Freud's core interest in the psyche was the dynamic unconscious: that part of the psyche which is unconscious due to conflict (Freud, 1923/1961 ). Over the course of his career, Freud variously described conflict as an opposition to the discharge of activation (Freud, 1950 ), opposition to psychic activity due to the release of unpleasure (Freud, 1990/1991 ), opposition between the primary principle and the reality principle (Freud, 1911/1963 ), structural conflict between id, ego, and superego (Freud, 1923/1961 ), and (...) ambivalence (Freud, 1912/1963 ). Besides this difficulty of the shifting description of conflict, an underlying question remained the specific shared terrain in which emotions, thoughts, intentions or wishes could come into conflict with one another (the neuronal homolog of conflict), and most especially how they may exist as quantities in opposition within that terrain. Friston's free-energy principle (FEP henceforth) connected to the work of Friston (Friston et al., 2006 ; Friston, 2010 ) has provided the potential for a powerful unifying theory in psychology, neuroscience, and related fields that has been shown to have tremendous consilience with psychoanalytic concepts (Hopkins, 2012 ). Hopkins ( 2016 ), drawing on a formulation by Hobson et al. ( 2014 ), suggests that conflict may be potentially quantifiable as free energy from a FEP perspective. More recently, work by Friston et al. ( 2017a ) has framed the selection of action as a gradient descent of expected free energy under different policies of action. From this perspective, the article describes how conflict could potentially be formalized as a situation where opposing action policies have similar expected free energy, for example between actions driven by competing basic prototype emotion systems as described by Panksepp ( 1998 ). This conflict state may be avoided in the future through updating the relative precision of a particular set of prior beliefs about outcomes: this has the result of tending to favor one of the policies of action over others in future instances, a situation analogous to defense. Through acting as a constraint on the further development of the person, the defensive operation can become entrenched, and resistant to alteration. The implications that this formalization has for psychoanalysis is explored. (shrink)

A new method of observation is currently emerging in psychiatry, based on data collection and behavioral profiling of smartphone users. Numerical phenotyping is a paradigmatic example. This behavioral investigation method uses computerized measurement tools in order to collect characteristics of different psychiatric disorders. First, it is necessary to contextualize the emergence of these new methods and to question their promises and expectations. The international mental health research framework invites us to reflect on methodological issues and to draw conclusions from certain (...) impasses related to the clinical complexity of this field. From this contextualization, the investigation method relating to digital phenotyping can be questioned in order to identify some of its potentials. These new methods are also an opportunity to test psychoanalysis. It is then necessary to identify the elements of fruitful analysis that clinical experience and research in psychoanalysis have been able to deploy regarding the challenges of digital technology. An analysis of this theme's litterature shows that psychoanalysis facilitates a reflection on the psychological effects related to digital methods. It also shows how it can profit from the research potential offered by new technical tools, considering the progress that has been made over the past fifty years. This cross-fertilization of the potential and limitations of digital methods in mental health intervention in the context of theoretical issues at the international level invites us to take a resolutely non-reductionist position. In the field of research, psychoanalysis offers a specific perspective that can well be articulated to an epistemology of networks. Rather than aiming at a numerical phenotyping of patients according to the geneticists' model, the case formulation method appears to be a serious prerequisite to give a limited and specific place to the integration of smartphones in clinical investigation. (shrink)

This paper compares the free energy neuroscience now advocated by Karl Friston and his colleagues with that hypothesised by Freud, arguing that Freud's notions of conflict and trauma can be understood in terms of computational complexity. It relates Hobson and Friston's work on dreaming and the reduction of complexity to contemporary accounts of dreaming and the consolidation of memory, and advances the hypothesis that mental disorder can be understood in terms of computational complexity and the mechanisms, including synaptic pruning, that (...) have evolved to reduce it. (shrink)

Anosognosia for hemiplegia is the denial of neurologically-caused paralysis, and it often co-occurs with a number of distortions of belief and emotion such as somatoparaphrenia and an exaggeration of negative affect towards minor health complaints. The salience of these latter symptoms led early investigators to propose explanations of AHP which construed it as a process of motivated self-deception against the overwhelming anxiety and depression that knowledge of deficit would otherwise cause, and which was observed in hemiplegic patients without the anosognosia. (...) Since some influential critiques of this approach, however, theories of this kind have largely been rejected on the grounds that they are inappropriately “psychogenic.” What has replaced them are a class of theories which explain the lack of awareness in terms of neurocognitive deficit, with the deficit in question variously described by researchers as involving spatial awareness, motor control, and other capacities. In this paper I argue – contra claims in the literature – that the patterns of explanation which are characteristic of the psychodynamic theory are not incompatible in principle with the notion that the illness involves neurocognitive deficit. That means that these patterns of explanation can be preserved where they make good sense of the obscure attitudinal and emotional symptoms that occur in AHP – symptoms that are otherwise difficult to explain. I suggest some ways in which this fact could be accommodated by deficit theories of the illness which are based on motor deficit. (shrink)