More than a century after Sigmund Freud developed some of his most influential—and controversial—ideas about the human mind, a new study indicates that modern neuroscience may be arriving at a surprisingly familiar destination.
Researchers at the University of Oslo argue that Freud’s concepts of projection, wish fulfillment, transference, and the unconscious may share a fundamental architecture with one of the most influential emerging theories in cognitive neuroscience: the idea that the brain is essentially a prediction machine.
Rather than passively receiving information from the world, the brain may continuously anticipate what will happen next, compare those expectations with incoming sensory information, and either revise its internal model or act to make reality conform more closely to its expectations.
In a paper published in the journal Entropy, researchers propose that this modern “predictive processing” framework may provide a neuroscientific explanation for mental processes that psychoanalysts have described from the perspective of subjective human experience for more than a century.
The researchers do not claim that neuroscience has proved Freud right. Instead, they argue that psychoanalysis and predictive processing may describe some of the same fundamental operations of the mind at two very different levels of analysis.
“The predictive processing model is a paradigm of the mind where the brain’s main task is to construct and interact with the world through predictions,” researchers write. “The world we perceive and interact with is a world that we create from our past, from expectancies and actions.”
The basic idea behind predictive processing represents a significant departure from older models of perception. Traditionally, the brain was often described as something like an information-processing machine: a stimulus arrives from the outside world, the brain processes it, and a response follows.
Predictive processing effectively turns much of that sequence around.
Under this system, the brain is constantly generating models of what it expects to encounter. Those predictions are formed by previous experiences, biological needs, and learned expectations. Incoming sensory information is then compared against the brain’s predictions.
When the two match, all is relatively well. When they do not, the discrepancy creates what neuroscientists call a prediction error.
The brain can respond in at least two broad ways. It can update its internal model to better reflect reality, a process known as perceptual inference. Or it can act on the world in ways that make reality more closely correspond to its prior prediction, a process known as active inference.
Researchers point to a familiar example: the fear of snakes. Someone who assumes snakes are dangerous may gradually revise that expectation after repeated encounters with harmless ones, eventually becoming less afraid. But if the fear is strong enough, the person may avoid snakes entirely. By never getting close enough to discover that some pose no threat, their behavior prevents the prediction from being challenged—and, in effect, helps keep the fear alive.
“To perceive is to predict, to act is to act out the prediction,” researchers explain.
According to the researchers, this framework itself bears a striking resemblance to concepts developed by Freud and later psychoanalysts.
Freud proposed that people do not experience the world as completely neutral observers. Past experiences, desires, fears, and unconscious expectations can shape how they perceive other people and events. In psychoanalytic theory, “projection” can occur when a person attributes internal feelings or expectations to someone else.
A person who feels hostility, for example, may perceive others as hostile. Someone who expects criticism because of earlier relationships may interpret ambiguous behavior as rejection. In more complex cases, people may even behave in ways that encourage others to respond as expected.
The researchers argue that this resembles a form of prediction.
In both models, past experience creates a template to understand the present. The brain—or, in psychoanalytic terminology, the mind—attempts to reduce uncertainty by making the world familiar and predictable.
That does not necessarily mean making the world pleasant.
One of the more consequential implications of the proposed connection is that people may sometimes preserve painful or destructive patterns precisely because those patterns are familiar. A predictable threat can, in some circumstances, create less uncertainty than an unfamiliar form of safety.
The researchers use the example of a woman who was frequently criticized by her mother when she was a child. As an adult, she continues to carry an internal critical voice that tells her she is not good enough. Even when praised, she may dismiss the compliment as undeserved.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, she has internalized—or “introjected”—the critical relationship. From a predictive-processing perspective, positive feedback conflicts with a deeply accepted model of what she expects from herself and others.
The result is a provocative possibility. People sometimes reject evidence that their circumstances have changed because accepting it would require the brain to rebuild its model of the world.
“The one with paranoia and the one with a self-critical inner voice minimize surprise at the cost of reality testing and psychological flexibility,” the researchers write.
The proposed connection also reaches into the “free energy principle,” a conceptual framework associated with neuroscientist Dr. Karl Friston. In simple terms, the framework describes biological systems as continually working to limit uncertainty and maintain themselves within viable states.
For the brain, unexpected information produces what researchers describe as “surprisal.” The mismatch between anticipation and reality can force the brain to do additional work, either changing its model or changing its behavior.
This may help explain why surprise can be uncomfortable and why the familiar can feel safe even when it is objectively harmful.
Freud approached a similar problem via the concept of homeostasis, although he developed his ideas before the term became widely established. The researchers argue that Freud’s concept of “perceptual identity”—the predisposition to seek or recreate perceptions associated with previously satisfying experiences—may be particularly compatible with modern predictive processing.
If researchers are correct, it could have consequences for understanding psychotherapy.
In psychoanalysis, patients may repeatedly bring expectations formed in earlier relationships into their relationship with a therapist, a phenomenon termed transference. Someone accustomed to abandonment, hostility, or criticism may expect the therapist to behave in the same way.
A therapeutic relationship that repeatedly violates those expectations would create precisely the type of prediction error that forces an internal model to change.
In this view, cognitive awareness is not simply an intellectual realization. It may involve confronting the fact that a deeply embedded prediction about the world has failed.
That failure produces surprise. And surprise, the researchers suggest, may be one of the mechanisms that makes psychological change possible.
A patient who expects rejection yet repeatedly encounters a safe, reliable relationship faces a mismatch between prediction and reality. The person can attempt to preserve the old model, perhaps through interpreting benign behavior as threatening, or gradually update the model to accommodate a different possibility.
This is where researchers believe psychoanalysis may offer something that computational neuroscience alone cannot easily provide.
Predictive processing attempts to explain the mechanisms by which brains generate, test, and update predictions. In contrast, psychoanalysis has spent more than a century attempting to describe what those processes feel like from inside the person experiencing them.
The researchers are careful to acknowledge significant differences between the fields. Predictive processing is primarily a descriptive scientific framework intended to explain how minds and brains function. Psychoanalysis is a clinical practice concerned with psychological suffering and how it might be treated.
There is also a difference in emphasis. Neuroscience often studies ordinary predictions involved in perception and behavior, while psychoanalytic concepts such as projection have frequently been developed through observations of psychological distress and mental illness.
Most importantly, the paper does not present new experimental evidence demonstrating that Freud’s concepts relate to specific neural mechanisms. It is a theoretical synthesis proposing that two intellectual traditions, one built largely on clinical observation and subjective experience, the other on computational and neuroscientific models, may describe overlapping features of the mind.
Nevertheless, the proposed convergence is notable.
Freud originally hoped that psychological theories might eventually be connected to the brain’s biological workings, but the neuroscience of his era was nowhere near capable of doing so. For much of the 20th century, psychoanalysis and experimental neuroscience grew increasingly distant.
Predictive processing may offer an unexpected point of reconnection.
If the brain constantly uses the past to predict the present, then projection, transference, and even the tendency to repeat destructive patterns may be viewed not simply as abstract psychoanalytic concepts but as subjective manifestations of a more fundamental biological imperative: reducing uncertainty and maintaining a workable model of the world.
That position could ultimately change how researchers think about the relationship between the brain’s computational machinery and the intensely personal experience of being human. Rather than treating subjective experience and neuroscience as incompatible domains, the researchers suggest that each may illuminate what the other cannot see.
“Psychoanalysis consists of a vast resource of theories about the subjective mind, projection being central among these, and neuro-psychoanalysis adds an external view of the mind while studying the biological and neurological substrate of psychology,” researchers write.
“Relational encounters in a safe environment, as in psychoanalysis, can produce surprise,” the authors add, “which again permits new ways of predicting and being in the world.”
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com