Discussion of a new project for a scientific psychology

Abstract

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 fill in the pictures they suggest. But these virtues are insufficient to make a good theory. Solms and Freud use a method that has proven fabulously successful in science – reductionism – in which complex phenomena are understood as manifestations of a small number of simple principles. Chemistry explains the properties of materials and reactions in terms of elements joined by chemical bonds; physics explains light in terms photons and their dual wave-particle nature; evolution explains the diversity of species through the mechanism of natural selection. Shouldn’t psychology be explainable in similar terms? Some history: Freud’s scientific lineage traces to Johannes Müller (1801–1858), among the last great proponents of Naturphilosophie, a tradition that included the idea that living and inanimate matter differ fundamentally. Observing that each sense organ responds to stimuli in its own particular way, Müller posited that each sense had its own specific energy. In 1826 he argued that external phenomena are perceived by changes they produce in the always active sensory system (Berrios, 2005). The eye, for example, reacts not only to light but is excited by internal sources, Imagination, with its own specific energy. In 1848, four of Müller’s students, Helmholtz, DuBois-Raymond, Ludwig, and Brücke joined in an oath to reduce biology to the forces of “equal dignity” to those of physics and chemistry and, in particular, to concepts like the conservation of energy, newly formulated by Helmholtz. No more “specific energies” or “vital forces.” Freud, who spent six years studying with Brücke, adopted this physicalist position (Galatzer-Levy, 1976). The core idea, that some quantity must be accounted for (equivalent to conservation laws of the physical sciences) in explaining phenomena being one central point, the other being that there is nothing intrinsically different about living and inanimate nature. The effectiveness of reductionism rests in its capacity to derive the properties of the whole as the sum of