Response to the commentaries on the “New Project”

Abstract

This banquet of commentaries by some of the world’s leading physicists, philosophers, psychoanalysts, neuroscientists, literary theorists, novelists, and more, is testimony to the ongoing vitality of Freud’s “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” the Ur-text of psychoanalysis. I would like to thank them very sincerely for the time and effort they have expended on this very difficult paper, and for the refreshingly positive spirit in which they have done so. To say the obvious, in the space available, I can respond only to a selection of the many issues they have raised, which I regret; but I will try to focus on the main ones, and especially on those that pose challenges and raise disagreements. I will do so in alphabetical order, starting with Alberini. She asks (1) whether we should build a new metaneuropsychology upon Freud’s basic concepts, or start afresh, and (2) whether we should limit ourselves to the scientific disciplines that were extant in Freud’s day, or draw upon the cutting-edge sciences of our own times, like molecular neurobiology (Alberini, 2020). She also asks an even more basic question: (3) what is “the mind” anyway? Regarding this third question, Alberini is wrong to cast Freud as a dualist; he, like Panksepp and me, was a dual-aspect monist. This means that he viewed the mind as a functional system which can be studied from two observational perspectives: objective brain and subjective being. When it comes to the former perspective, of course we must use every “unbiased” method and technology that we have, without exception. That answers Alberini’s second question. When it comes to the subjective perspective, psychoanalysis stands pretty much alone among the mental sciences in recognizing that felt experience provides the primary empirical data of psychology. As Alberini’s opening quotation from Freud (1950 [1895]) reminds us: “the nature of the subject” demands that we take this perspective; but still, almost all academic psychologists today do not. That is why Alberini’s mentor Eric Kandel asserted that “psychoanalysis still represents the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind” (1999, p. 505); it remains more-or-less the only conception we have of the subject of the brain. That answers Alberini’s first question. But ultimately, as monists, we are seeking an understanding of the underlying functional system itself; the abstracted entity which unites mind and brain. This abstracted system is what Freud called the “mental apparatus,” something that is neither physiological nor psychological but rather inferred from the observational data of both fields. When it comes to this level of analysis, the level that I call metaneuropsychological, I think the language of statistical physics is the most serviceable, since it transcends both physiological and psychological phenomenologies. Ontologically, on the dualaspect monist view, the mind is not composed of neurons or their molecular genetics and epigenetics, nor is it composed of the fleeting and fugitive stuff of lived experience; instead, the mind in itself must “be inferred like other natural things” (Freud/Solms, p. 15, 2020). On a point of detail: predictions are not, as Alberini has it, “a temporary state and function, whereas memories involve lengthy processes that establish persistent changes in the brain, which can last for a lifetime” (p. 40). This is too literal a reading of the term “prediction,” namely as a cognitive act, whereas Friston uses it in a deeper, statistical sense. Clark (2015, p. 21) summarizes this deeper meaning, using visual prediction as an example: