What if the human brain works in a way similar to the model Sigmund Freud began describing more than 130 years ago? A new scientific analysis suggests that some of Freud’s ideas about the mind share striking similarities with one of modern neuroscience’s most influential theories: the predictive brain.

Published in the scientific journal Entropy, the paper examines connections between Freud’s original theories, later developments in psychoanalysis, and the modern neuroscience approach known as the predictive paradigm.

The predictive brain theory describes the brain as a prediction-making system. Rather than simply reacting to information from the outside world, the brain constantly anticipates what will happen next. It compares those expectations with incoming sensory information and attempts to reduce the difference between what it predicted and what actually occurred.

Scientists believe this ongoing process plays a central role in perception, decision-making, behavior, and emotional regulation.

Researchers Eric Stanicke, Bendik Hovet, and Rhein Indrevor Stanicke, along with their colleagues, argue that this modern understanding of brain function has important similarities to ideas developed by psychoanalysts over more than a century.

“For more than 130 years, psychoanalysis has developed psychological theories about how predictions are made at the subjective level, but cognitive neuropsychology now studies it at the physiological level.”

How Freud’s ideas connect to the predictive brain

Although neuroscience and psychoanalysis use different methods to study the mind, researchers suggest that both may describe related psychological processes.

Neuroscience investigates the physical mechanisms behind thoughts and behavior and often uses mathematical models to explain how the brain processes information. Psychoanalysis, which developed from Freud’s work, focuses on how unconscious mental processes, emotional experiences, and past relationships influence present behavior.

In other words, one field studies what happens in the brain, while the other examines how those processes are experienced by individuals.

One particularly interesting connection involves the psychoanalytic concept of projection and the neuroscience concept of prediction.

In psychoanalysis, projection involves attributing feelings, intentions, or qualities to another person. Researchers suggest this may resemble the way the brain uses previously learned expectations to interpret new experiences.

“When we attribute qualities, intentions, and emotions to others, our brains shape our experience of the world around established expectations,” says Stenicke.

For example, people who have experienced repeated rejection may become especially sensitive to signs that others are rejecting them. Past experiences can shape expectations, causing vague statements or facial expressions to be interpreted negatively.

Over time, these expectations may influence how someone approaches unfamiliar situations and forms new relationships.

“This corresponds to the neuroscientific distinction between changing one’s own predictions, perceptual reasoning, and attempting to make the world conform to it, active reasoning.”

Perceptual reasoning refers to how the brain interprets sensory information and updates its expectations. By contrast, active reasoning involves taking actions that help align experience with predictions or reduce uncertainty.

Together, these concepts help explain why people do not always experience the world exactly as it is. Expectations can influence what they notice, how they interpret events, and how they respond.

Why does the brain hold negative expectations?

Researchers believe the similarities between Freud’s ideas and modern neuroscience could provide insights into mental health disorders, particularly conditions involving deeply established patterns of thought and behavior.

Both approaches depict the mind as constantly seeking stability and predictability. This tendency is related to homeostasis, the process by which a system maintains a relatively stable internal state.

In predictive brain models, reducing uncertainty is an important part of maintaining stability. The brain relies on familiar expectations to make sense of the world, even when those expectations are inaccurate or no longer helpful.

“Psychoanalysts refer to the mind’s tendency to reproduce familiar relational patterns, even if they are poorly adapted,” Stenicke says.

This may help explain why people repeat harmful relationship patterns or continue to interpret situations negatively despite evidence that challenges their assumptions.

“Rigid, persistent symptoms, such as paranoid thoughts or internalized critical voices, may be stable, but they are not very flexible predictive models,” Stenicke says.

“For example, some people may automatically expect criticism, rejection, or hostility from others and interpret the situation through this filter, despite the fact that reality does not justify it.”

These expectations can become deeply ingrained because they make experiences feel familiar and predictable. Maintaining an established mental model may feel less uncertain than changing it, even when the resulting interpretation is distorted.

Stenicke says this may help explain why some psychological symptoms persist for years and why changing long-standing patterns of thought and behavior often takes significant time.

This connection is especially notable because it suggests that some mental health problems may involve more than consciously held beliefs. They may also reflect deeply learned expectations that automatically shape emotional responses and interactions with other people.

How psychotherapy can change deeply ingrained patterns

Researchers also emphasize the difference between what people consciously believe and what they learn through experience.

“Furthermore, both models give us insight into how some of our expectations about the outside world are fixed in procedural memory, which is expressed not only cognitively but also in an existential, relational way,” he says.

Procedural memory is a form of long-term memory involving learned habits and skills. It allows people to perform familiar actions without consciously thinking through every step.

In relationships, similar forms of learning may help explain why certain emotional reactions and interaction patterns become automatic.

For example, some people may instinctively respond as if rejection is inevitable, even when they intellectually understand that another person is not necessarily hostile or critical.

These expectations are not simply thoughts that can always be changed through reasoning. They may also be embedded in habitual ways of responding to people and navigating relationships.

This distinction may explain why psychotherapy often needs to address relationships and emotional experiences rather than focusing only on conscious thoughts.

“Psychotherapy may therefore need to work relationally. For example, new experiences in the relationship between therapist and patient can help gradually change entrenched relational patterns.”

Through repeated experiences that challenge familiar expectations, patients may gradually develop different ways of interpreting situations and relating to other people.

Could psychoanalysis and neuroscience complement each other?

Researchers argue that combining psychoanalysis with modern predictive brain theories could benefit both fields.

Neuroscience may provide a biological framework for understanding processes that psychoanalysts have long described through subjective experience. At the same time, psychoanalytic theory may offer a more detailed explanation of how expectations are emotionally experienced, personally interpreted, and expressed through relationships.

The proposed analogy does not prove that Freud’s broader theory was correct. Instead, the researchers suggest that two different traditions of studying the mind may offer complementary perspectives on some of the same psychological processes.

By examining both the physical mechanisms of the brain and people’s internal experiences, researchers hope to develop a more complete understanding of human behavior and mental health.

“Integrating these two fields could pave the way for a more holistic psychology that includes both neurological mechanisms and subjective experience. In this way, subjectivity can be understood in a more scientific way.”