state linked to the creation of novel and adaptive memory paradigms.” Fabio Thá, Eduardo Buatim Nion da Silveira, and Tiago Buatim Nion da Silveira’s “The Hysterical Symptom: A proposal of the articulation of the Freudian theory and the Bayesian Account”, which builds on Michael’s 2018 article in Neuropsychoanalysis, “On the Scientific Prospects for Freud’s Theory of Hysteria” is even more directly indebted to Friston’s work. Freud’s case history of Elisabeth von R is revisited and brought to life. Her symptoms are explained via a masterful bending of three aspects of pathogenesis, i.e., the displacement of the affective charge of a psychic conflict onto a symbol, the conceptual blending of the metaphor which links the symptom and the conflict, and the neurocomputational conferring of excessively attentive precision on the somatic complaint. Novac and Blinder suggest that the neuroscience literature “may serve to stimulate renewed interest in FA;” in a similar spirit, Thá, Nion da Silveira and Nion da Silveira assert that the interplay of free energy neuroscience and psychoanalysis engenders a creative synthesis, and that the corresponding articulations of symbolic and neuroscientific readings are complementary as well as mutually clarifying. The Editors happily agree with both sentiments. Psychoanalysis has long been interested in early developmental issues and in the mother-baby dyad. These have occupied, among others, the thinking of