Abstract
I very much welcome the chance to contribute to this panel and particularly the opportunity it provides to be clear about differences in what we as psychoanalysts do.
In a moment I will set out how I understand the two treatment models we are being offered, based on their author’s reading of contemporary neuroscience evidence. While I agree, particularly with Solms, that neuroscience findings concerning memory, the emotional embodiment of cognition, emotional needs, active inference, and predictive coding are an important background orientation for the theory of psychoanalytic practice, I am less sure than either author about the way they incorporate them into a model of psychoanalytic treatment. To me crucial elements of Freud’s core thinking as to how a psychoanalyst can know a patient’s unconscious are missing.
Lane’s Approach
The core of Lane’s position has two elements.
One, taken from computational neuroscience, is that our brains make predictions that anticipate our experience on the basis of priors.
The other, from a broader range of work, is that we must distinguish between the bodily expression of affective states and the subjective feelings we experience and name (like, I assume, hate, jealousy, envy, love, etc.). These subjective states are “psychological constructions or mental representations facilitated by language that are learned” rather than “mediated by specific, innate neuroanatomy or physiology” (p. 10). For Lane, therefore, each patient develops a (subjective) “superordinate knowledge structure” that reflects “abstracted commonalities across multiple experiences, exerting powerful influences over how events are perceived, interpreted, and remembered,” located in what he calls “schematic memory.” In other words, emotionally charged memories formed in early childhood experiences subsequently give rise to an internal model which initiates learned and potentially repetitive maladaptive predictions about the world executed without awareness, so that they cannot respond to negative feedback.
With this developmental model in mind, Lane sees analytic sessions as providing an opportunity for a patient (a) to experience the analyst (in the present) as inhabiting the predicted persona of the parent and (b) to get feedback on the accuracy of the prediction. The stage is then set for psychanalysis to be a “corrective experience” through which the old (schematic) memory can be updated (Lane, in press).
If I understand him, Lane’s key intervention is an “accurate interpretation,” which is one that conveys to the patient that the patient’s experience is being represented in the analyst’s mind. In this way, a feeling of closeness that enhances the therapeutic alliance is facilitated, although it might also mobilize anxieties about closeness. He says the key but often implicit interpretation is of the form: “Your behavior is understandable. I don’t reject you. I care about you. I want to help you. By working together, we can help you overcome the difficulty that brought you into treatment.”
Solms’s Approach
As well as drawing on predictive coding and active inference, Solms emphasizes (a) the difference between declarative and nondeclarative memory, (b) the need to expand Freud’s drives to a more precise seven conflicting core needs and (c) the way an infant and child actively adapt to situations when needs are not met, by creating automated reactions within a (phantasy) object relationship.
Staying largely within the Freudian corpus, Solms describes early development as a learning task in which, in the environment he is in, the child finds adaptive ways of meeting his own (conflicting) emotional needs as well as those of others through “object relationships.” But because, during this time, the brain is not yet developed sufficiently for there to be “declarative memories” (i.e., of actual events and stories) when a child feels unpleasure (conscious) because an emotional need remains unmet, it develops an automated “action program.”
In the ideal situation emotional needs reliably trigger accurate automatic predictions and “action programs”—ones that do meet the need. But inaccurate predictions and action programs may also become adopted. The general idea is that during development, a child automatizes the best—or least bad—predictions about situations and how to respond that s/he can muster and that sometimes they really meet needs and sometimes not. But because these are automatized, they are unknown to consciousness.
Insofar as premature and therefore illegitimate automatization of predictions has taken place, there is a problem—because predictions and solutions are repressed or unconscious and “illegitimate” (i.e., inaccurate) predictions as to how to meet emotional needs that are not good compromises. They lead to chronic and repetitive emotional troubles.
Importantly, using his theory, Solms argues cogently that while psychotherapy of different sorts can try to help patients meet their emotional needs in better ways, only psychoanalytic therapy has the special characteristic that it can help patients to identify the emotional needs they are trying to meet without knowing it and open the way to their becoming conscious of alternative perhaps better ways for getting what may be available.
In terms of psychoanalytic technique, because nondeclarative predictions, based on unconscious memories of old coping strategies, cannot be known directly, the psychoanalyst has to bring the patient’s nondeclarative predictions to awareness. This is done by observing the predictions “in action” and then by drawing the patient’s attention to their recurring enactment. Although repetition is to be expected many times and will have to be worked through, choice will eventually be enabled by “encouraging the patient to generate more satisfying predictions, which can then gradually be consolidated through the process of ‘working through.’” There are four necessary steps—(a) Can you see you are doing that (the stereotyped behavior) over and again? (b) Can you see it is intended to achieve this outcome (to satisfy such-and-such emotional need)? (c) Can you see it is not achieving that desired outcome? (d) Can you see that is why you are suffering from this feeling?
Transference as Core
Freud wrote about what he called transference many times—back to his earliest thinking in the 1890s. And since then psychoanalysts have used the term in multiple ways—in so many ways in fact that although there has often been broad agreement that it is a core concept in psychoanalysis and transference interpretation a core tool, even a cursory review of literature or discussion of clinical material shows there is little or no consensus understanding.
In this respect, both models of the change process offered by Lane and Solms, make an important contribution to clinical psychoanalysts because they agree and argue cogently from the findings of computational neuroscience that the human brain is, so to speak, a prediction machine.
Whatever their differences, both authors apply this idea to transference as the outcome of repetitive predictions that, because they are unconscious, cannot normally be updated. Two implications follow. First, psychoanalysts would be well advised to restrict their use of the term transference to refer to the processes through which patients repeat their prior predictions or expectations both in their experience of their lives generally and their experience with their analyst. Second, psychoanalysts would be well advised to focus therapeutic efforts on finding effective ways to intervene to help patients to alter these predictions or expectations. In other words, despite their differences, both authors agree that we simplify the central goal of psychoanalysis to make it a treatment focused on trying to alter what Freud (1912/1958a), explaining transference, called a stereotype:
a stereotype plate (or several such), which is constantly repeated—constantly reprinted afresh—in the course of the person’s life . . . set up not only by the conscious anticipatory ideas but also by those
Given the vast and almost incomprehensibly complex and conflicted literature on what psychoanalysts should be doing (see Cremerius, 1979; Tuckett et al., 2024, p. 161ff) this focus, might greatly improve clinical work and transmission. It aligns with what I call a “parsimonious” model (Tuckett, 2019), designed as a point of departure from which any psychoanalyst can innovate in a disciplined way.
Procedure, Method, and Theory
There may be a measure of agreement between us, then, that the core task of psychoanalysis is to enable a patient’s transference predictions to be revealed and through that process to enable them to develop a new set of more current reality based predictions which will serve them better. However, I am much less sure than either author as to how far either of their models benefits from psychoanalytic insights—in the sense that Freud defined psychoanalysis as “procedure,” “method,” and a “collection of theories” derived from what he learned from sessions conducted with the procedure and the method.
By “procedure” I refer to Freud’s very specific ideas about how an analyst creates a psychoanalytic session and its underlying rationale. He recommended freier Einfall for the patient and gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit for the analyst. (Both phrases are left in the original German because in that language their specific passive meaning jumps out better.)
His purpose in setting up sessions in this way derived from his wish to foreground the potential for subjective unconscious meanings, beliefs, and impulses to become evident in conscious associations. He did not have in mind a focused ordinary conversation. Rather he thought unconscious ideas would be betrayed (verraten) inadvertently, first, by a patient following the fundamental rule in the presence of an analyst attending in a special gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit way—and noticing slips, word choice, affects, various signs of discomfort. In suggesting this approach, Freud was drawing on what he saw as his successful efforts to discover his own unconscious by analyzing his dreams. He was then quite explicit when advising others what to do that they should avoid “deliberate attention.” Because
as soon as anyone deliberately concentrates his attention to a certain degree, he begins to select from the material before him; one point will be fixed in his mind with particular clearness and some other will be correspondingly disregarded, and in making this selection he will be following his expectations or inclinations. This, however, is precisely what must not be done. (Freud, 1912/1958b, pp. 111–112)
By “method,” I am referring to Freud’s idea that psychoanalysis, as a method of treatment, works through the participation of both parties who together undertake an investigation, using the procedure he designed, whose purpose is to reveal a patient’s unconscious ideas and impulses. Session by session the analyst is enabled to sense and guess (erraten) what would otherwise be inaccessible (i.e., held unconscious to preserve current comfort) and to make interpretations, (i.e., comments) aimed not at cognitive understanding but at deepening and elaborating the investigation.
His idea was that his procedure converges with his method (of cure) and he referred to this as the junktim. Importantly, but with perhaps uncomfortable implications, Freud also makes clear as he elaborates his position that he sees the procedure and so the method as a process involving unconscious to the patient to unconscious to the analyst cognition, or transmission of meaning (see Tuckett et al., 2024, pp. 117–119). In particular, he is not separating what might be thought of as a procedure of discovery (listening to the patient and inferring unconscious content) from treatment (telling those discoveries to the patient). In other words, interpretations for Freud are not treatment in the sense of dispensing expert knowledge and wisdom.
For Freud (1923/1955b), procedure and treatment form an indivisible tripod with theory—because while participating in the investigation the analyst’s mind is deeply infused by the theories that emerged from the findings of his own analysis and then sessions with patients, those which for him became “Corner-Stones of Psycho-Analytic Theory,” namely,
The assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of resistance and repression, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex—these constitute the principal subject-matter of psycho-analysis and the foundations of its theory. (p. 247)
The next sentence he added, “No one who cannot accept them all should count himself a psycho-analyst”—was not just polemic. For Freud, it referred very precisely to something our also keen to emphasize, namely, these foundational psychoanalytic theories are instantiated at depth in the analyst’s mind and so in the analyst’s listening. Hence the need for a personal analysis in training.
How Transference is Revealed and Interpreted in Psychoanalytic Sessions
One thing is to have a theory of transference as prediction, another is to use a psychanalytic session so that a particular patient’s unconscious predictions are revealed first to the analyst and then to the patient.
Elsewhere I have described a major research study that used four metaphors to identify how psychoanalysts suppose it can be done: Cinema, Theater, Immersive Theater, and Dramatic Monologue (Tuckett, 2026; Tuckett et al., 2024).
Freud’s (1909/1955a) description of his treatment of Ernst (the Rat Man) provides an example of two of the types. Oversimplifying, it was apparent to Freud early on from his memories that Ernst experienced his captain and his father, unconsciously, as cruel and punishing persons, despite what else he said about them. Importantly, he did not imagine it could be otherwise with them or other similar men and was locked into repetitive inner sadomasochistic relationships with them.
However, in the psychoanalytic sessions Freud had with Ernst, conducted using Freud’s procedure, Freud could not persuade Ernst of the truth of his observations. But he describes how eventually he realized that when the patient lay down and free associated, he was not just talking about the unconscious features of his memories and events. Rather, his behavior, his slips of the tongue and other associations, as he communicated to Freud, also necessarily resulted from his (unconscious) picture of Freud’s person. With mutual pain and difficulty both patient and analyst then came to realize that when Ernst called Freud “Captain” several times and when he was uncomfortable on the couch and had to get up and walk around (etc.), he was betraying (verraten) an unconscious picture of Freud as a person very different to the respected Freud he would talk about and defer to consciously. In short, he was picturing Freud as vengeful and constantly unconsciously expecting, predicting we could say, a beating from him (Diercks, 2018; Tuckett et al., 2024, pp. 82ff).
Freud’s description of his eventually successful work with Ernst along the above lines is the first example we have of a transference revealed in what I call “Theater.” He no longer just inferred parallels between what his patient told him and his father and captain but quite specifically noticed the patient’s unconscious casting of his person as it was happening in the session. For what he had been doing we use the metaphor “Cinema.” For what he now did we use “Theater.”
A third possible way psychoanalysts suppose transference is revealed is described by the metaphor “Immersive Theater.” Here the analyst discovers the patient’s predictions not only by seeing patterns in what the patient tells him (Cinema) nor only by how he, as a person in the consulting room, is being unconsciously cast by the patient as the transference object (Theater) but also by finding out, that previously and unbeknown to him, he has been unconsciously casting his patient. An example is Bion’s account of Brian (Tuckett, 2026; Tuckett et al, 2024, pp. 12ff). Using the metaphor, we can also wonder if the way Freud was behaving toward Ernst, so-to-speak “beating him up with words,” is an example that might have been recognized by the analyst but was not. (Freud made huge steps forward but not that one.)
What sort of psychoanalysis? Core differences
Although Lane and Solms do it a bit differently (and these differences are important for another discussion) both propose an approach, which although it might work with some patients, misses an important point. Both analyst and patient have no option but to relate to each other in terms of unconscious predictions of their own which are very hard to know, so that very often before they are known, the psychoanalytic process takes the form of mutual enactment (Tuckett, 1997). Freud’s procedure and method and particularly its elaboration by later psychoanalysts like Bion or Racker in relation to the psychoanalyst’s unconscious response to the patient, was very precisely designed to avoid the idea that an analyst or patient gets to know their unconscious simply by directing attention to it. If time allowed, I would quote many examples.
In contrast, both Solms and Lane seem to suppose they can work out the predictions their patients are making mainly by using their cognitive ability and background understanding when listening to the content of what patients say—the films of life they bring in to the cinema, so to speak, to which the analyst contributes film criticism. This approach is used by many psychoanalysts and can perhaps work but is subject to huge difficulty if the patient is, for instance, unconsciously dubious about the analyst, as Ernst was, or able to induce complex and unconscious mutual enactment like Bion’s patient Brian (Bion, 2014; Tuckett et al, 2024, pp. 12ff). Additionally, giving up gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit and substituting for it a more focused approach, creates a fundamental shift in the psychoanalyst’s sensibility—excluding from the analyst’s “theory in practice” what in modern parlance is the capacity for reverie with a potentially serious impact on an analyst’s capacity to transform unconscious enactment in the clinical situation and to become trapped in concrete thinking and impasse (Birksted-Breen, 2012).
Lane’s approach is particularly interesting because he seems to suppose, as do many analysts who take the cinema approach, that aspects of what goes on between patient and analyst is somehow not subject to the very unconscious predictions his theory puts at the heart of the matter. For instance, Lane states that therapeutic effectiveness depends on the patient’s “accurate” experience of an analyst different to the persons predicted. He explains that he means by this an analyst conveying that his patient’s behavior is understandable, he is not rejected, he is cared for, his analyst wants to help him, and so on. For Lane, noticing the difference between his predictions and reality allows a patient to note their inaccuracy and permits a new “corrective experience.” The idea is not unlike Strachey’s (1934) depiction of the therapeutic effect of psychoanalysis. But Lane’s idea (and also I think Solms’s approach), misses what Strachey discussed as to how to get there because they ignore what we know about the potential effect of the unconscious of the analyst (countertransference) as well as the unconscious of the patent. 1
What Freud’s Ernst case shows us, as do many other cases described by psychoanalysts in our literature, is, first, that the patient’s predictions are not easily accepted as such by the patient and, second, that the analyst can be trapped in countertransference induced acting out mindsets for long periods of time.
It was with mutual pain and difficulty that both patient and analyst had to struggle to realize that when Ernst called Freud “Captain” several times and when he was uncomfortable on the couch and had to get up and walk around (etc.), he was betraying (verraten) a frightening and unconscious picture of Freud as a person very different to the respected Freud he would talk about and defer to consciously. In short, he was picturing Freud as vengeful and unconsciously expecting, predicting we could say, a beating from him (Diercks, 2018; Tuckett at al., 2024, p. 82).
Freud, too, clearly had to suffer a lot before he recognized how unhelpful and mean Ernst unconsciously thought he was as a fact—as indeed had Dora. To take a completely different example, Eissler (1953) got nowhere when trying to convey to his patient an interesting and potentially useful hypothesis about his troubles. Psychoanalysis is much more complex—hence the procedure, the method, and the theory.
Conclusion
Lane and Solms do very helpfully offer psychoanalysts the realization that what really matters is to focus their work on transference, understood as the outcome of repeated inaccurate prediction.
At the same time, although to different degrees, by separating their method from the complex essence of Freud’s procedure, method, and theory, they oversimplify the nature of the very processes they are trying to bring in. Freud’s approach, elaborated by those who came after (such as Racker, Klein, and Bion) recognized the deep unconscious to unconscious cognition at the heart of an analytic session and the profound role of countertransference. Based on experiences with the procedure and the method, many psychoanalysts have come to recognize that transference templates are only revealed after a great deal of emotional and cognitive work by both analyst and patient, with transference conceived as revealed as if in the theater and immersive theater, rather than in the cinema.
Be that as it may, it seems to be only reasonable to note that either or both models we have been discussing could be demonstrated empirically to be more effective than any form of psychoanalysis that follows Freud’s three principles.
A further reason to be grateful to both authors, therefore, is that by being willing to codify their approaches, they take an important step forward toward allowing us to debate what we do with greater clarity.
What we all need to recognize and ask ourselves to specify how is that we work differently. We can then define, describe, and compare the versions of psychoanalysis we advocate. Without that we can neither design training to enable future psychoanalysts to practice effectively, nor design research to determine which ways of doing psychoanalysis produce more or less effective outcomes.
