You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Taking as his starting point the fact that in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century Freud stepped away from considering mental distress through a purely scientific lens and founded psychoanalysis, psychiatrist Jeremy Holmes, MD, notes that “Our millennium has seen a return to a mechanistic study of the mind, based on brain imaging and artificial intelligence” (p. 1) and, in this book, whilst in no way detracting from what psychoanalysis still has to offer, sets out “to argue that advances in neuroscience point to new understandings of how psychotherapy produces psychic change” (p. 4). This is no simple task and Holmes freely admits that what is on offer is very much his own attempt to express succinctly the essential features underpinning these understandings, link them to many of Freud's early insights, and elucidate the mechanisms involved in psychic change.
The groundwork is laid in chapter 1 which traces the evolution of contemporary neuroscience in general and explains in considerable detail how the application of key concepts—the free energy principle (FEP), coupled with Bayesian mathematics, a mathematical procedure that applies probabilities to statistical problems, active inference (AI), a way of understanding sentient behaviour, and prediction error minimisation (PEM)—can enable us to comprehend how the brain makes sense of the world in which it finds itself. It is, in my view, to Holmes’ considerable credit that this chapter is presented entirely in prose with not a mathematical equation in sight; in essence it tells us that, according to FEP, the brain's task is “to a) sustain homeostasis [stability] and b) resist the forces of entropy [chaos] by procedures that minimise uncertainty and surprise [free energy]” (p. 35). This it does by combining internal sensory information with the external stimuli of past experience to generate a representational model of the world and itself that stimulates the “bottom up” (internal) information it should receive