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First, this is a great project, I enjoyed reading it. It is indeed interesting to see how much of Freud’s pioneering neuroscience paper can be rephrased in present day terms. It is however, as Solms says, a very dense paper, and this will only be a partial response to it.
The basic idea is set out in this paragraph:
[P1]: Intention The intention is to attempt, once more, to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science; that is, to represent mental processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable physical elements, thus making those processes perspicuous and free from contradiction. Two principle ideas are involved: (1) What distinguishes activity from rest is to be regarded as F,† an information exchange between a system and its environment, subject to the general laws of information. (2) Neurons are to be taken as the physical elements.
I believe that what is meant here is not F per se, but rather changes of F? Assuming this is so, Solms develops this in an interesting way, invoking on the one hand the concept of predictive coding (Clark, 2013; Hohwy, 2013) and particularly the way it has been developed by Friston in terms of free energy (Friston, 2005, 2009), and on the other the work of Panksepp (2004) on affective neuroscience. Developing further, he states
[P2] First principal theorem:† The theorem “what distinguishes activity from rest is to be regarded as F” is derived from statistical physics but manifest itself in clinical observations … it is now possible to lay down a basic principle of neuronal activity in relation to F, which promises to be highly enlightening, since it appears to comprise its entire function. This is the free energy principle: neuronal systems tend to minimize F. On this basis the structure and development as well as the functions of the nervous system, as they relate to mental life, can be understood.
Thus this claims to be a total view of the brain function, as related to mental life (“it appears to comp