Revision of Drive Theory: Commentary on Solms’s “Revison of Drive Theory”

The Fundamental Mechanism of Drive

Solms then continues with Freud’s 1895 concept of free and bound neuronal energy, stating that “‘freely mobile’ energy” was “the driving force of [Freud’s] ‘primary process,’” whereas “the mental apparatus tolerates a tonic store of energy, which . . . becomes its supply of ‘bound energy’ (and thereby of the secondary process) . . .” (p. 1038). Indeed, a full twenty years later, in the metapsychological paper “The Unconscious,” Freud (1915b) maintained that “the cathectic intensities [in the Ucs.] are much more mobile [free]. . . . Displacements and condensations such as happen in the primary process are excluded or very much restricted [in the bound cathexes of the secondary process]. . . . In my opinion this distinction [between free and bound psychic energies] represents the deepest insight we have gained up to the present into the nature of nervous energy, and I do not see how we can avoid making it” (Freud 1915b). Still twenty-three years later, in “An Outline of Psycho-Analysis,” Freud (1938) again declared, “We seem to recognize that nervous or psychical energy occurs in two forms, one freely mobile and another, by comparison, bound; . . . hypercathexis brings about . . . a synthesis in the course of which free energy is transformed into bound energy” (p. 64). Accordingly, following many other scholars of Freudian theory, Solms infers that “it is evident that Freud’s distinction between ‘free’ and ‘bound’ states of drive energy built directly upon the physics of Helmholtz, who introduced the term ‘bound energy’ into thermodynamics and indeed played a major role in the formulation of its First Law” (p. 1038).

It should be noted, however, that Freud’s free and bound neuronal cathectic energies were chiefly distinguished not by their thermodynamic properties but by whether their hypothesized electrical neuronal cathexes were freely and flexibly deployable by the mental apparatus in the service of shifting complex mental activities such as the ego’s attention and defensive operations (Holt 1962). If, in fact, Freud drew upon Helmholtz in postulating free and bound cathexes, it is also clear that Freud throughout his career took considerable theoretical liberties with this enduring analogy between his hypothesized, abstract, free and bound neuronal cathectic energies, and Helmholtz’s measured, exact, free and bound chemical-mechanical thermodynamic energies, which contributed to the formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (not the First, as Solms states) (see (Holt 1962).

The Relationship between Drive and Pleasure-Unpleasure

Solms takes exception (p. 1044) to Freud’s hypothesis (1916–1917) that “we seem to see deeper in the case of some affects and to recognize that the core . . . is the repetition of some particular significant experience. This experience could only be a very early impression of a very general nature, placed in the prehistory not of the individual but of the species” (p. 395). Solms presents Freud as believing that phylogenetic memories (expressed, e.g., as castration anxiety) originated in “the repeated experience by our ancestors, over many generations, of an alpha male in a primal horde who castrates or tries to castrate his sons when they reach puberty and threaten his preeminent sexual position. According to Freud, the descendants of these sons inherit unconscious memories of those traumatic events, which take the form of what he called ‘primal fantasies’ . . .” (p. 1044). Solms emphatically rejects this phylogenetic construct, stating, “There are no such things as inherited [phylogenetic] memories, a neurobiological impossibility . . .” (p. 1053).

I maintain, however, that certain ancient, genetically programmed, prosocial, behavioral dispositions (e.g., the tendency to fear parental punishment and to feel guilt) could have conferred survival advantages on both the individual and the species, such that when enacted and refined through generations over long periods of evolutionary time, such psychical dispositions become phylogenetically transmitted to the present and expressed ontologically as unconscious phylogenetic memories, like the oedipal complex (Schwartz 2016; see also Marks and Tobena 1990). Similarly, Panksepp states, “What affective neuroscience has sought to do through the identification of key brain systems that help create primal emotional feelings, through the rewarding and punishing properties of various brain emotional systems, is to provide an evolutionary strategy for understanding the foundations of our emotional mind. The genetically ingrained emotional systems of the brain reflect ancestral memories—adaptive affective functions of such universal importance for survival that they were built into the brain, rather than having to be learned afresh by each generation of individuals” (Panksepp and Biven 2012, p. 236). Thus, while Freud may have gotten the mechanism of phylogenetic inheritance wrong (Lamarckian vs. Darwinian), that phylogenetic memories exist in our unconscious seems quite likely.

The Relationship between Drive and Conscious Qualities in General

“For Freud,” Solms states, “drive energies operating within the mind (in the id and in the unconscious parts of the ego and superego) were unconscious in all their vicissitudes until they reached the superficial system Cs. . . . Freud insisted that affects are necessarily conscious phenomena. There is no such thing as an ‘unconscious emotion.’ This is because affects, for Freud, were perceptions of the process whereby drives are discharged, so that a drive remains unconscious until it is discharged, at which point it is consciously perceived and is no longer a drive, but an affect. . . . [But] if affects are by definition conscious, then how can it be true (1) that the passage of events in the id obeys the inexorable pleasure principle and (2) that the id and its drives are unconscious? What is the point of a pleasure principle ‘in’ the id if it does not feel it? . . . Once again, we are on the brink of theoretical incoherence—a good sign that we might have taken a wrong turn” (pp.1045–1047).

However, Solms’s assertion of theoretical incoherence on the part of Freud is not warranted. While it is true that Freud struggled for years defining and locating the metapsychological status of affects, he did not insist that affects are by definition conscious, and that there is no such thing as unconscious affects. For example, in “The Unconscious,” Freud (1915b) tried but failed to completely resolve this conundrum, stating, “We should expect the answer to the question about unconscious feelings, emotions and affects to be just as easily given. It is surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it, i.e. that it should become known to consciousness. Thus the possibility of the attribute of unconsciousness would be completely excluded as far as emotions, feelings and affects are concerned. But in psycho-analytic practice we are accustomed to speak of unconscious love, hate, anger, etc., and find it impossible to avoid even the strange conjunction, ‘unconscious consciousness of guilt’, or a paradoxical ‘unconscious anxiety’. . . . In every instance where repression has succeeded in inhibiting the development of affects, we term those affects (which we restore when we undo the work of repression) ‘unconscious’. Thus it cannot be denied that the use of the terms in question is consistent; but in comparison with unconscious ideas there is the important difference that unconscious ideas continue to exist after repression as actual structures in the system Ucs., whereas all that corresponds in that system to unconscious affects is a potential beginning which is prevented from developing. Strictly speaking, then, and although no fault can be found with the linguistic usage, there are no unconscious affects as there are unconscious ideas. But there may very well be in the system Ucs. affective structures. . . . In the present state of our knowledge of affects and emotion we cannot express this difference more clearly (pp. 177–178).

Eight years later, in The Ego and the Id, after Freud (1923) had abandoned his discharge theory of affects, he concluded, “We then come to speak, in a condensed and not entirely correct manner, of ‘unconscious feelings’, keeping up an analogy with unconscious ideas which is not altogether justifiable. Actually, the difference is that, whereas with Ucs. ideas connecting links must be created before they can be brought into the Cs., with feelings, which are themselves transmitted directly, this does not occur. In other words: the distinction between Cs. and Pcs. has no meaning where feelings are concerned; the Pcs. here drops out—and feelings are either conscious or unconscious” (pp. 22–23). Thus, Solms’s contention that Freud insisted throughout his scientific life that there is no such thing as unconscious affects is not correct.

The Mechanism of Fundamental Drive and Its Relationship to Pleasure-Unpleasure

Solms states that the fundamental mechanism of all drives (e.g., blood glucose, oxygen, or body temperature regulation) is homeostasis (p. 1048), and that drives are governed by autonomic control systems that measure deviations or errors from the desired “settling point” and institute automatic corrective actions in proportion to the magnitude of the error signal (e.g., like a thermostat; see Schwartz and Erk 2004; Schwartz, Rosenthal, and Wehr 1998). However, if the error signals become too great, these autonomic “needs” become felt mentally as conscious “drives.” Solms thus defines drives as conscious phenomena: “To differentiate these two types of demand for work, the nonmental and the mental, I will use the terms ‘need’ and ‘drive’ respectively” (p. 1049). Solms then concludes by “deducing” his first implication of the fundamental mechanism of drive, namely, that “drives are conscious.” That is, Solms reasons as follows: drives are by my definition conscious; therefore, I conclude that drives must be conscious. As an illustration, however, Solms chooses to apply the cybernetic principles of his “nonmental autonomic needs” and “mental drives” to Freud’s libidinal drive. Solms thus contends that humans are not unconsciously driven to lustfully engage in sex because of some unconscious evolutionary libidinal imperative reinforced by biologically pleasurable orgasms; rather, we engage in sex because of our conscious feelings. In support of his contention, Solms argues that often we engage in sex while trying not to reproduce, and he suggests that sexual behavior is determined predominantly, if not entirely, by our voluntary conscious choice. To be sure, as if to repudiate any influence of Freud’s unconscious libido, Solms later states that “some people even doubt that sexuality is a need” (p. 1065). Thus, he seems to deny the force, even existence, of Freud’s rich, dynamic, repressed, unconscious libidinal drive, relegating it instead to the status of an autonomic, prematurely automatized prediction (p. 1085).

The Relationship between Drive and Entropy

According to Solms, “The energy in a system that is usefully employed (i.e., employed in effective work) is called ‘bound’ energy, and the energy that is not currently employed in effective work is ‘free’” (p. 1056). Here again, Solms is not correct. In fact, the amount of energy within a system that is available to do work is the free energy, whereas the amount of energy within a system that is unavailable to do work is the bound energy (Helmholtz 1882). Based on his erroneous thermodynamic reasoning, Solms then postulates, “if the system is going to survive as a system (i.e., if it is going to avoid dissipation), then the free energy in the system must be bound. This is the ‘free energy principle’” (p. 1056). It is unfortunate that Solms’s initial formulation of Friston’s important free-energy principle (Friston 2009) is immediately suspect.

Solms next states that Friston’s free-energy principle is “derived from statistical mechanics” (p. 1057). Once again, Solms is incorrect. Friston’s free-energy principle is not at all derived from statistical mechanics. The principle was initially formulated on the premise that the brain is an inference machine that perceives an external stimulus y, compares it with its internal expected value x based on previous experience (its belief regarding the true nature of y), generates a prediction error (inference), and then maximizes its inferential value by minimizing the statistical divergence between the respective probability distributions for x and y. This statistical minimization of Friston’s “variational free-energy” minimizes the surprise (the error) from sensory inputs. At the outset, Friston explicitly stated that his informational free-energy principle should be distinguished from statistical-thermodynamic free-energy: “It should be noted that the only link between these two uses of the term ‘free-energy’ is mathematical; i.e., both appeal to the same probabilistic fundaments. It is the second sort of free-energy, which is a measure of statistical probability distributions that we apply to the exchange of biological systems with the world. . . . The variational free-energy is not a thermodynamic free-energy but a free-energy formulated in terms of information-theoretic quantities. The free-energy principle discussed here is not a consequence of thermodynamics but arises from population dynamics and selection” (Friston and Stephan 2007, p. 451).

Recent elaborations of the free-energy principle have addressed even more complex organismic behaviors (Friston et al. 2017). Friston and colleagues have already formulated several interesting preliminary attempts to extend the free-energy principle to several aspects of Freudian metapsychology (Cahart-Harris and Friston 2010; Edwards et al. 2012; Solms and Friston 2018), though none of these papers directly address the issue of Freudian drives. Thus, notwithstanding the rapidly evolving advances in Friston’s free-energy models, in light of the theoretical shortcomings I have noted with regard to Solms’s proposals involving energy, statistics, and physics, we must for now temper our enthusiasm for his claim that “Friston’s free energy principle achieves Freud’s greatest ambition, namely, ‘to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles, thus making those processes perspicuous and free from contradiction’ (Freud 1895)” (p. 1057).

Classification of Drives and the Bodily Sources of Drives

Solms asserts that drives cannot be confluent: “each drive must be satisfied in its own right; it makes no biological sense to say that 3/10 of thirst plus 7/10 of pain equals 10/20 of total drive pressure” (p. 1063). Consistent with this view, Panksepp has stated that his seven emotional systems represent seven relatively independent neurobiological systems that underlie human personality (Panksepp and Biven 2012). However, it should be noted that in early psychometric studies, considerable overlap (correlations) has been found between the scores on the various scales describing these presumably independent emotional systems (Davis, Panksepp, and Normansell 2003; Fuchshuber et al. 2022; Montag and Davis 2018). In addition, a genetic-epidemiologic twin study also found significant correlational overlap between the interindividual variation in scores on the scales for all emotional systems (Montag et al. 2016). These studies suggest that Panksepp’s seven affective systems are not entirely independent of one another and could therefore be considered confluent (Kernberg 2012), violating one of Solms’s criteria for his seven drives and providing evidence supporting Freud’s formulations that libidinal and aggressive drives can indeed be confluent.

The Relationship between Drive and Conscious Qualities in General

Solms states, “Having proclaimed that drives are conscious, I will conclude with only a brief consideration of the unconscious—since I have written extensively about this topic elsewhere (Solms 2017, 2018, 2021b)” (p. 1080). Thus, previously, based on his review of the literature documenting observations of retained rudimentary consciousness and preserved affectivity in decorticate animals and humans, Solms highlighted the compelling case for placing the anatomical seat of consciousness not in Freud’s cerebral cortex ego but in the upper brainstem (Solms 2013, 2017; Solms and Panksepp 2012). However, as if by theoretical necessity, Solms declared that “the classical conception is turned on its head. . . . The conclusion is inescapable, consciousness is generated in the id, and the ego is fundamentally unconscious” (Solms 2013, p. 11). But Solms’s theoretical reasoning is once again flawed. Perhaps he is correct that it is indeed time for psychoanalysis to recognize that the kernel of consciousness resides in the upper brainstem. But even if that is the case, the most parsimonious explanation for psychoanalytic metapsychology is to simply relocate Freud’s mostly conscious ego to the upper brainstem and Freud’s unconscious id to the cerebral cortex; that is, the ego and the id should simply trade their anatomical homes, but not their metapsychological, topographic, economic, and dynamic features and systemic interrelationships. Finally, Solms admits that “since repressed predictions inevitably produce negative affects . . . the only recourse available . . . is ‘defense’” (p. 1085). But since such defenses are unconscious, what exactly is being defended against if not unconscious affects? Thus, there seems to be insufficient theoretical justification for Solms’s radical contention that the id is conscious and the ego unconscious.