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.
This is an important and erudite work, written by a consultant psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist who, through his publications over twenty-five years, has done more than anyone in the UK to bridge the gap between attachment theory, psychoanalysis, and clinical practice. It is fitting, then, that he should use this book, one of the first to come out of Confer's new publications stable, to share a distillation of his thoughts about the clinical implications of recent developments in neuroscience.
Drawing upon the buzz created in academic psychology and brain research circles around what has been termed the Free Energy Principle (FEP), Jeremy Holmes sets about introducing psychotherapists to this new paradigm and its implications for practice. What excites him is its potential to provide a scientific basis for diverse forms of psychotherapy. Moreover, he shows how this theory has much in common with Freud's thinking, as well as with more recent psychoanalytic ideas.
Put simply, free energy is a superordinate concept describing the everchanging, potentially chaotic range of stimuli generated internally by bodily states and externally within the environment. These stimuli provide individuals with vital information which, unchecked, will overload the processing power of the brain. A primary task of the brain, from this perspective, is to “bind” free energy by mapping experience onto models that have predictive power. Development can be described as the process of testing and updating these models so they make sense of sensation and provide individuals with emotional equilibrium, a process described as “predictive error minimisation”. Discrepancies between the predictions of the models and actual experience disturb that equilibrium, requiring action—a process that expends energy, since we pay more attention to surprises than what we take for granted. Broadly speaking, our options lie with updating our models to conform more closely with experience, changing or