Free Energy, Attachment & Therapy: A Psychoanalytic View

Children often encounter discrepancies between their pre-existing models of the world, based on their limited experiences and incoming information. This phenomenon can result in pent of frustration, also called free energy, that can result in mental pain. Caregivers can help to build resilience to entropy caused by free energy by facilitating a despair-repair cycle and may develop a secure attachment style. However, when caregivers themselves become overtaken by a child’s rupture of unhappiness, cycles of rupture-despair or rupture-disaster are perpetuated, which can result in insecure attachment. Insecurely attached children show increased vulnerability to developing depression and PTSD in adulthood and their attempts to mitigate free energy can become problematic.

Patients undergo psychotherapy can work to “bind” unprocessed free energy and bottom-up experiences that have been previously addressed by repression or dissociation. With contemporary psychoanalytic therapy, trauma related free energy is evoked, then quieted using free association, dream analysis, and analysis of transference. In psychoanalytic and attachment-serviced mentalization-based therapy (MBT) has shown to be afficacious in treating borderline personality disorder leading to reductions in medication use, suicide attempts, hospitalizations, and unemployment rates. MBT uses free energy principles to address bottom-up feelings that otherwise drive self-harm with the help of the therapists’ ability to model secure relationship and mutual mentalizing from the therapist and patient to establish more adaptive models of the self and others. The goal of treatment is to repair patients’ pre-existing models of the world and create resilience to withstand unbound free energy and decrease mental distress.

Source: Holmes J. (2022). Friston’s free energy principle: new life for psychoanalysis?