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In the “New Project for a Scientific Psychology,” Solms (2020) reclaims the long-forsaken biological anchor of psychoanalysis. Equipped with the insights of Jaak Panksepp’s affective neuroscience and Karl Friston’s computational neuroscience, he repurposes Freud’s original Project by expanding its pioneering metapsychological ideas. In the process, we rediscover the foundations of the essential nature of psychoanalysis. While Freud reportedly abandoned the Project in his turn towards psychoanalysis, the New Project documents anew its relevant metapsychology as the scaffolding for psychoanalytic theory and practice.
The paper is daunting. But we believe that what awaits as a result of the effort to extract some of its essential content will actually yield profound psychoanalytic recognition. This commentary is our personal effort to make the case for it – the best we can. It may not meet all criteria for a full grasp of the paper, but it is guided by a discernible vision we see in it. What follows is an outline of that vision.
The updated version takes up Freud’s modeling of the dynamic mental processes which underpin the organization of the “mental apparatus” in terms of energy transformations into affective qualia in neuronal functioning. The life of an organism requires the proper energy management necessary for the preservation of homeostatic balance. Human life is marked additionally by “feeling” the way of doing that while interacting with the (object) world – i.e. regulating it by means of mentation. The functionality of this model is underscored further by highlighting two powerful vectors characterizing these processes: (1) the concentric levels of graded complexity of their central neuronal organization,† and (2) the centrifugal/centripetal ebb and flow from the neuronal to proto-mental to mental functioning. This provides cohesion to the entire model: if internal organismic energy requirements lead to transformations in mental organization through affective