Bibliographic record
Abstract
Friston and psychodynamic therapyProsser et al 1 cogently argue that psychotherapeutic treatment is no less 'biological' than pharmacotherapy -a point also made by Bowlby, who argued, from an ethological perspective, that behaviour is shaped by evolutionary processes no less than anatomy. 2 However, in linking Friston's 'free energy' principle with cognitivebehavioural therapy (CBT), they fall into the trap of 'brand nominalism' (e.g.Hoover/vacuum cleaner, Coke/soda, Kellogg's/ breakfast cereal, etc.).There is a lot more to psychotherapy than CBT; arguably, psychodynamic therapy fits the Friston bill rather better than Beck's baby.As I (a non-mathematical psychotherapist) understand it, the essence of the free-energy model is the brain's Bayesian shaping of sensory input into experience according to a probabilistic calculus.In healthy psychological functioning, discrepancies between prediction and input are resolved by action to reduce uncertainty and update probabilities.Underlying many psychiatric disorders are relational difficulties arising from outmoded free-energy-reducing models.For the psychologically unwell, both action and the tolerance of uncertainty entailed in updating these models are inhibited.Psychodynamic therapy addresses this in a number of ways, by: (a) creating a trusting attachment relationship, thereby instating an 'epistemic superhighway' , 3 which, by 'borrowing' therapists' brains' free-energy reduction (i.e.their trained Bayesian skills), reduces clients' need to cling to free-energy minimisation at all costs; (b) offering an ambiguous stimulus via the neutral transference-promoting stance of the therapist; (c) promoting 'action', not in the CBT sense of 'experiments' , but in exploring the resulting fears and fantasies -i.e.prior predictions -that arise in vivo with the therapist; (d) tolerating the free energy liberated by abandoning these predictions; (e) instating more adaptive relational probablisms; and (f) reinforcing the capacity for action and updating in the living/learning everyday world, whether 'natural' or culturally created (e.g.therapeutic day hospitals, group therapy, etc.).Psychodynamic therapy is thus not, as Freud dubbed it, 'the impossible profession', but the 'improbable profession', in that it helps its clients revise their predictions and, in collaboration with the trusted secure base, to live with, and put to good use, the 'surprise' associated with liberated free energy.These processes are far from exclusively 'top down' as Prosser et al suggest, but implicate the amygdala as much as the prefrontal cortex and need to be seen in the context of the synchronous 'social brain' of client and therapist acting in concert.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.065 | 0.056 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.014 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".