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When Wilhelm Fliess received the amazing document from Sigmund Freud that has come down to us as the “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” he must have read it with a combination of thrill at his friend’s brilliance, frustration with its difficult and incomprehensible passages, and an impulse to advise his friend that Freud should, at minimum, include Fleiss’s nasal theories as a centerpiece of the discussion. Reading Solms’ wonderful attempt to update Freud’s Project, I find myself in a similar, though hopefully less extreme, frame of mind. While the New Project contains many points worthy of commentary and elaboration, and others points that call for clarification, I find myself coming at the entire manuscript with something like Fliess’ preoccupation with the nose, namely my own hobby horse, a central focus on nonlinear dynamic systems theory as a way of thinking about mental life. While I believe that this viewpoint is not as far off the mark as Fliess’ ideas, and while I will try to show its specific relevance to a critique of Solms’ approach, I do think it is important for myself and for the reader to keep in mind that, while the critique comes from a far better established framework than Fliess’ nasal theories, it is itself not without problems and limitations and should not be taken as gospel.
The New Project is far too rich for brief discussion as a whole, so I will focus on its general approach to theory and its two foundational elements, leaving aside a vast amount of important material. Regardless of their merit as pure theory, the two projects organize vast amounts of data in a meaningful, comprehensible way. The resulting presentation of brain function could not be achieved without such an organizing conceptualization, whether or not that conceptualization is, in some sense, ultimately accurate. Both the original Project and the New Project bring together phenomena that could easily be lost among a myriad of seemingly unrelated facts and data needed to