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

Mark Solms’ revision and reformulation of Freud’s famous “Project for a Scientific Psychology” seems to be a heroic effort to bring recent progress in neuropsychoanalysis closer to some sectors of today’s psychoanalysts. His text makes clear the extent to which not only can Freud’s intentions of 1895 be maintained after a thorough and twenty-first-century neuroscientific updating of his Project but that even whole chapters are preserved in much of their original wording. Although important ideas of Freud, like his famous Qη or his “principle of neuronal inertia,” are replaced by more timely concepts, today’s Freudians can see how much of the thinking of their intellectual founder has stood the test of time. Simultaneously, the question arises in how far Solms’ revision has managed to update Freud not only neuroscientifically but also psychoanalytically, as psychoanalysis as well has neither stood still in the decades after Freud’s Project nor since Freud’s death. My endeavor in this short commentary is to relate some of the basic innovations of Solms with important ideas from psychoanalytic object relations theory, a trend within the psychoanalytic community that is associated with names like Fairbairn, Klein, Jacobson and Kernberg. Object relations theory has placed great emphasis on the idea that human beings live objectively and subjectively in relationships from the beginning of life, thus putting into question Freud’s idea of primary narcissism as a developmental stage before that of object relations. As I am no neuroscientist but a psychoanalyst, my reasoning will focus on some of the implications of Solms’ paper for psychoanalytic theory and not so much on the computational neuroscientific details. I want to make four separate but connected points which hopefully add up to a constructive suggestion and supplement to Solms’ approach.