Freud's Ideas Mirror Predictive Brain Science
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- Erik Stänicke, Bendik Hovet, Line Indrevoll Stänicke and colleagues at the University of Oslo's Department of Psychology published the paper in the journal Entropy, arguing today's leading predictive-processing model of the brain closely mirrors Freudian ideas developed over 130 years.
- The authors map the psychoanalytic concept of projection — attributing qualities or intentions to others — onto top-down predictive brain processes, where prior expectations shape perception of the world.
- Researchers link the brain's drive to reduce uncertainty, called homeostasis, with psychoanalysts' observation that the mind tends to recreate familiar relational patterns even when poorly adapted to new situations.
- The paper argues that rigid psychological symptoms such as paranoid ideas or an internalized critical voice may be "stable but not very flexible prediction models" that persist because they reduce uncertainty even while distorting how reality is perceived.
- Stänicke says psychotherapy sometimes must work relationally because expectations are stored not only as conscious beliefs but in procedural memory expressed through entrenched patterns of being with others.
- The authors propose combining predictive neuroscience's biological mechanisms with psychoanalysis's focus on subjective experience to develop what they call "a more holistic psychology."
Why it matters: The *Entropy* paper puts peer-reviewed weight behind a reading of Freudian concepts — projection, recurring relational patterns, rigid symptoms — as legible through predictive processing, giving clinicians and researchers a biological scaffold to pair with psychoanalytic insight rather than treating the two as incompatible traditions.
