A project for a scientific psychoanalysis

In the “New Project for a Scientific Psychology,” Solms (2020) reclaims the long-forsaken biological anchor of psychoanalysis. Equipped with the insights of Jaak Panksepp’s affective neuroscience and Karl Friston’s computational neuroscience, he repurposes Freud’s original Project by expanding its pioneering metapsychological ideas. In the process, we rediscover the foundations of the essential nature of psychoanalysis. While Freud reportedly abandoned the Project in his turn towards psychoanalysis, the New Project documents anew its relevant metapsychology as the scaffolding for psychoanalytic theory and practice. The paper is daunting. But we believe that what awaits as a result of the effort to extract some of its essential content will actually yield profound psychoanalytic recognition. This commentary is our personal effort to make the case for it – the best we can. It may not meet all criteria for a full grasp of the paper, but it is guided by a discernible vision we see in it. What follows is an outline of that vision. The updated version takes up Freud’s modeling of the dynamic mental processes which underpin the organization of the “mental apparatus” in terms of energy transformations into affective qualia in neuronal functioning. The life of an organism requires the proper energy management necessary for the preservation of homeostatic balance. Human life is marked additionally by “feeling” the way of doing that while interacting with the (object) world – i.e. regulating it by means of mentation. The functionality of this model is underscored further by highlighting two powerful vectors characterizing these processes: (1) the concentric levels of graded complexity of their central neuronal organization, and (2) the centrifugal/centripetal ebb and flow from the neuronal to proto-mental to mental functioning. This provides cohesion to the entire model: if internal organismic energy requirements lead to transformations in mental organization through affective qualia expressions, it is because these transformations take place along the inside/ outside axis of the human organism. In the mental apparatus, this axis connects the received signals of imperative biological demands for the maintenance of homeostasis in the body’s interior with the resources in the outside (object) world needed to secure it. Why does this articulation matter? After prolonged arguments about the theoretical and clinical relevance of metapsychology, psychoanalysis largely discarded it. Even when Rapaport and Gill (1959) affirmed the five tenets of psychoanalytic metapsychology (topographic, dynamic, economic, genetic, and adaptive), they were already treating it as a psychological system untethered from its biological roots. Rootless, psychoanalysis was set adrift into hermeneutic debates of competing schools of thought. While believing passionately in psychoanalytic propositions and their clinical mettle, a shared foundational matrix, needed to give them common ground, had gone missing. Yet, it is in appreciating the rules governing the organization and regulation of biological life by the central nervous system – and thus of the mental functions therein – that we stand to rediscover the cogency of fundamental psychoanalytic insights into psychic processes. While Freud’s formulations in his Project served as the metapsychological springboard into psychoanalysis, the New Project spells out the inherent neuropsychological continuum. It shows how mental life participates in safeguarding survival and wellbeing by transmitting the endogenously generated affective signals along with exogenous sensory information coming from the external world, and by negotiating their interface. The centrifugal transmission has been illuminated by the affective neuroscience research of Jaak Panksepp. Salient signals from the interior recruit the sentience of arousal in the brain stem, along with the stimulation of the SEEKING system on behalf of any of the other six affective systems (CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, LUST, FEAR, RAGE, PLAY). Signals from these systems carry qualities of felt affect into the basic representations of the organism’s states in the central nervous system, resulting in protomental feelings of subjectivity. This subjectivity is further elaborated by the interface with centripetally incoming information about the availability of the external resources to meet the internally generated expectancies. A match will prompt the felt pleasure of satisfaction;