A new article shows the parallels between modern neuroscience and psychoanalytic theories of how the human mind works: – Bringing these two fields together can open up for a more holistic psychology.

A new academic article published in the neurocognitive journal Entropy argues that Sigmund Freud’s model of the mind, as well as more recent psychoanalytic theory, has similarities with the leading model in brain research today, the so‑called prediction paradigm. According to this neuropsychological model, the brain is a prediction machine. It continuously attempts to predict what will happen, while at the same time trying to minimise the discrepancy between expectation and actual sensory impressions. Neuropsychologists consider the process fundamental to all human perception, action and emotional regulation.

Erik Stänicke, Bendik Hovet and Line Indrevoll Stänicke at the Department of Psychology, together with colleagues, argue that the theory has marked similarities with how psychoanalysis has already described the human inner life for over a hundred years.

– For over 130 years, psychoanalysis has developed psychological theories about how predictions take place at a subjective level, which cognitive neuropsychology is now studying at a physiological level.

Predictions and projections

Both psychoanalysts and neuropsychologists today describe the same fundamental phenomena, according to the authors of the article, but at different levels. Neuroscience draws a mechanistic and mathematical model of how the brain functions. Psychoanalysis offers a phenomenological description of how these processes are experienced from within.

In particular, Erik Stänicke and colleagues highlight the psychoanalytic concept of projection as a phenomenological parallel to neuroscience’s prediction.

– When we attribute qualities, intentions or feelings to other people, our brain shapes our experience of the world in line with established expectations, says Stänicke.

Previous experiences with other people gradually shape our expectations of new relationships and situations, the professor points out.

– This corresponds to the neuroscientific distinction between changing one’s own predictions, perceptual inference, and the attempt to make the world conform to them, namely active inference.

New perspectives on mental disorders

In the article, Erik Stänicke and colleagues place particular emphasis on how both neuroscience and psychoanalytic theory describe the mind as a system oriented towards stability and predictability, or homeostasis, a form of psychological equilibrium. In the predictive model, this occurs by removing uncertainty. The brain attempts to make the world as comprehensible and predictable as possible by holding on to established expectations.

– Psychoanalysts refer to the tendency in the mind to recreate familiar relational patterns, even when these are poorly adapted, says Stänicke.

He believes that this convergence is an example of how the link between the two fields can provide new perspectives on mental disorders.

– Rigid and persistent symptoms, such as paranoid ideas or an internalised critical voice, may be stable but not very flexible prediction models, says Stänicke.

– For example, there may be people who automatically expect criticism, rejection or hostility from others, and therefore interpret situations through this filter despite the fact that reality does not warrant it.

In the patient, the models are maintained because they reduce uncertainty, even though they entail a distortion of the perception of reality. In this way, both psychoanalysis and the prediction paradigm can explain why it sometimes takes a long time to change mental disorders, according to Stänicke.

– In addition, both models give us insight into how parts of our expectations of the outside world are not only anchored cognitively, but in procedural memory that is expressed in relational ways of being, he says.

This means that experiences and expectations exist not only as conscious thoughts, but also as ways of reacting and being together with other people, Stänicke explains.

– Therefore, psychotherapy sometimes has to work relationally. For example, new experiences in the relationship between therapist and patient can gradually help to change entrenched relational patterns.

A scientific subjectivity

The predictive model can contribute a neurological grounding for psychoanalysis, while psychoanalytic theory can supplement neuroscience with detailed and nuanced models of how predictions take place, are experienced, interpreted and expressed in relationships.

– Bringing these two fields together can open up for a more holistic psychology, in which both neurological mechanisms and subjective experience are included. In this way, we can understand subjectivity in a more scientific manner.