Modern neuroscience and psychoanalysis may have much more in common than many realize, according to a new paper published in the journal Neurocognition entropy. Researchers argue that today’s leading models of brain function share striking similarities with ideas that originated with Sigmund Freud and have been developed by psychoanalytic theorists for more than a century. They suggest that combining these perspectives may provide a more complete understanding of how the human mind works.
Central to the comparison is the predictive paradigm, one of the dominant theories in contemporary neuroscience. According to this model, the brain constantly generates predictions about what will happen next and updates those predictions by comparing them with incoming sensory information. Scientists believe that this ongoing process helps shape perception, behavior, and emotional control.
Researchers Eric Stanicke, Bendik Hovet, Rhein Indrevor Stanicke, and colleagues in the Department of Psychology argue that this framework closely resembles long-standing psychoanalytic ideas about how people experience and interpret the world.
“For more than 130 years, psychoanalysis has developed psychological theories about how prediction occurs at the subjective level, but cognitive neuropsychology now studies it at the physiological level.”
predictions, predictions, human experience
The authors note that neuroscience and psychoanalysis explain many of the same underlying mental processes from different perspectives. While neuroscience focuses on biological and computational mechanisms within the brain, psychoanalysis investigates how those processes are experienced from a human perspective.
One example is the psychoanalytic concept of projection, which researchers believe is closely related to the brain’s predictive processes.
“When we attribute qualities, intentions, and emotions to others, our brains shape our experience of the world around established expectations,” says Stenicke.
Researchers say that our past interactions with others gradually influence our expectations of future relationships and situations.
“This corresponds to the neuroscientific distinction between changing one’s own predictions, perceptual reasoning, and attempting to make the world conform to it, active reasoning.”
Brain predictions and mental disorders
This paper also highlights another important similarity. Both predictive neuroscience and psychoanalytic theory describe the mind as a system that seeks stability and predictability, also known as homeostasis, a state of psychological balance.
Within predictive brain models, this stability is achieved by reducing uncertainty. The brain constantly tries to make the world easier to understand by relying on pre-existing expectations.
“Psychoanalysts refer to the mind’s tendency to reproduce familiar relational patterns, even if they are poorly adapted,” Stenicke says.
He believes that the overlap between these two fields has the potential to provide valuable new ways of understanding mental disorders.
“Rigid, persistent symptoms, such as paranoid thoughts or internalized critical voices, may be stable, but they are not very flexible predictive models,” Stenicke says.
“For example, some people may automatically expect criticism, rejection, or hostility from others and interpret the situation through this filter, despite the fact that reality does not justify it.”
Researchers say these deeply ingrained mental models can persist because they reduce uncertainty, even if they distort our perception of reality. Seen from this perspective, both psychoanalysis and predictive neuroscience can help explain why lasting psychological change takes considerable time.
“Furthermore, both models give us insight into how some of our expectations about the outside world are fixed in procedural memory, which is expressed not only cognitively but also in an existential, relational way,” he says.
Stenicke explains that expectations are not only stored as conscious beliefs, but also as deeply ingrained patterns that shape how people respond to and interact with others.
“Psychotherapy may therefore need to work relationally. For example, new experiences in the relationship between therapist and patient can help gradually change fixed relationship patterns.”
Toward a more complete psychology
The researchers suggest that while predictive neuroscience may provide a biological basis for psychoanalytic thinking, psychoanalysis may help neuroscience better understand how predictions are experienced, interpreted, and expressed in everyday life and relationships.
“Integrating these two fields could pave the way for a more holistic psychology that includes both neurological mechanisms and subjective experience. In this way, subjectivity can be understood in a more scientific way.”
