The RCPsych Article of the Month for June is ‘Friston’s free energy principle: new life for psychoanalysis?’ and the blog is written by author Jeremy Holmes published in BJPsych Bulletin.

I’m not really a blogger – more of a blagger some might say.  And it seems a long time since I wrote the Bulletin piece – it predates covid, party-gate, Ukraine, and seismic life-events in my own subatomic corner of world chemistry. 

Friston describes his free energy principle (FEP) as, just that, a principle, rather than a localised scientific fact. FEP is a heuristic or overall framework for thinking about things. So although I am no longer actively working on the FEP, it continues to be influential in the background of my life-world. 

That in itself could be seen as a manifestation of the FEP, which sees the mind/brain organised in a hierarchical way. Freud’s two great principles – the reality and pleasure – also attempt to frame and encapsulate the parameters of our being in the world.  But, unlike the FEP, they are content-specific,  tied to a particular model of the mind, and especially to the idea of the unconscious as a cauldron of  libido and deathfulness. While FEP views top—down models of some sort as indispensable — without them we could not survive,  just as a fish out of water dies without behavioural-physiological model of the air-world — the nature of these models remains unspecified in the Friston universe.

This is consistent with the attachment concept of mentalising – thinking about thinking. Mentalising refers to a process or skill acquired in the course of development rather than a particular idea or concept. It sits at the apogee of the FEP hierarchy in that it subjects the thinking process itself to free energy minimisation, and especially deciding whether a surprise-laden experience represents a genuine mismatch between sensation and concept requiring further investigation and model revision, or is no more than system error.

The FEP has been absorbed as one of the ‘basic assumptions’ which inform my approach to the mind. Another is psychoanalysis, side-lined in contemporary psychiatric discourse, and yet which, were it updated in an attachment-informed way, could I believe help to address some of society’s pressing psychosocial conflicts and dilemmas. These include the nature and importance of the inner psychic world, the texture of intimate relationships, and freedom and democracy as interpersonal and intrapsychic experiences.

My third basic assumption is the ubiquitous evolutionary triad of variation, selection and reproduction. Darwin’s dangerous idea can seamlessly be applied to FEP  in that bottom-up experience, both external and internal (enteroceptions, but also, I would argue,  dreams and phantasies), provides variation which is then selected, top-down, by cortical regulatory functions in order to enhance adaptation to the interpersonal environment. Those that are successful, i.e., do indeed enhance adaptation, are then reproduced via the cultural transmission of epistemic trust to future generations. 

One of these, I hope and believe, is the FEP itself. It was my excitement about this new paradigm which I was trying convey to readers in the Bulletin article.

A few years ago it was suggested that Karl Friston had a chance of receiving a Nobel prize. Friston demurred, accurately, from this prediction. And prediction is his specialist subject. However, I don’t think he could have predicted quite how influential his model of mental functioning has become. It has been used to explain normal perceptual experiences, illusions, and actions, including the hitherto puzzling outfielder problem. It has also been applied to abnormal states from Autism spectrum disorder, eye tracking dysfunction in schizophrenia to delusions, hallucinations, and functional neurological symptoms. Given there are some parallels with Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology it was inevitable that it would find application also in psychoanalytic thinking. We are proud to showcase Jeremy Holmes’ analysis of Friston’s theory. Two greats for the price of one. 

Norman Poole
Editor-in-Chief, BJPsych Bulletin