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

Mark Solms’ “New Project for a Scientific Psychology” (2020) is both a coup de maître and also dizzingly impenetrable (something it, unintentionally I believe, shares with Freud’s original). Despite its length, is to be seen in a wider context of Solms’ unique efforts to forge an interdisciplinary dialogue between psychoanalysis and neighbouring disciplines, mainly, but not restricted to, the neurosciences. It is therefore not surprising that, like this broader endeavour, one can view his contribution as enormously stimulating and enriching, controversial and contradictory or even irrelevant. In other words, it is likely the New Project will provoke similar responses to the many varied ones that neuropsychoanalysis itself elicits: enthusiasm, disagreement, and indifference being the main ones. Taking these three different reactions, one must be content with the fact that none of them is entirely right nor wrong, all potentially legitimate depending on the reader’s vantage point and preference and even co-existing in one person’s mind (perhaps representing the commentator’s attempt to reduce his own free energy when unable to approximate to the hidden causes that lie behind the writing in full – so much circularity must be allowed as, in keeping with the free energy principle (FEP) (Friston, Kilner & Harrison, 2006), one is now confronted with a new “posterior” presented by Solms’ reconceptualisations that call for mental “work”). Pleasure and unpleasure are in dialogue while reading. Solms updates Freud’s project elegantly and he revises it where he sees need and fit. I understand it as work in progress, with sufficient converging empirical evidence and conceptual advances allowing not only for an overdue stocktaking of isolated findings from experimental psychology, neurophysiology, neuroimaging, and modelling approaches but also for the possibility to put pen to paper and to systematize and integrate these new insights under the rubric of Friston’s FEP. It may be important to remember that what has been put forward is a model and what models do is to simplify and thereby inevitably reduce. But they also provide clarity, precision of argument, and a basis for hypothesis-testing and further reworking. They cannot be the last word on the matter although ensuing debates often fall for that and then hinder proper dialogue. The future conversational partner concerned here is perhaps not so much the experimental scientist but the psychoanalyst speaking from the different position of and imbued with their valid evidence from the laboratory of the consulting room. It is in this echo chamber, where Solms’ updating turns, in part, into a substantial revision of Freud’s ideas and where further debate and disagreement may be engendered (e.g. Bell, 2019). From 1895, Freud kept developing his metapsychology and understanding of the mental apparatus. New clinical observations and phenomena found entry into his metapsychological edifice and he chose to depart from the need for rigorous formalization and weighted another type of evidence. It will remain forever indiscernible whether, to him, this was owed to the lack of scientific understanding and methodology available at the time, or to a quasi time-withstanding recognition that the complexity of the human mind, particularly that which he deemed to be the governing principle – phylogenetic and individual unconscious processes – can never be fully captured with formalism but only experienced. That limitation notwithstanding, a materialist perspective must also be given credit in that whatever processes are observed or theorized, including mental ones, there must be biological underpinnings with the temptation to “bind” their workings in a conclusive treatise. Solms’ work here significantly advances what Freud grappled with in his time. As a result of his reanimation of the original text, we are presented with more clarity and consistency of some key governing principles of the mind. It is, and how could it be any different, subject to the same epistemological tensions between “state of the art and time” formalism and the phenomena