I’m deep in Mark Solms‘s “Revision of Drive Theory,” a great article published a couple of years ago in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. I’ve tried to read the article a few times, and I’ve seen Solms present a few times. Somehow, it wasn’t until last weekend, when I watched him give a two-hour presentation on this subject – a presentation which I’ve seen once or twice before in almost precisely the same form – that his presentation took with me, that I got it, that I felt it in my bones. [I wrote about that presentation – and provided a bunch of notes and glosses on it – here.]
A lot of patients struggle with so much of what it is that we do in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, so much “interpreting” of the “unconscious.” And no wonder: so much of what we analysts do is point out things to our patients that they don’t see, don’t feel, and don’t want to see or feel.
Solms’s theory (and while I’m calling it a theory, I think it’s fair to say he would have us believe it’s not really a theory, so much as an explanation of how the brain, the mind, and the body function) boils down, as I understand it, to the following assertions:
- We have one primary drive: the drive to maintain homeostasis.
- Any disruption to our homeostasis leads either to an autonomic response (we need oxygen, so we breathe; we need to circulate our blood, so our heart pumps) or to an instinct as to how to return to homeostasis (flee a building, say, if it’s burning, so we can breathe, at the most basic level; flee intimacy, if intimacy has, in the past, been dangerous to us, at a more emotional level).
- That instinct – the answer to the question “What should I do?” – emanates from what Solms calls a “prediction” – a prediction we consolidated very early in life, usually before the age of three.
- Predictions themselves are conscious, or are close enough to consciousness that we can see them and recognize them.
- Predictions are very hard – but not impossible – to change.
- Analysts can point out both the predictions patients are making (“This relationship feels terrifying! I’ll feel better if I tank it!”) and their real-life, real-time impact (“I can’t keep a girlfriend”).
- Over time, as patients see, over and over, as/that their predictions actually fail them – either they fail to be accurate, or they fail to lead to the desired destination, or both – they can test, and establish, new predictions. And this can happen most effectively in the transferences, in the here-and-now relationship between the patient and the therapist (and all the other people in their life).
This feels about 80% right to me. Pretty much all of it I agree with, until the last bullet. Or rather, the last bullet feels… somehow oversimplified… to me. As a patient, and as a clinician, my experience is that “change” manifests, if not magically, not hydraulically. I can see my “flawed predictions” quite clearly long before I stop following them. Ditto my patients. The process by which we abandon our flawed predictions, and replace them with more accurate ones? That’s not cognitive. It’s bodily. It happens s.l.o.w.l.y.
So.
I find Solms exciting. That’s the punchline.
One last thought: Solms, I think, wouldn’t disagree with my final paragraph. It’s just that his presentation almost necessarily simplifies that process.
