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I am a passionate fan of neuropsychoanalysis, the ambitious attempt to understand ourselves from two contrary but necessary perspectives. Over the last two decades in a series of exciting international congresses, neuropsychoanalysis has offered a chance for neuroscientists, familiar with the cellular matter which makes up the neurobiology of our brains, to engage in dialogue with psychoanalysts who see this extraordinary 3 kg of matter from the perspective of a subjective mind in all the complexity of its sensations, thoughts, feelings and consciousness.
In this recent publication, Jeremy Holmes gives us all a handy introduction to one of the most fertile new strands of neuropsychoanalysis. His highly readable eight chapters, appended with an excellent glossary, concentrate exclusively on Karl Friston's (2009) free energy principle. Free energy is the force of entropy; unbound ‘free energy’ spells disorder and chaos for a biological agent, be it a single-celled bacteria or a human being. Thus, all living things must work to ‘bind’ this energy and minimize the entropy of their sensory states by maintaining homeostasis. In simple terms, when I find myself shivering, I put on a jumper. In grander schemes, the brain of every biological agent exists to ‘bind’ incoming information according to its predictive models of the world and they do so using the free energy principle. Mathematician Karl Friston has used Bayesian mathematics to show how human brains are engaged in using the free energy principle at every level of our functioning to keep entropy at bay. The reach of the theory is exciting and if you follow Holmes' thread by reading this book, I think you will agree he has done an excellent job of elaborating it.
Freud's earliest efforts to understand the mind in all its complexity was his unpublished 1895 Project (Freud, 1950) where he wrestled with the same mind/brain conundrum that researchers in neuropsychoanalysis attempt to bridge, but without access to all the f