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Mark Solms’ “New Project for a Scientific Psychology” (2020) is both a coup de maître and also dizzingly impenetrable (something it, unintentionally I believe, shares with Freud’s original). Despite its length, is to be seen in a wider context of Solms’ unique efforts to forge an interdisciplinary dialogue between psychoanalysis and neighbouring disciplines, mainly, but not restricted to, the neurosciences. It is therefore not surprising that, like this broader endeavour, one can view his contribution as enormously stimulating and enriching, controversial and contradictory or even irrelevant. In other words, it is likely the New Project will provoke similar responses to the many varied ones that neuropsychoanalysis itself elicits: enthusiasm, disagreement, and indifference being the main ones. Taking these three different reactions, one must be content with the fact that none of them is entirely right nor wrong, all potentially legitimate depending on the reader’s vantage point and preference and even co-existing in one person’s mind (perhaps representing the commentator’s attempt to reduce his own free energy when unable to approximate to the hidden causes that lie behind the writing in full – so much circularity must be allowed as, in keeping with the free energy principle (FEP) (Friston, Kilner & Harrison, 2006), one is now confronted with a new “posterior” presented by Solms’ reconceptualisations that call for mental “work”). Pleasure and unpleasure are in dialogue while reading.
Solms updates Freud’s project elegantly and he revises it where he sees need and fit. I understand it as work in progress, with sufficient converging empirical evidence and conceptual advances allowing not only for an overdue stocktaking of isolated findings from experimental psychology, neurophysiology, neuroimaging, and modelling approaches but also for the possibility to put pen to paper and to systematize and integrate these new insights under the rubric of Friston’s FEP.
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