Commentary on Mark Solms’ “New Project for a Scientific Psychology”

Abstract

As we know from the introduction to Solms’ target article (2020), an editor of this journal articulated in a private communication to him the value of his revision of Freud’s Project (along with the fuller exposition offered in a forthcoming book), the value “for theoreticians, clinicians, and researchers” who seek “to account for the complex interactions between cognition and emotion; impulse and regulation; consciousness and unconscious processes; genetics and experience; etc.” The impact of this undertaking, however, has an even greater reach, extending much beyond the research lab or the consulting room to the broader domains of curiosity, the interrelation of how and why we know what we know, and the imaginary. Indeed, Solms’ New Project is Freud’s psychology revisioned as a natural science, but it is not for nothing that terms like “autopoiesis” and “intentionality,” to name but two, figure prominently not only in biology but in philosophy, both in phenomenology and aesthetics. And it is perhaps also not for nothing that it was by way of a lecturer in comparative literature, as he makes known in the introduction as well, that Solms first came upon Freud’s text. The point I would make is that “the articulation of an infrastructure of a truly neuropsychoanalytic model of the mind and brain,” to again cite Maggie Zellner, adds significantly to our understanding of, on the one hand, the need to know and modes of reflection, and, on the other, the origin of communication and modes of expression. Solms goes so far, in fact, as to ask in The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness, his soon-to-be-published book, “Where do observers come from?” And “How and why, in physical terms, does question-asking arise?,” an inquiry relevant not only to cognition, but to perceptual and affective activity as well, and to the capacity of the individual to imagine. Imagination is the means by which the writer, painter, and composer observe, the tool which allows their question-asking to occur. So, too, it is that of the reader, viewer, and listener. For what underlies that intentionalizing (à la Husserl) projection of the mind, its expressivity and resulting autopoietic construction of agency, is the seeking of knowledge, curiosity itself. What Solms makes eminently clear in the New Project is that the pursuit of knowledge emanates from a curiosity that takes an infinite number of forms. Drawing upon the achievements of Karl Friston and Jaak Panksepp as well as his own, he demonstrates with his modifications of Freud’s conceptualizations how homeostasis is served by the strategic design of the nervous system, a design at once economic (in its dynamic opposition to entropy), generative (in its “unfolding over a concentric predictive hierarchy”), and self-organizing (in its embeddedness within the psychophysiology of all life experience). Learning – which emerges from the feedback by sensory states of “the external consequences of prior active states” of the system and the consequent determination of subsequent states, all by way of the “homeostatic control centers that generate predicted consequences” – is intimately related to choice. “If an action does not yield the predicted sensory consequences,” Solms explains,