Revision of Drive Theory: Commentary on Solms's “Revison of Drive Theory”

Mark Solms (2021b) has recently called for numerous radical revisions to Freud's venerated drive theory. The eminent and prolific Solms needs no introduction. Among his vast array of impressive achievements are the founding in 1999 of his flagship journal Neuropsychoanalysis, his book The Brain and the Inner World (Solms and Turnbull 2002), his provocative publication “The Conscious Id” (Solms 2013), and his eagerly awaited New Project for a Scientific Psychology (see Solms 2020). However, most of Solms's proposed revisions to Freud's drive theory are based on faulty scientific reasoning and do not helpfully advance either Freud's metapsychological model of the mind or psychoanalytic clinical technique. In particular, Solms's claims that do not hold up to scientific scrutiny include (1) that Freudian unconscious phylogenetic memories don't exist; (2) that unconscious affects don't exist; (3) that human sexual behavior is driven predominantly by conscious feelings; (4) that Friston's free-energy is equivalant to Freud's drive energy; (5) that drives cannot be confluent; and (6) that consciousness resides in the id and that the ego is fundamentally unconscious. For logical coherence, I will follow in my commentary the same organizational format found in Solms 2021b.

Solms starts by quoting Freud's definition of drive “as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body (Freud 1915a)” (p. 1034). In keeping with the laws of physics, Solms then correctly states that Freud implies that this demand for work “must be driven by an energy of some kind… . Thus,

[Freud] clung to his notion of ‘drive energy’, a psychical energy that was capable of increase, diminution, displacement, and discharge, and therefore possessed all the characteristics of a quantity, ‘though we have no means of me