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SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article

Positive psychology: looking back and looking forward.

• Department of Psychology, Institute on Aging, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States

Envisioning the future of positive psychology (PP) requires looking at its past. To that end, I first review prior critiques of PP to underscore that certain early problems have persisted over time. I then selectively examine recent research to illustrate progress in certain areas as well as draw attention to recurrent problems. Key among them is promulgation of poorly constructed measures of well-being and reliance on homogeneous, privileged research samples. Another concern is the commercialization of PP, which points to the need for greater oversight and quality control in profit-seeking endeavors. Looking ahead, I advocate for future science tied to contemporary challenges, particularly ever-widening inequality and the pandemic. These constitute intersecting catastrophes that need scientific attention. Such problems bring into focus “neglected negatives” that may be fueling current difficulties, including greed, indifference, and stupidity. Anger, which defies easy characterization as positive or negative, also warrants greater scientific study. Going forward I advocate for greater study of domains that likely nurture good lives and just societies – namely, participation in the arts and encounters with nature, both currently under study. Overall, my entreaty to PP is to reckon with persistent problems from its past, while striving toward a future that is societally relevant and virtuous.

Introduction

I have studied psychological well-being for over 30 years ( Ryff, 1989 , 2014 , 2018 ), seeking to define its essential features as well as learn about factors that promote or undermine well-being and probe how it matters for health. I bring this past experience and expertise to thinking about positive psychology (PP), noting that I have never considered myself a positive psychologist, mostly because it has always seemed misguided to me to partition science by valence. Everything that interests me involves complex blends of good and bad things, what Rilke called the beauty and terror of life. With these ideas in mind, I reflect about the future of PP by first looking at its past to highlight what it has, or has not, contributed over the last two decades. My views represent personal observations from an outsider who, from the outset, was dubious about the point of launching the PP movement.

I begin with a look at early critiques, including my own, that distilled various concerns about the launching of PP. Some of those problems have endured, such as the failure to embrace the deeper history of psychology and related fields that have long addressed optimal human functioning. This distortion undermines the building of cumulative and coherent knowledge, while also contributes to insularity within PP. Additional past critiques, some from within PP, emphasized the need to put negative and positive experience together, as in dialectical approaches. I made similar points along the way. For this essay, I describe work outside the PP umbrella doing exactly that, drawing largely on the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) national longitudinal study 1 , which I have led over the past two decades.

Returning to PP, on the topic of scientific progress I highlight select contributions over the past 20 years, but again underscore that most of these topics predated PP. On the downside, two notable problems are discussed: (1) poorly constructed measures of well-being and problematic findings, which contradict the claim that PP rests on solid science; and (2) widespread use of homogeneous research samples (white, well-educated, Western) in PP, thereby ignoring how race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and culture matter for positive human functioning. Linked to these problems is widespread pursuit of financial profit, purportedly grounded in rigorous scientific findings. Such commercialization, illustrated by products and shopping carts on websites, makes clear that PP has become a major business. Money-making, I observe, is a strange counterpoint to the recurring emphasis on character strengths and virtue. Financial gain raises additional issues of ethical oversight and quality control in what is being sold.

Going forward, PP and the human sciences in general need to address contemporary societal problems. I focus on ever-widening inequality, now compounded by the pandemic. What we know is that the suffering is not occurring equally, but is happening disproportionately among those who were already vulnerable. These difficulties bring into high relief topics that psychology has largely neglected. Among pernicious negatives of our era that may be fueling the problems we see are greed and indifference, especially among the privileged, as well as stupidity, which seems to cut across educational strata. Anger is another important contemporary emotion that defies easy characterization as positive or negative. These topics stand in marked contrast to what PP was meant to correct – namely, the preoccupation with psychopathology, weakness and damage ( Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000 ).

Looking ahead, I examine factors that may be key in nourishing good lives and just societies, such as active engagement with the arts, broadly defined. Widespread initiatives are moving in this direction, though few emphasize the critical role of the arts in understanding human suffering, which I bring into high relief. A key question is whether great literature, music, poetry, painting, and film can activate caring and compassion, particularly among the advantaged. Encounters with nature constitute another domain for nourishing good lives, while also strengthening commitments to take care for our planet. I note currently unfolding work along these lines.

Looking Back

Early critiques of positive psychology.

Most cite Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) as the definitive statement of what PP was about and why it was needed. The essay began with the authors describing what led each of them to believe that psychology as a discipline was preoccupied with “pathology, weakness, and damage” (p. 7). These assertions were remarkably at odds with extensive literatures on the positive in clinical, developmental, existential, and humanistic psychology – decades of prior work, much of which I drew on to formulate an integrative model of psychological well-being ( Ryff, 1989 ). Instead, most of the foundational exegesis was devoted to describing the 15 articles that followed. All represented longstanding programs of research on such topics as evolution, subjective well-being, optimism, self-determination, maturity, health, wisdom, creativity, and giftedness. These realms were themselves notably at odds with the assertion that psychology was preoccupied with the negative, a point strangely missed by the founders of PP.

Three years later Psychological Inquiry published a target article titled “Does the Positive Psychology Movement Have Legs?” ( Lazarus, 2003 ), followed by numerous commentaries. Ryff (2003) found fault with many aspects of the Lazarus critique (e.g., subjectivism, dimensional versus discrete models of emotion, and cross-sectional research), most of which I clarified were not problems specific to PP. On the topic of emotion, however, I argued for joint focus on negative and positive emotions because “…bad things happen to people, and the healthy response is to feel the sadness, pain, frustration, fear, disappointment, anger, or shame resulting from the adverse experience. However, good things also happen to people, and the healthy response is to feel joy, pride, love, affection, pleasure, or contentment from such experience positive experiences. Thus, the capacity for experiencing and expressing both realms of emotion is central to healthy functioning.” (p. 154).

The unsatisfactory Lazarus critique meant that the central strengths and limitations of PP had not been addressed. On the credit side of the ledger, I praised the special issue for bringing together in the same forum research programs that addressed positive, healthy, adaptive features of human functioning, but underscored that everything assembled came from longstanding programs of prior research. Nothing meant to exemplify this new movement was new : “This myopia about past and present is damaging not for the superficial reason of taking credit for advances already contributed by others but for more serious problems of increasing the likelihood of reinventing wheels, both conceptual and empirical, such that science fails to be incremental and cumulative” ( Ryff, 2003 , p. 155).

To illustrate historical precursors, I drew on Coan’s (1977) Hero, Artist, Sage, or Saint. It described centuries of scholarly efforts to depict the more noble attributes of humankind, such as the ancient Greeks’ emphasis on reason and rationality, St. Augustine’s emphasis on close contact with the divine, the Renaissance emphasis on creative self-expression, and the poets and philosophers of the Enlightenment. I also noted James (1902/1958) eloquent writings about healthy-mindedness juxtaposed with the sick soul, along with others who formulated individuation ( Jung, 1933 ; Von Franz, 1964 ), ego development ( Erikson, 1959 ), maturity ( Allport, 1961 ), self-actualization ( Maslow, 1968 ), the fully functioning person ( Rogers, 1961 ), and positive mental health ( Jahoda, 1958 ).

My own work on well-being ( Ryff, 1989 ) had drawn extensively on these sources, while Ryan and Deci’s (2001) review of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being distilled other philosophical precursors. I noted other contributions on positive topics, such as studies of ego development ( Loevinger, 1976 ), adult personality development ( Helson and Srivastava, 2001 ), generativity ( McAdams and St. Aubin, 1998 ), the human quest for meaning ( Wong and Fry, 1998 ), effective coping and self-regulation ( Carver and Scheier, 1998 ), and proliferating research on human resilience and post-traumatic growth ( Tedeschi et al., 1998 ; Luthar et al., 2000 ). My point: “Taken as a whole, this impressive array of current and past research on the upside of human condition leaves one wondering what all the fanfare has been about. Positive psychology is alive and well, and it most assuredly has legs, which stretch back into the distant history of the discipline. It is only from particular vantage points, such as clinical or abnormal psychology that the positive focus constitutes a novelty. For other subfields, especially life-span developmental and personality psychology, there has always been a concern for healthy, optimal human functioning. Perhaps the main message in the positive psychology initiative is thus how deeply entrenched and divided are the subfields within which psychologists work” ( Ryff, 2003 , p. 157). Unfortunately, this failure to consider relevant wider literatures has persisted through time. More than a decade later, the positive in PP was defined entirely from “Three Foundational Documents” ( Pawelski, 2016 ), which included Seligman (1999) and Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) , and an unpublished paper from a 2000 conference in Akumal, Mexico organized by Seligman. Effectively, all meanings of the positive in PP emanated from its founder, thus more deeply entrenching the historical myopia.

My 2003 essay concluded with a call for psychology to organize its house of strengths and to be circumspect about generating new assessments: “Those who would add to the many tools already available need to be clear that they are not contributing to clutter – that is, generating instruments that are redundant with extant measures.” (p. 157). The concern went unheeded, as I detail later.

Calls to Put Negative and Positive Realms Together

Wong (2011) advocated for a balanced and interactive model of the good life: “the development of character strengths and resilience may benefit from prior experience of having overcome negative conditions” (p. 70). The call to maximize positive affect and minimize negative affect could also create a “happy person as a well-defended fortress, invulnerable to the vicissitudes of life” ( King, 2001 , p. 53). New to the discourse, Wong called for a balance between individualist and collectivist orientations, thereby signaling the need to address cultural issues. Similarly, Lomas and Ivtzan (2016) called for second wave positive psychology to recognize the insufficiency of the admonition of first wave PP to go beyond a psychology preoccupied with disorder and dysfunction. Negative states could be conducive to flourishing, calling again for recognition of the dialectical nature of wellbeing. Five dichotomies were examined: optimism versus pessimism, self-esteem versus humility, freedom versus restriction, forgiveness versus anger, and happiness versus sadness. Within each, the value of both sides was described. These ideas aligned with other prior work, such as Carver and Scheier’s (2003) observation that doubt and disengagement play critical roles alongside commitment and confidence as well as Larsen et al. (2003) emphasis on co-activation of positive and negative emotions that allow individuals to make sense of stressors and gain mastery over them.

At the 6th European Conference on PP in Moscow, I spoke about “Contradiction at the Core of the Positive Psychology Movement: The Essential Role of the Negative in Adaptive Human Functioning” ( Ryff, 2012 ), beginning with a quote from Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground: “And why are you so firmly and triumphantly certain that only what is normal and positive – in short, only well-being is good for man? Is reason mistaken about what is good? After all perhaps prosperity isn’t the only thing that pleases mankind. Perhaps he is just as attracted to suffering. Perhaps suffering is just as good to him as prosperity.” I then drew on Mill’s (1893/1989) Autobiography: “Those only are happy, I thought, who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness, on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus as something else, they find happiness by the way.”

Arguing that psychology should not be partitioned by valence because all lives encompass both positives and negatives, I provided three examples of how they might come together. In the first, the positive is construed as an antidote to the negative, such as how positive emotions can help undo negative emotions ( Fredrickson, 1998 ), or how psychological well-being can help prevent relapse of depression or anxiety ( Fava et al., 1998 ; Ruini and Fava, 2009 ). In the second, the negative is seen as the route or path to the positive, as in trauma contributing to personal growth ( Tedeschi et al., 1998 ), or the expression of negative emotion fostering relational intimacy ( Reis, 2001 ), or the expression of negative emotion in childhood contributing, via skilled parenting, to emotional development ( Gottman, 2001 ). In the third, the positive and negative emotions are inextricably linked, such that embedded within every negative is a positive and within every positive is a negative. This dialectical perspective is more common in interdependent cultural contexts, with our findings ( Miyamoto and Ryff, 2011 ) showing that Japanese adults report experiencing both positive and negative affect, whereas United States adults report mostly positive affect. The dialectical emotional style was also linked with better health (fewer physical symptoms) in Japan compared to the United States.

Around the same time, McNulty and Fincham (2012) issued an important new challenge to PP: to consider that psychological traits and processes are not inherently positive or negative, but can be either depending on the context in which they occur. This insight was illustrated with interpersonal research (longitudinal studies of marital partners). Four putatively positive processes (forgiveness, optimism, benevolent attributions, and kindness) were shown to be beneficial, or harmful, depending on the context in which they occurred. For example, whether forgiveness was linked with self-respect differed by levels of agreeableness of one’s partner. Martial satisfaction over time also varied depending on whether attributions for spouses’ undesirable behaviors were more or less benevolent. This work, including numerous other examples, offered compelling evidence that simplistic characterizations of phenomena as positive or negative are misguided.

Integrative Work Outside the Positive Psychology Umbrella

Extensive research not part of PP has brought negative and positive aspects of human experience together. To illustrate, I describe select findings from the MIDUS (Midlife in the United States) national longitudinal study (see text Footnote 1), which is based on diverse probability samples, thereby facilitating analyses of how well-being and health vary by age, race, gender, and socioeconomic status. A counterpart study in Japan (MIDJA) has illuminated cultural differences in well-being and health. MIDUS has unprecedented depth in high quality measures of hedonic well-being (life satisfaction, positive, and negative affect), eudaimonic well-being (autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations with others, purpose in life, and self-acceptance), optimism, sense of control, personality traits, generativity, social responsibility, and social ties with spouse/significant other as well as parents during childhood. Deeply multidisciplinary in scope, MIDUS has facilitated linkage of all of the above variables to epidemiology, biology, neuroscience, and genetics. Most importantly, MIDUS data are publicly available and are widely used by scientists around the world.

Many findings have combined positive and negatives. For example, Morozink et al. (2010) showed that those with lower educational attainment had elevated levels of IL-6 (interleukin-6, an inflammatory marker implicated in numerous diseases) but higher psychological well-being buffered against such effects. Miller et al. (2011) showed that those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds had increased risk for metabolic syndrome in adulthood, but maternal nurturance buffered such risk. Resilience findings (see Ryff et al., 2012 ) showing that positive psychosocial factors afforded protection against poor health and physiological dysregulation in the face of various challenges (aging, inequality, early life adversity, cancer, loss of spouse). Breaking new ground, multiple studies have documented that higher purpose in life predicts increased length of life and better health behaviors ( Ryff and Kim, 2020 ). Regarding underlying mechanisms, Heller et al. (2013) showed that sustained activation of reward circuitry in the brain predicted higher eudaimonic well-being as well as better diurnal regulation of cortisol. Personality researchers have studied “healthy neuroticism,” with findings from multiple international studies showing that neuroticism is less strongly linked with poor health behaviors (smoking, inactivity) among those who are high in conscientiousness ( Graham et al., 2020 ).

With regard to race, MIDUS has advanced knowledge of the Black-White paradox in health ( Keyes, 2009 ) – i.e., despite inequality and discrimination, Blacks show higher levels of flourishing and lower levels of mental disorders than Whites. Keyes (2005 , 2007) also revealed neglected types of mental health in the general population by jointly examining mental distress (depression and anxiety) and well-being (emotion, psychological, and social). In contrast to those who are flourishing (high well-being and no mental distress) are those who are languishing, defined as not suffering from mental distress but having low well-being. Declining well-being over time also predicted increased subsequent risk of mental distress ( Keyes et al., 2010 ), while positive mental health predicted subsequent recovery from mental illness ( Iasiello et al., 2019 ). Space does not permit the details, but many findings from MIDUS and MIDJA have documented cultural differences in how emotion and well-being matter for health and biological risk ( Miyamoto and Ryff, 2021 ).

To reiterate, I include the above glimpse at MIDUS research is to underscore the need for greater interplay and exchange between the field of PP and much parallel science being done by those who do not view themselves as positive psychologists and are not publishing in journals aligned with PP or happiness.

Recent Work in Positive Psychology

This section first below examines select areas of research that represent forward progress of PP over the past two decades. Then I note recent evaluative overviews of PP from those within the field. Some of their concerns are elaborated in the next sections on what I see as problems within PP science: first, the promulgation of poor instruments for assessing well-being, and second, the reliance on largely privileged, homogeneous samples for conducting PP research.

Forward Empirical Progress

Whether the science of PP is moving constructively forward can examined in various ways. Rather than conduct a systematic review of empirical findings, I choose to focus on chapter-writing, mostly from 3rd Edition of the Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology ( Snyder et al., 2021 ). Unlike journal articles, chapters allow authors to combine many advances on particular topics over time thereby offering a narrative overview of multiple findings. The book includes 68 chapters written by 153 authors, 86% of whom were from the United States.

In the study of emotion, multiple lines of progress are evident. The broaden and build theory continues to evolve by showing short- and long-term benefits of positive emotions in multiple domains, including thoughts, actions, stress, health, physiological and neurological connections ( Tugade et al., 2021 ). Studies of positive affectivity, a trait composed of different components (joviality, self-assurance, and attentiveness) have also progressed via linkages to other constructs (extraversion, happiness, and well-being) as well as psychological disorders, health, marital and job satisfaction, and cultural issues ( Naragon-Gainey and Watson, 2021 ). Positive affect has been linked to longer life, lower incidence of disease, better recovery from disease and better overall health ( Hunter et al., 2021 ), with calls for further work on mechanisms, culture, and technology. The emotional approach to coping (EAC) shows evidence on the intentional use of emotional processing and expression to manage adverse circumstances, such as infertility, sexual assault, diabetes, cancer ( Moreno et al., 2021 ), while calling for more work on interventions, including who benefits (which contexts).

Happiness studies have examined ways in which happy and unhappy people respond to social comparisons, make decisions, and reflect ( Boehm et al., 2021 ), along with strategies (experiments and activities) to improve happiness and formulation of underlying mechanisms. Veenhoven (2021) reviewed differences in happiness across nations and linked them to important questions about what governments can or cannot do to raise levels of happiness, thus reaching toward issues of public policy. A unified model of meaning in life was advanced, underscoring the need for conceptual integration in this growing area of science ( Steger, 2021 ). Positive aging was covered via multiple positive formulations that have been extensively studied, in some cases with interventions ( Nakamura and Chan, 2021 ).

Shifting to life outlooks, how the future is construed was covered with work on optimism showing that those who expect good things to occur have higher well-being, better health, and higher quality social ties, partly attributable to how they cope with adversity ( Mens et al., 2021 ). Detrimental consequences of hope were considered, while calling for greater work on the origins of hope and cultural issues. Hope, defined as the perceived ability to achieve desired goals via pathways and agency, was examined with a goal pursuit process model and linked to academic and athletic performance, health and well-being, social relationships, and work ( Rand and Touza, 2021 ). Resilience, the capacity for positive adaptation in the face of significant adversity, was examined in models that illuminated self-regulation skills, good parenting, community resources and effective schools ( Cutuli et al., 2021 ). Strategies for reducing risk, building strengths and mobilizing adaptive systems were future directions.

Positive mental health was covered with a thoughtful historical perspective and overview of current conceptualizations and measures ( Delle Fava and Negri, 2021 ), examined from life course and cultural perspectives. Illustrating methodological novelty, Tarragona (2021) considered the benefits of personal narratives and expressive writing on mental health and physical health (immune function and cardiovascular health), particularly in the context of trauma. Dominant approaches to mental health interventions (psychotherapy, counseling, and coaching) were examined for commonalities and differences in time perspectives, therapeutic strategies and recipients ( Ruini and Marques, 2021 ), while emphasizing the need for professional regulation and oversight.

Several chapters covered interpersonal themes. Attachment theory was presented as a framework for studying positive relationships ( Mikulincer and Shaver, 2021 ) via links between mental representations of attachment security and how they matter for diverse outcomes (health, social adjustment or interpersonal conflict, and personal growth). Relationship complexities were examined, underscoring both meaningful rewards and substantial risks of close social ties ( Gable and Maisel, 2021 ). They highlighted positive processes, involving positive emotions, intimacy, growth of self-concept, and benefits of sharing positive events. Past research on empathy was reviewed and emerging work on the neuroscience of empathy described ( Duan and Sager, 2021 ). How empathy relates to racial/ethnic diversity, multiculturalism, and social justice were future directions. Forgiveness was described in terms of the methods used and the differentiation of various antecedents, some intrapersonal (empathy, personality, attributions, and religion) and others interpersonal (closeness and conciliatory behavior) ( Tsang and Martin, 2021 ). Whether forgiveness is uniformly positive was considered.

Pawelski and Tay’s (2021) described efforts to connect PP to the humanities through new conceptual analyses and various interventions. Silvia and Kashdan (2021) examined curiosity and interest, framed as recognizing, seeking out, and preferring things outside one’s normal experience. How these tendencies matter for well-being is under study in the laboratory and everyday life. Courage, defined as facing personal risks in pursuit of worthy goals, was examined historically and via modern theory and measurement tools focused on volition, goals, and risk ( Pury et al., 2021 ). Humility, formulated as accurate and modest self-presentation and being other-oriented, showed steady progress in empirical findings from 2000 to 2015 ( Worthington et al., 2021 ).

In sum, considerable evidence reveals forward progress on important topics in PP. Even though most areas of inquiry predated PP, it is useful to bring such contributions together to convey the range and diversity of topics on adaptive human functioning. At the same time, several chapters in the collection were not current in coverage, and some had a paucity of empirical findings. All ended with future questions. An interesting question is whether these have evolved over the past 20 years, or are largely similar to where the field was back then. Before addressing problematic areas of PP science, I next examine evaluative reviews from within the PP field.

Overarching Concerns About Positive Psychology

Lomas et al. (2021) call for PP to broaden toward complexity – go beyond the individual toward analysis of groups, organizations, and broader systems as well as to embrace diverse methodologies. Better understanding of context (historical, social, cultural, and institutional) was also emphasized. Contextual approaches were illustrated with positive organizational scholarship ( Cameron et al., 2003 ), positive educational approaches in schools ( Waters et al., 2010 ), and family-centered positive psychology ( Sheridan et al., 2004 ; Henry et al., 2015 ). Lomas et al. (2021) called for greater ethical oversight of the ever-expanding cadre of PP practitioners from applied programs: “…unless practitioners are affiliated to a particular profession, they may be operating outside the advice and provisions of any set of ethical guidelines” (p. 16).

Kern et al. (2020) contrasted the rapid growth of PP with concern about exaggerated claims, inflated expectations, disillusionment, and possibly, unintentional harms. Issues of over-promising and under-delivering in programs with individuals, schools, the workplace, and communities were noted. To help the field mature, they advocated for systems informed PP, which would clarify epistemological, political, and ethical assumptions and commitments. The implications of such ideas for research and practice were examined.

van Zyl (2022) reviewed criticisms and concerns about PP, including the lack of a unifying metatheory that underpins the science as well as fundamental ideas for how positive psychological phenomena should be researched. Related criticisms were that PP has borrowed most of its theories from social, behavioral and cognitive psychology, thereby advancing few of its own unique perspectives. There is the problem of terminological confusion – e.g., using terms like flourishing or well-being interchangeably when operationalizations of them are notably different, or failing to recognize the possible overlap among putatively distinct topics, such as grit, conscientiousness, or diligence. Inconsistency in the factorial structures of various measurement models is a further problem. The fact that most PP has failed to produce significant or sustainable changes was noted, along with its cultural (Western) biases.

Taken together, I agree with most of the above assessments and further illustrate them below.

Problems in Positive Psychology Science: Flawed Conceptualization and Measurement of Well-Being

I bring my expertise in the study of psychological well-being to how some have approached this topic in PP. As noted above, I foresaw problems of measurement clutter at the dawning of PP ( Ryff, 2003 ). My prediction was prescient and needs attention, given growing interest in the measurement of well-being across scientific disciplines. A recent edited volume ( Lee et al., 2021 ) included scrutiny of multiple measurement approaches along with an animated exchange among contributors ( Ryff et al., 2021a , b ; VanderWeele et al., 2021a , b ) on the pluses and minuses of various assessment strategies. What came into high relief was concern about the proliferation of thin, poorly validated measures that are undermining quality science in the study of well-being.

Although not considered in the above volume, Seligman and his collaborators have contributed to this problem. I offer two examples of the promulgation of poorly constructed and poorly validated measures of well-being that are at odds with claims that PP rests on rigorous science. A first study ( Seligman et al., 2005 ) sought to validate five different interventions (gratitude visit, three good things, you at your best, using signature strengths in a new way, and identifying signature strengths). Internet-based samples were recruited through the authentic happiness website 2 ; most participants were white and highly educated.

All completed baseline assessments and five follow-up assessments over a 6-month period after completion of the intervention assignment. As a general observation, the findings were overstated – most comparisons between the control group and intervention groups were not significantly different across time, nor was there coherence in when such effects were evident. There was also insufficient attention given to pre–post comparisons, which are central for demonstrating intervention effectiveness. My primary focus, however, is on the outcomes assessed – specifically, the measure of happiness.

Described as “scientifically unwieldy” (p. 413) happiness was “dissolved” into three distinct components: “(a) positive emotion and pleasure (the pleasant life), (b) engagement (the engaged life), and (c) meaning (the meaningful life).” I note the redundancy in defining each component. The source for this tripartite formulation was Seligman’s (2002) trade book, Authentic Happiness , which was operationalized with the Steen Happiness Index (SHI), an unpublished 20-item inventory. No evidence was provided that the inventory measures three distinct components of well-being, nor is it likely such evidence could be assembled. Many items lack face validity – i.e., they pertained to other constructs, such as optimism, positive self-regard, frustration, energy, social connection, making good choices. Adding to the befuddlement was this statement: “We continue to use the word happiness, but only in the atheoretical sense of labeling the overall aim of the positive psychology endeavor and referring jointly to positive emotion, engagement, and meaning” (p. 413). All analyses focused the atheoretical construct of happiness – i.e., the component parts were nowhere to be seen.

Next came PERMA, defined by Seligman (2011) in Flourish , another popular book. Added to the prior components of positive emotion, engagement, and meaning, were now two additional components: relationships and accomplishment. Again, none were explicitly defined, nor was the pronouncement about what happiness entails theoretically grounded in anything , nor was it linked with the extensive prior empirical literatures on subjective and psychological well-being as well as research on positive emotions (exemplified by the diverse MIDUS measures). Such obliviousness to what the field had been investigating for decades made inevitable that there would be redundancy with already validated approaches and assessment tools. Such duplication became a certainty given how PERMA was operationalized – namely, by taking items from prior instruments ( Butler, 2011 ). These were transformed into the PERMA-Profiler ( Butler and Kern, 2016 ) via multiple studies (none clearly defined) involving a large samples recruited mostly through online systems; most participants were well-educated.

Missing from the reported analyses were key preliminaries required to develop quality assessments. For example, of central importance was whether the item pools for the five components were empirically distinct (i.e., did each item correlate more highly with its own scale than another scale?). In subsequent tests of convergent validity with other measures, a further problem, not addressed, was the degree of item-overlap (redundancy), given that all PERMA items came from prior instruments. Additional analyses correlated PERMA scales with 20+ measures. For many (e.g., organizational practices, political orientation, work performance, social capital, burnout, values, self-efficacy, perceived stress, and gratitude), the relevance of these analyses was unclear.

Subsequent work showed that PERMA and subjective well-being are indistinguishable ( Goodman et al., 2018 ). Seligman (2018) responded by calling for the need to “transcend psychometrics,” accompanied by an exegesis on the psychometrics of baseball pitching. Also offered was the observation that “SWB probably is the useful final common path of the elements of well-being” (p. 1) – presumably an effort to deflect evidence away from the clear empirical redundancy of PERMA with subjective well-being. Most incoherent was the following: “All of this is to say that a good theory of the elements of well-being helps to build well-being and that the psychometric findings that the elements correlate perfectly with overall well-being and that the elements correlate very well with each other is not very instructive when it comes to building well-being” (p. 2).

Other findings have shown questionable support for the putative five-factor structure of PERMA ( Watanabe et al., 2018 ; Ryan et al., 2019 ; Umucu et al., 2020 ). Data from German speaking countries Wammerl et al. (2019) supported for the five-factor model but also bifactor models ( Reise, 2012 ). My observation is that these latter methodological studies examining various multivariate structures are largely disconnected from substantive issues of what well-being is, or critical questions needed to advance the field. Those are not about dimensional structures of recycled items, but about the antecedents and consequents well-being, whether well-being is protective in the face of adversity, and whether interventions can promote well-being. On all of these questions, the above two efforts to articulate a meaningful, conceptually grounded theory of happiness that works empirically (i.e., the data support the claimed multifactorial structure) AND that is distinct from what was already in the field, have failed.

Problems in Positive Psychology Science: Samples and Contexts

A second major problem in PP research, already illustrated in preceding sections, is the overwhelming reliance on homogeneous, privileged samples . This lack of diversity pervades subfields of psychology that have tended to conduct their research with readily available college students or community volunteers. Others call this the WEIRD phenomenon ( Henrich et al., 2010 ) – doing research with western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. Minorities and socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals are missing in such inquiries, although population research makes clear that well-being and health are linked with sociodemographic factors ( Ryff et al., 2021c ). Our review, which included findings from MIDUS and other large studies, made clear that numerous aspects of well-being (hedonic and eudaimonic) do, in fact, differ by age, socioeconomic status, race, and gender. These differences also predict diverse health outcomes, assessed in terms of symptoms, chronic conditions, biological risk factors, and mortality. Thanks to the MIDJA (Midlife in Japan) study, we have illuminated cultural differences in many of these same topics ( Miyamoto and Ryff, 2021 ).

Closer to PP, I note that Frontiers in Psychology issued a recent call for papers to address with PPI (positive psychology interventions) work in non-WEIRD contexts ( van Zyl et al., 2021 ). Their bibliographic analyses showed that only about 2% of PPIs to date have been conducted with vulnerable groups, or in multi-cultural contexts. Clearly, a major need going forward is the importance of reducing the bias toward Western (often United States) samples of privileged people whose lives are clearly not representative of those from other cultural contexts as well as focusing on disadvantaged groups within such contexts.

The Commercialization of Positive Psychology: Needed Oversight

It is without question that PP has become a big business ( Horowitz, 2018 ). Happiness promotion involves billions of dollars spent on popular books, workshops, counseling/coaching, apps, websites, and social media platforms. PP has entered the corporate world through happiness consulting companies that claim to “bridge the gap between cutting-edge research in the field of positive psychology and best practices within corporate and community cultures around the globe” (p. 244). Horowitz wryly observes that few promoting happiness as the route to success consider the alternative – i.e., that success leads to happiness. There is also a marked failure to address the needs of lower echelon workers, such as better wages and benefits. Instead, motivational speakers cheer on executives, managers and workers with messages consonant with positive psychology and neoliberalism. Via apps and other gadgets happiness has become a “measurable, visible, improvable entity” (p. 246), thus replacing global commitments to combat stress, misery, and illness was with relaxation, happiness, and wellness.

I will not detail the dizzying array of websites promoting happiness, flourishing, and positive psychology; they are easily found online. Instead, I ask whether the for-profit cart has gotten seriously ahead of the scientific horse. This is a matter the scientific community cannot afford to ignore because it addresses whether the evidential basis behind the proliferation of products is truly there, or has been glossed over in the frenzy to sell. Prior to the commercialization of PP, scientists had shared understanding of what is required to demonstrate intervention effectiveness, as in randomized clinical trials, a staple of the National Institutes of Health. These guidelines exist to protect the public from products that are not credible. That the advertised promise of happiness promotion may be overstated is intimated by the “Earnings Disclaimer and Statement of Individual Responsibility” from the Flourishing Center 3 . It states that “the Flourishing Center, Inc. makes no guarantees that you will achieve results similar to ours or anyone else’s.” Additional text in this format follows: YOU FULLY AGREE AND UNDERSTAND THAT YOU AND YOU ALONE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR SUCCESS OR FAILURE. NO REFUNDS ARE AVAILABLE UNLESS STATED OTHERWISE ON A PROGRAM’S SALES PAGE.

Closer to the heart of PP, we need to ask what it means when character strengths are being sold, when virtue has become a commodity, and when PP scientists have shopping carts on their websites. There is also the matter of pricing. Horowitz (2018) describes some who are receiving $25,000 speaker fees – are these defensible in academia? Many believe we have a responsibility to share our knowledge and expertise, but not to do so in pursuit of personal profit. Scrutiny also is required regarding the content of educational programs. Here I focus on the flagship program that is presumably leading the field – namely, the Master’s in Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) at the University of Pennsylvania, described with no shortage of hubris, as Medici II ( Seligman, 2019 ). MAPP offers two semesters (nine courses) and a summer capstone project for a price of over $70,000. The curriculum is thinly described on the website, but if students are being taught that the theory, history, and meanings of PP (Introduction to Positive Psychology) began with Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) and other foundational documents ( Pawelski, 2016 ), they are not getting what they paid for. Further, if PERMA is being taught as a credible tool for measuring well-being (Research Methods and Evaluation), they are being miseducated. The theoretical, empirical, and experiential nature of positive interventions (Foundations of Positive Interventions) are not detailed on the website, but if Seligman et al. (2005) , reviewed above, is presented as credible evidence that PP interventions work, they are being misled.

Amidst these questions, it is important to underscore that high quality teaching materials for such programs do exist, such as the recent book on Positive Psychology Through the Life Span: An Existential Perspective ( Worth, 2022 ) and another on Positive Psychology in the Clinical Domains ( Ruini, 2017 ). Both offer thoughtful, historically comprehensive perspectives in their respective domains, which are essential features of quality education in PP.

The larger issue is the quality of what PP is marketing, not just in master’s programs, but also certificate programs and short-term seminars. Horowitz (2018) notes those who have expressed concerns about ethical oversight, calling for standardized nomenclature, formal training and certification guidelines, given uneven credentialing among those doing this work. Central concerns are whether the teaching in some programs is superficial and short-term practices lack scientific evidence of effectiveness. Stated otherwise, the commercialized end of PP appears to be fundamentally unregulated. “Despite all the research carried out in the field, what remains too often neglected are the who, why, and with what results ordinary consumers gain from all the money and time they spend on pursuing positive psychology by reading books, attending workshops, and carrying out recommended exercises.” (Horowitz, p. 274).

Looking Forward: Suggested New Directions for Positive Psychology

Societal ills as research imperatives.

Two major challenges of our era, ever-widening inequality and the world-wide pandemic, need scientific attention. Together, they constitute intersecting catastrophes ( Ryff, forthcoming ). Among those who were already disadvantaged, the pandemic has aggravated difficulties many were already facing plus added new challenges (unemployment, loss of healthcare, evictions due to unpaid rent, and food lines/hunger). MIDUS has been a prominent forum for investigating health inequalities, given its rich psychosocial, behavioral, and biological assessments ( Kirsch et al., 2019 ). Our findings have linked lower education and incomes to compromised well-being, greater psychological distress, poorer health behavior, higher stress exposures, elevated biological risk factors, greater morbidity and earlier mortality (see Text Footnote 1). A unique feature of the study has been recruitment of two national samples situated on either side of the Great Recession. Over the period covered by these two samples, educational attainment in the United States improved.

Despite such educational gains, the post-Recession refresher sample reported less household income (after adjusting for inflation), lower financial stability, worse health (multiple indicators) and lower well-being (multiple indicators) than the pre-Recession baseline sample. Further work compared the two samples on measures of negative and positive emotions, showing more compromised mental health in the later refresher sample, particularly among those with lower socioeconomic standing (measured with a composite of education, occupation, income, and wealth) ( Goldman et al., 2018 ). This worsening of mental health among disadvantaged Americans has occurred in the context of the opioid epidemic, growing alcoholism and increased death rates, including suicide, among middle-aged white persons of low SES standing ( Case and Deaton, 2015 ; Kolodny et al., 2015 ; Grant et al., 2017 ; Schuchat et al., 2017 ), a phenomenon known as deaths of despair ( Case and Deaton, 2020 ).

Positive psychologists need to engage with these societal changes. I note promising work already underway ( Waters et al., 2021 ). Although human strengths constitute important protective resources in the face of adversity, it is also the case that significant challenge can sometimes disable pre-existing strengths ( Shanahan et al., 2014 ). We found evidence of such disablement among those exposed to high levels of hardship in the Great Recession ( Kirsch and Ryff, 2016 ). Going forward, it is critical that studies of psychological strengths in the face of pandemic stress include assessment of key sociodemographic variables such as socioeconomic status in national samples. Vazquez et al. (2020) illustrated such work in a representative sample of Spanish adults. It is critical that future PP contributions to understanding impacts of the pandemic not perpetuate the longstanding prior focus on privileged, homogeneous samples.

Neglected Negatives Behind the Current Societal Problems

The founders of PP advocated that psychology should encompass more than psychopathology (depression and anxiety) and other forms of dysfunction. Hence, the call to elevate positive aspects of human functioning. I observe that psychology as a discipline has neglected something else: namely, a category of negative characteristics that may be implicated in the societal problems we now face. These include greed, indifference, and stupidity ( Ryff, 2017 , 2021a ), along with anger, which is not inherently positive or negative. I cover these topics below because they reveal a possibly pernicious blind spot in the larger vision of PP: namely, that the well-being and positive human functioning of some (especially those who are disadvantaged) may be compromised by the priorities and actions of others (especially those who are advantaged). To the extent that PP ministers primarily to the better educated and economically comfortable in conveying how to get the most out of life and achieve personal potential, PP may, itself, be part of the problem.

To illustrate, I note the widespread marketing of mindfulness meditation, including to CEOs as described by Horowitz (2018) in Happier? Purser (2019) offers more, observing that “mindfulness programs do not ask executives to examine how their managerial decisions and corporate policies have institutionalized greed, ill will, and delusion. Instead, the practice is being sold to executives as a way to de-stress, improve productivity and focus, and bounce back from working 80-h weeks. They may well be ‘meditating,’ but it works like taking an aspirin for a headache. Once the pain goes away, it is business as usual. Even if individuals become nicer people, the corporate agenda of maximizing profits does not change.”

Following from the above quote, we must consider that among the malevolent forces contributing to ever-widening inequality are behaviors of excessive self-interest orchestrated by those in positions of power. These problems are empirically evident when corporate profits soar, but worker paychecks lag ( Cohen, 2018 ), a problem described by economists as “monopsony power” – the ability of employers to suppress wages below the efficient or perfectly competitive level of compensation ( Kruger and Posner, 2018 ). Human history shows longstanding concern about problems of greed. The ancient Greeks saw greed and injustice as violating virtues of fairness and equality, and thereby, contributing to civic strife ( Balot, 2001 ). Dante’s Divine Comedy ( Dante’s, 1308/2006 ) placed sins of greed and gluttony, along with fraud and dishonesty, in his nine circles of hell. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations ( Smith’s, 1776/1981 ) made the case for self-interest and capitalism, but recognized the problem of greed, framed as the limitless appetites of the vain and insatiable.

Some within psychology are addressing what lies behind the worship of money and selfish wealth gratification, sometimes orchestrated through fraudulent tactics ( Nikelly, 2006 ). Motivational psychologists have studied “the dark side of the American Dream” ( Kasser and Ryan, 1993 ), showing that those motivated by primarily extrinsic factors (financial success) have lower well-being and adjustment compared to those motivated by less materialistic values. Social psychologists have shown that those with higher social class standing have increased sense entitlement and narcissism compared to those from lower class backgrounds; those in the upper-class are also more likely to behave unethically than those in the lower-class ( Piff et al., 2012 ; Piff, 2013 ). A large study of United States students examined what lies behind the widespread acceptance of inequality ( Mendelberg et al., 2017 ) by asking them to indicate their agreement or disagreement with the statement: “Wealthy people should pay a larger share of taxes than they do now.” The main finding was that students from affluent colleges (defined by family SES background) were more likely than those from public or less affluent colleges and universities to disagree with the statement – i.e., the most privileged were also the most strongly opposed to having the wealthy pay more taxes. In addition, such tendencies were most pronounced among those who were active in college fraternities and sororities.

The seamy underside of philanthropy, usually thought of as elites doing good in the world, is also under scrutiny ( Giridharadas, 2018 ). The Sackler family, well-known for their philanthropy in art museums around the world, offers a singular example. They owned Purdue Pharma, which created oxycontin, the highly addictive opioid painkiller that was aggressively marketed, thereby leading to massive over-prescribing. To date, more than 500,000 have died from overdose deaths. A 2021 HBO documentary, Crime of the Century , revealed the widespread individual actions behind this public health tragedy – within drug companies, political operatives, and government regulators, all of whom backed the reckless distribution of this deadly, but highly profitable, drug.

Some might argue that the above examples are isolated actions of those of extreme wealth and do not represent most of the rest of us. Stewart’s (2021) recent look at the new American aristocracy suggests otherwise. With a solid evidential basis, he shows that a much larger segment of the population is involved in warping our culture – i.e., how those laser-focused on career success are relying on an underpaid servant class to fuel their forward progress, while also making personal fitness a national obsession, even as large segments of the population lose healthcare and grow sicker. The privileged also segregate themselves in exclusive neighborhoods and compete relentlessly in getting their children into elite schools, which has contributed to ever-more extreme costs of higher education. Perhaps most troubling is the ethos of merit they have created to justify their advantages. Stewart powerfully distils that these people are not just around us, they are us.

Indifference

On this topic I have little to say other than to quote Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize winning author and Holocaust survivor: “I believe that a person who is indifferent to the suffering of others is complicit in the crime. And that I cannot allow, at least not for myself. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” In the present era, such indifference to the widespread suffering of others must be studied and documented. It is a character weakness that psychologists should try to understand – where does it come from? How is it enacted? What are its consequents?

Marmion’s (2018) tongue-in-cheek edited collection on the Psychology of Stupidity warrants consideration, given psychology’s long preoccupation with studying intelligence (of multiple types) and cognitive capacities (also of multiple types). The book offers a taxonomy of morons and links stupidity with established topics (cognitive bias, narcissism, and negative social networks). Wisely, Marion asserts: “No matter what form it takes, stupidity splatters us all. Rumor has it that we ourselves are the source of it. I am no exception” (p. ix). The kind of stupidity that most interests me and needs critical study is the swallowing of lies, or being duped by others. Lies are perpetrated by people in high or low places, but the essential question is why they have impact – why they are believed. Some in the clinical realm have examined such questions, focusing on those who lie with impunity, sometimes revealing clear sociopathy ( Peck, 1983 ; Stout, 2006 ). We need more science about these assaults on the truth and why they have become such pervasive part of contemporary life. My hypothesis is that all levels of human experience (personal ties, the workplace, communities, and societies) are damaged by the swallowing of lies, whether knowingly or unknowingly.

Often depicted as toxic, anger is sometimes legitimate as Aristotle understood. He reminded that at the right time, to the right degree, and for the right reasons, anger can be a powerful and needed response. Indeed, its neural underpinnings look more like positive affect than depression or anxiety ( Harmon-Jones et al., 2011 ). Anger may be uniquely justified vis-à-vis profoundly unequal life opportunities. Mishra’s Age of Anger ( Mishra’s, 2017 ), offers an astonishing integration of history, philosophy, literature, politics, economics, and cultural studies on the topic. He begins with this: “Individuals with very different pasts find themselves herded by capitalism and technology into a common present, where grossly unequal distributions of wealth and power have created humiliating new hierarchies. This proximity is rendered more claustrophobic by digital communications and the improved capacity for envious and resentful comparison” (p. 13). Drawing on Arendt, Mishra describes existential resentments that are poisoning civil society and fueling authoritarianism.

Most powerful is Mishra’s portrayal of the distinct philosophies of Rousseau and Voltaire, eighteenth century interpreters of life. Voltaire praised material prosperity and consumerism, boldly professing his love of conspicuous consumption. Rousseau reminded that the ancients spoke incessantly about morals and virtue whereas the French philosophes spoke only of business and money. He saw the new commercial society as acquiring features of class division, inequality, and callous elites whose members were corrupt, hypocritical and cruel. According to Mishra: “What makes Rousseau, and his self-described ‘history of the human heart,’ so astonishingly germane and eerily resonant is that, unlike his fellow eighteen-century writers, he described the quintessential inner experience of modernity for most people: the uprooted outsider in the commercial metropolis, aspiring for a place in it, and struggling with complex feelings of envy, fascination, revulsion, and rejection” (p. 90). Although Rousseau’s books were best sellers in his era, they are rarely invoked in current discourse. He castigated the Enlightenment philosophes for their self-love and self-interest, writing that amour propre ( McLendon, 2009 ) was a dangerous craving to secure recognition for self over others and an insatiable ambition to raise personal fortunes. These observations need serious examination vis-à-vis the thriving business of PP – to what extent are self-interest and personal ambition the central motives behind what is being sold?

Returning to empirical science, I note that MIDUS includes multidimensional assessments of anger, from over 20 publications have been generated (see Text Footnote 1). Anger expression has been linked to multiple indicators of health (sleep, cognitive function, inflammation, and allostatic load) as well as to race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, early life adversity, and cultural context.

What Nurtures Our Better Selves: The Arts and Humanities

To those who find my views to be overly negative, I end this section with more hopeful topics. I note that my career journey has reflected this dual focus on the forces that both undermine as well as nurture positive psychological functioning ( Ryff, 2022 ). As stated at the outset and multiple times long the way, I have always believed both are fundamental parts of the human experience. I begin this part with distant observations from Matthew Arnold, who in Culture and Anarchy ( Arnold, 1867/1993 ), emphasized that freedom should be employed in the service of higher ideals and further noted that these ideals are critically important during times of great peril, such as pandemics and wars. For him, culture was the study of perfection tied to the moral and social passion for doing good.

I have long believed that the arts (broadly defined) and humanities (history and philosophy) can help us discern how to do good and be well ( Ryff, 2019 ). Growing research is now linking diverse art (music, literature, poetry, art, film, and dance) to health ( Fancourt, 2017 ; Fancourt and Finn, 2019 ). To maintain a thread to current societal challenges, I here consider the arts in a somewhat different way – namely, whether they might be venues for nurturing compassion and insight about human suffering, which has become so widespread. Starting with contemporary film, multiple examples (e.g., The Florida Project, American Honey, Paterson, Parasite , and Nomadland ) reveal the lived experience of inequality, including descending into prostitution to feed a child, growing up with addicted parents, having dreams of self-realization stymied, experiencing homelessness, and working in physically-difficult, mind-numbing jobs. These works also portray the poetry in disadvantaged lives, including cleverness and resourcefulness vis-à-vis insensitive elites. The relevance of these domains for contemporary science, largely unstudied, is whether such inputs increase quotients of caring and compassion, and possibly challenge the complacency and indifference among those who are not suffering. Such questions elevate themes of social justice in ongoing research on well-being and health, while pointing to the arts as possible venues for informing and mobilizing individual and societal action.

The visual arts may also powerfully activate compassion vis-à-vis the pandemic or contemporary conflicts. The self-portrait of the Austrian artist, Egon Schiele, painted in 1912 and looking gravely ill before his death at age 28 from the Spanish flu, which also took his wife and their unborn child, is an example. Kandinsky painted Troubled in 1917, an abstract work of turbulence and trauma created during the Russian revolution when he was lived in Moscow and had a child die of malnourishment. A last visual example comes from over 1,000 watercolors painted from 1940 to 1942 and brought together in Charlotte Salomon: Life? Or Theater? ( Salomon, 2017 ). Born in 1917, this woman experienced multiple suicides in her family during her brief lifetime. She was a student at the Berlin Fine Arts Academy and in 1938 fled to southern France where an intense period of creativity unfolded. Next to a series of paintings depicting multiple faces with dramatic eyes and sad countenances, she wrote: “I realized that no heaven, no sun, no star could help me if I did not contribute by my own will. And then I realized that actually I still had no idea who I was. I was a corpse. And I expected life to love me now. I waited and came to the realization: what matters is not whether life loves us, but that we love life.” This insight about loving life had tragic salience: she was transported to Auschwitz in 1943 where, at age 26 and 5 months pregnant, she died.

Literature is another powerful realm for revealing travesties of the human condition. In A Tale of Two Cities ( Dickens, 1859/2004 ), Charles Dickens brought horrors of the French Revolution to the hearts and minds of his readers. We learned of the awful lives of those imprisoned within the Bastille, and after it was stormed, the executions by guillotine at the Place de La Concorde in Paris. The bloodbath of class retribution took more than 1,200 lives, including the French Queen and King. Here is how Dickens described the context: “…the frightful moral disorder born of unspeakable suffering, intolerable oppression, and heartless indifference” (p. 344). At the core of the book is Madame DeFarge, the tigress quietly knitting, observing, and overseeing the acts of vengeance. Near the end, we have insight into her fury, learning that her younger sister was the victim of shameless male aristocrats who carelessly exploited her and destroyed her life and family.

Two contemporary books of fiction address the current migration crisis. Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West ( Hamid’s, 2017 ) describes the awful realities of refugees whose lives have been stolen out from under them, only to be subjected to endless trauma as they try to find another home. Another recent work, Call Me Zebra ( Van der Vliet Oloomi, 2018 ), winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulkner award for fiction, tracks a family escaping from Iran by foot. The mother dies along the way, but the father and daughter eventually make their way to New York. The family is a group of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts who took refuge in books; their distilled philosophy: “Love nothing except literature, the only magnanimous host there is in this decaying world…. The depth of our knowledge, the precision of our tongues, and our capacity for detecting lies is unparalleled” (p. 8). Memorization is key; thus, sprinkled throughout the book are quotes from Nietzsche, Omar Khayyam, Dante, Goethe, Rilke, Kafka, Cervantes, Garcia Lorca, Dali, and Picasso – “These writers’ sentences deposited me at the edge of the unknown, far from the repulsive banality of reality others refer to as life” (p. 205).

I conclude with examples of satire vis-à-vis experiences of oppression and want. Jonathan Swift’s, A Modest Proposal , written in Swift’s (1729) , was put forth with the stated intent of preventing the children of the poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or the country, as well as to make them beneficial to the wider public. Swift began by describing female beggars in Dublin followed by their many children, all in rags, importuning every passing person for alms. He elaborated on the numerical scope of the problem and then observes that these young children cannot be fruitfully employed until they are around age twelve. Swift thus suggests that these children, if well nursed for their first year, be sent to England to provide “a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout” (p. 3). Calculations were included to show the financial benefits that would follow. This satirical hyperbole mocked the heartless attitudes toward the poor among the British as well as their policies toward the Irish in general. The book is widely recognized as one of the greatest examples of sustained irony in the history of the English language.

Moving to the present, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout ( Beatty’s, 2015 ) won the Man Booker Prize and was praised as “Swiftian satire of the highest order.” The book covers race relations in the fictional township of Dickens (meaningfully named), California, a place where residents are left to fend for themselves. With masterful humor, Beatty parodies everything – from contemporary psychology to “slapstick racism” to public transportation to depict the obstacles of being poor and black in racist America. Sister cities for Dickens are identified: Chernobyl, Juárez, and Kinshasa – all known for their pollution, poverty, and dysfunction. The satire and razor-sharp wit reveal what it means to exist in a culture saturated with negative stereotypes.

To summarize, I have emphasized the role of the arts in awakening the wider public to human suffering. Central questions for science and praxis are whether these inputs can effectively increase needed supplies of compassion and empathy, while perhaps also provoke awareness of complacency among those who are comfortable, if not indifferent. Such topics can and should be studied, including in experimental and educational contexts. The National Endowment for the Humanities regularly tracks who partakes of the arts and further shows variation therein by educational status. Such practices are fundamentally not different from studying health behaviors (smoking, drinking, and exercise). These parts of living, focused on the content of what people are taking in, need to part of large epidemiological studies, where they could be linked with other important topics such as reported levels of social responsibility and caring ( Ryff and Kim, 2020 ) as well as their views about who should be taxed at what levels ( Mendelberg et al., 2017 ).

What Nurtures Human Flourishing: The Natural Environment

Nature is powerfully present in the visual arts and music as well and has been throughout human history. I have recently covered these topics elsewhere, including nature’s role in nurturing the human spirit ( Ryff, 2021b ) and here highlight some of that work. My overall messages are that those interested in understanding influences that nurture good lives as well as a concern for our planet need to bring encounters with nature into their scientific studies, including interventions designed to promote diverse aspects of well-being and health.

Vibrant research is now investigating how nature contributes to human flourishing ( Capaldi et al., 2015 ; Mantler and Logan, 2015 ). These ideas take on greater salience as more of the world’s population live in nature-impoverished urban milieus. Multiple theories have been invoked to explain how we benefit from nature, such as the biophilia hypothesis from evolutionary thinking, which suggests that our human ancestors depended on connecting with nature to survive ( Kellert and Wilson, 1993 ), or stress-reduction theory ( Ulrich et al., 1991 ), which proposes that past exposures to unthreatening natural environments contributed to survival via stress-reducing physiological responses. Other perspectives consider roles of the natural environment in addressing existential anxieties, such as meaning in life, isolation, freedom, and death ( Yalom, 1980 ). Eco-existential positive psychology ( Passmore and Howell, 2014 ) thus describe how restorative experiences with nature might contribute to sense of identity, multiple forms of happiness, meaning, social connectedness, freedom, and awareness of one’s mortality.

Empirical evidence has linked encounters with nature to high hedonic well-being, both short and long-term, and to aspects of eudaimonic well-being ( Capaldi et al., 2015 ; Mantler and Logan, 2015 ; Triguero-Mas et al., 2015 ). Some inquiries have examined intervening mechanisms, such as increased physical activity, increased social contact, stress reduction and restoration of cognitive attention. The focus on green spaces underscores growing concerns about urbanization, loss of biodiversity, and environmental degradation. Increasingly dire consequences of climate change (droughts, wildfires, and floods) have also led to research on pro-nature behaviors that support conservation of nature and biodiversity. Richardson et al. (2020) conducted an innovative population survey in the United Kingdom examining links between pro-nature actions with time spent in nature as well as knowledge of and concerns about nature.

Nature as a source of inspiration and uplift is pervasively present in poetry, literature, music, art, history, and philosophy. An example is the life of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), beautifully written about in The Invention of Nature ( Wulf, 2016 ). Primarily a scientist, naturalist, and explorer (of South America and Siberia), Humboldt influenced many of the great thinkers of his day, including Jefferson, Darwin, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, and Goethe. Humboldt was ahead of his time in thinking about the degradation and exploitation of nature, warning that humankind had the power to destroy the natural environment, the consequences of which would be catastrophic. He wanted to excite a ‘love of nature’ and thereby, revolutionized how the natural world was seen. He believed that nature speaks to humanity in a voice “familiar to our soul” (p. 61), thereby aligning himself with the Romantic poets of his time who believed nature could only be understood by turning inward.

The educator Mark Edmundson uses great literature and poetry to nurture well-being, including the ideals needed by the human soul such as courage, contemplation, and compassion ( Edmundson, 2015 ). In Why Read ( Edmundson, 2004 ). Edmundson elaborates what a liberal, humanistic education can contribute to personal becoming. Apropos of Humboldt and his contemporaries, Edmondson examined Wordsworth’s famous poem, “Lines Composed a Few Miles from Tintern Abbey” written in 1798. Wordsworth’s life had become flat – “he lived in a din-filled city, among unfeeling people, and sensed that he is becoming one of them …there is a dull ache settling in his spirit” (p. 57). Returning to a scene from his childhood, he remembered himself as a young boy, free and reveling in nature. The return to nature, which is the heart of the poem, reminds him of its role in nurturing his own vitality. “Wordsworth’s poem enjoins us to feel that it (the answer to one’s despondency) lies somewhere within our reach – we are creatures who have the capacity to make ourselves sick, but also the power to heal ourselves” (p. 49).

Wordsworth’s poetry served the same vital function in the life of John Stuart Mill (1893/1989) , who in early adulthood realized something deeply troubling – that he lacked the happiness central to the utilitarian philosophy in which he was immersed. Reflecting on his life, Mill described an early educational experience that was exceptional, but profoundly deficient. His father began teaching him Greek and Latin at a young age and then expanded the pedagogy to fields of philosophy, science, and mathematics. However, his father was deeply opposed to anything connected to sentiment or emotion. To escape the logic machine he had become, Mill began a quest to feel, and it was the poetry of Wordsworth, mostly about nature, that ministered deeply to the longings in his soul. He credited it for helping him recover from the crisis in his mental history.

To summarize, amidst the many interventions under study in PP, I lobby for a focus on encounters with nature, which some are already investigating. The preceding examples give us reason to believe that human lives may be enriched by such experiences. These can occur by being in nature as well as from reading about nature in poetry and literature, taking it in through film, or listening to music inspired by nature.

Concluding Thoughts

My observations about what PP has accomplished over the last two decades are clearly mixed. Some may see the criticism as unfounded, if not mean-spirited, while others may view the input as long overdue straight talk about problems with an initiative intended to be transformational. I have long believed that self-criticism is central to making progress, whether in our individual lives, or our collective pursuits. My hope is thus that the field of PP will grow and flourish going forward, but also come to grips with its limitations. How might this happen?

One way is to pay attention to the problem of overreach in what PP claims to have accomplished. This will require greater scrutiny of the science touted as the evidential basis that PP works. Peer review is all we have to monitor the quality of the work that we do, but alas, it is an imperfect system, such that seriously flawed work sometimes gets published, even in high visibility outlets. There is the related problem of PP taking credit for more than it can credibly call its own achievements – i.e., the impact of PP ( Rusk and Waters, 2013 ) has been overstated. As conveyed at the outset, extensive science on positive human functioning was happening well before PP declared its visionary new path. The upshot is that quantitative summaries of positive science unavoidably include many products that have nothing to do with the field of PP. Work from MIDUS is but one example of such wide-ranging science, much published in top-tier journals, showing protective benefits of psychological strengths. These studies were not created or nurtured by PP, and therefore, do not constitute evidence of its impact. Such distortion diminishes the stature of PP.

Relatedly there is need to recognize the insularity of PP, much seeming United States-centric, particularly in leadership. By creating its own professional society and journal, PP unfortunately removed itself from the wider discipline of psychology and its subfields, each with their own organizations and journals. While new groups can nurture comradery and a sense of identity, they can also create distance from related areas of inquiry. Most problematic, they can lead to insider peer reviewing that likely lowers rather than elevates the quality of the work generated.

On the matter of the commercialization of PP, I am perhaps an outlier in seeing this as a significant problem. However, it is construed, those who care about the long-term future of PP need to grapple with how to prevent the pursuit of profit from becoming a force that could ultimately take the enterprise down – on grounds that it is not scientifically substantiated, nor is it properly regulated, or doing lasting good, or is even creating harm. Without proper oversight, business pursuits could become the antithesis of the original promise and purpose of PP – to advance optimal human functioning.

Most of my essay has not been about these troublesome matters. Rather, I have tried to underscore the widespread consensus, from within PP and beyond, that thoughtful formulations are needed going forward, which put positives and negative together – i.e., research and practice that integrates human strengths and vulnerabilities. Parenthetically, one benefit of this shift may be that the adjective “positive” is less relentlessly present in titles of articles, books, and journals. As many have observed, greater attention must be given to diversity – i.e., how the wide array of topics being studied vary by numerous dimensions (e.g., age, gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability status, sexual orientation, and cultural context). It is also critical that societal relevance be a priority in the future science and practice that lies ahead. So doing demands attending to contemporary problems, and how they are negotiated in diverse life contexts. Our societal ills further call for study of negatives that have historically been neglected (greed, indifference, stupidity, and anger). Nonetheless, amidst the contemporary turbulence is the promise of the arts and of nature to help us be better – in seeing and caring about the suffering of others as well as in inspiring us to make the most of the lives we have been given and do so with commitment that encompasses families, schools, the workplace, communities, and the planet.

Data Availability Statement

Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. This data can be found here: www.midus.wisc.edu .

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

National Institute on Aging Grants (P01-AG020166; U19-AG051426).

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

• ^ www.midus.wisc.edu
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Keywords : positive, negative, commercialization, inequality, greed, indifference, arts, nature

Citation: Ryff CD (2022) Positive Psychology: Looking Back and Looking Forward. Front. Psychol. 13:840062. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.840062

Received: 20 December 2021; Accepted: 21 February 2022; Published: 17 March 2022.

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Copyright © 2022 Ryff. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Carol D. Ryff, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Selected Scholarly Articles

Theoretical Foundations of Positive Psychology:

Positive Psychology: An Introduction , Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000

APA President’s Address, Seligman, 1998

American Psychologist: Special Issue on Positive Psychology, 2000

Positive Psychology FAQs , Seligman & Pawelski, 2003

A Balanced Psychology and a Full Life, Seligman , Parks, & Steen, 2004

What (and Why) is Positive Psychology?, Gable and Haidt, 2005

Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network: Longitudinal Analysis over 20 Years in the Framingham Heart Study , Fowler & Christakis, 2008

Happiness Can Spread Among People Like a Contagion, Study Indicates , Washington Post, 2008

Non Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny , Robert Wright, 2001

Ordinary Magic: Resilience Processes in Development , Masten, 2001

The Better Angels of Our Nature , Pinker 2011

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress , Pinker, 2018

PERMA and the Building Blocks of Well-Being, Seligman, 2018

Positive Psychology: A Personal History , Seligman, 2019

Agency in Greco Roman Philosophy , Seligman, 2020

Agency in Ancient China , Zhao, Seligman et al., 2021

Psychological History and Predicting the Future , Seligman, 2022

Well-Being Research:

Beyond Money , Diener and Seligman, 2004

Subjective Well-Being: Three Decades of Progress , Diener at al., 1999

Subjective Well-Being: The Science of Happiness and a Proposal for a National Index , Diener, 2000

Using Well Being for Public Policy: Theory, Measurement, and Recommendations , Adler and Seligman, 2016

If, Why, and When Subjective Well-Being Influences Health, and Future Needed Research, Diener, Pressman, and Delgadillo-Chase, 2017

Social Media and Well-Being Research :

Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression , Hunt, Marx, Lipson, & Young, 2018

Detecting Depression and Mental Illness on Social Media: An Integrative Review , Guntuku et al., 2017

Predicting Individual Well-Being Through the Language of Social Media , Schwartz et al., 2016

Gaining Insights from Social Media Language: Methodologies and Challenges , Kern et al., 2016

Psychological Language on Twitter Predicts County-Level Heart Disease Mortality , Eichstaedt et al., 2015

Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach , Schwartz et al., 2013

Optimism Research :

Association between Predeployment Optimism and Onset of Postdeployment Pain in US Army Soldiers, Hassett et al, 2019

Optimism and Physical Health: A Meta-analytic Review , Rasmussen, Scheier & Greenhouse, 2009

Pessimistic Explanatory Style Is a Risk Factor for Physical Illness: A Thirty-Five-Year Longitudinal Study , Peterson & Seligman, 1988

Explanatory Style Change During Cognitive Therapy for Unipolar Depression, Seligman et al., 1988

Explanatory Style as a Predictor of Productivity and Quitting Among Life Insurance Sales Agents , Seligman and Schulman, 1986

Explanatory Style as a Mechanism of Disappointing Athletic Performance , Seligman et al., 1990

Explanatory Style and Academic Performance Among University Freshmen , Peterson & Barrett, 1987

Attributional Style in Depression: A Meta-Analytic Review , Sweeney, Anderson & Bailey, 1986

Learned Helplessness in Children: A Longitudinal Study of Depression, Achievement, and Explanatory Style, Nolen-Hoeksema, Girgus, & Seligman, 1986

Causal Explanations as a Risk Factor for Depression: Theory and Evidence, Peterson & Seligman, 1984

Learned helplessness in Humans: Critique and Reformulation, Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978

Learned Helplessness: Theory and Evidence ,  Maier & Seligman, 1976

Learned Helplessness , Seligman, 1972

Positive Psychology Interventions Research:

Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions , Seligman, Steen, Park, & Peterson, 2005

Pursuing Happiness in Everyday Life: The Characteristics and Behaviors of Online Happiness Seekers , Parks et al., 2012

Disseminating Self-Help: Positive Psychology Exercises in an Online Trial , Schueller & Parks, 2012

Building Resilience , Harvard Business Review, Seligman, 2011

Character Strengths Research :

Christopher M. Peterson (Memoriam), Park & Seligman, 2013

Character Strengths Predict Subjective Well-Being During Adolescence, Gillham et al., 2011

Character Strengths: Research and Practice , Park & Peterson, 2009 

Strengths of Character, Orientations to Happiness, and Life Satisfaction , Peterson et al., 2007

Character Strengths in Fifty-Four Nations and the Fifty US States , Park, Peterson, & Seligman, 2006

Shared Virtue: The Convergence of Valued Human Strengths Across Culture and History, Dahlsgaard, Peterson, & Seligman, 2005

Strengths of Character and Well-Being , Park, Peterson & Seligman, 2004

Chris Peterson's Unfinished Masterwork: The Real Mental Illnesses , Seligman, 2013

Research on the VIA Institute Website

Positive Emotions Research :

Positive Emotions Broaden and Build , Fredrickson, 2013

Counting Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life , Emmons & McCullough, 2003

The Grateful Disposition: A Conceptual and Empirical Topography , McCullough & Emmons, 2002

The Psychology of Forgiveness , McCullough & vanOyen Witvliet, 2001

Interpersonal Forgiving in Close Relationships: II. Theoretical Elaboration and Measurement , McCullough et al., 1998

Mindfulness Training Modifies Subsystems of Attention , Jha, Krompinger & Baime, 2007

Witnessing Excellence in Action: The ‘Other-Praising’ Emotions of Elevation, Gratitude, and Admiration , Algoe & Haidt, 2009

The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience , Yaden, Haidt, Hood, Vago, and Newberg, 2017

A Four-Factor Model of Perceived Control: Avoiding, Coping, Obtaining, and Savoring , Bryant, 1989

Engagement Research :

Flow Theory and Research , Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2009

Relationships Research :

What Do You Do When Things Go Right? The Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Benefits of Sharing Positive Events , Gable et al., 2004 

Meaning Research :

On the Meaning of Work: A Theoretical Integration and Review , Rosso, Dekas & Wrzesniewski, 2010 

Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work , Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001

Jobs, Careers, and Callings: People’s Relations to Their Work , Wrzesniewski et al., 1997

The Development of Purpose During Adolescence , Damon, Menon & Bronk, 2003

Achievement Research :

The Science and Practice of Self-Control , Duckworth & Seligman, 2017

Self-Control and Grit: Related but Separable Determinants of Success , Duckworth & Gross, 2014

Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals , Duckworth et al., 2007 

Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents , Duckworth & Seligman, 2005

The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance , Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Romer, 1993 

A Social-Cognitive Approach to Motivation and Personality , Dweck & Leggett, 1988

School-Based Resilience Interventions Research :

Positive Education  Seligman & Adler 2019

Positive Education, Seligman & Adler, 2018

Positive Education: Positive Psychology and Classroom Interventions , Seligman, Ernst, Gillham, Reivich, & Linkins, 2009

Group Prevention of Depression and Anxiety Symptoms , Seligman, Schulman, & Tryon, 2007

The Prevention of Depression and Anxiety , Seligman, Schulman, DeRubeis, & Hollon, 1999

Teaching Well-Being increases Academic Performance: Evidence from Bhutan , Mexico, and Peru, Adler, 2016

Physical Health Following a Cognitive-Behavioral Intervention , Buchanan, Gardenswartz, & Seligman, 1999

School-Based Prevention of Depressive Symptoms: A Randomized Controlled Study of the Effectiveness and Specificity of the Penn Resilience Program, Gillham et al., 2007

Prevention of Depressive Symptoms in School Children: Two Year Follow-Up , Gillham, Reivich, Jaycox, & Seligman, 1995

Prevention of Depressive Symptoms in School Children, Jaycox, Reivich, Gillham, & Seligman, 1994

A Meta-Analytic Review of the Penn Resiliency Program's Effect on Depressive Symptoms , Brunwasser, Gillham, & Kim, 2009

Primal World Beliefs:

Primal World Beliefs , Clifton et al., 2019

Parents Think, Incorrectly, that Teaching their Children the World is a Bad Place is Best for Them , Clifton & Meindl, 2021

Well-Being and the Arts:

Art Museums as Institutions for Human Flourishing , Cotter and Pawelski, 2021

Imagination Research :

Creativity and Aging: What We Can Make with What We Have Left , Seligman, Forgeard, & Kaufman, 2017

Openness/Intellect: The Core of the Creative Personality , Oleynick et al., 2017

How Social-Emotional Imagination Facilitates Deep Learning and Creativity in the Classroom ,, Gotlieb, Jahner, Immordino-Yang, & Kaufman, 2017

Cultivating the Social-Emotional Imagination in Gifted Education: Insights from Educational Neuroscience , Gotlieb, Hyde, Immordino-Yang, & Kaufman, 2017

Post-Traumatic Growth Research :

Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence , Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004

Doors Opening: A Mechanism for Growth After Adversity, Roepke & Seligman, 2015

Positive Psychology and Therapy Research:

Cognitive Therapy and Research Special Issue: Positive Emotions and Cognitions in Clinical Psychology , June 2017

Positive Psychology in Clinical Practice , Duckworth, Steen, & Seligman, 2005

Positive Psychotherapy , Seligman, Rashid, & Parks, 2006

Positive Health Research : 

Positive Health , Seligman, 2008

Positive Health and Health Assets: Re-analysis of Longitudinal Datasets , Seligman et al., 2013

The Person-Event Data Environment: Leveraging Big Data for Studies of Psychological Strengths in Soldiers. Vie, Griffith, Scheier, Lester & Seligman, 2013

The U.S. Army Person-Event Data Environment: A Military-Civilian Big Data Enterprise, Vie et al., 2015

Initial Validation of the U.S. Army Global Assessment Tool , Vie, Scheier, Lester, & Seligman, 2016

Protective Effects of Psychological Strengths Against Psychiatric Disorders Among Soldiers, Shrestha et al., 2018

Association Between Predeployment Optimism and Onset of Postdeployment Pain in US Army Soldiers, Hassett et al., 2019

PTSD: Catastrophizing in Combat as Risk and Protection, Seligman et al., 2019

Comparison of Cardiovascular Health Between US Army and Civilians. Shrestha et al., 2019

Optimism and Risk of Incident Hypertension: A Target for Primordial Prevention , Kubzansky et al., 2020

Development of Character Strengths Across the Deployment Cycle Among U.S. Army Soldiers , Chopik et al., 2020

Happy Soldiers are Highest Performers , Lester et al., 2021

Prospective Psychology:

We Aren't Built to Live in the Moment , Seligman & Tierney, 2017

Navigating into the Future or Driven by the Past , Seligman, Railton, Baumeister, & Sripada, 2013

Depression and Prospection , Roepke & Seligman, 2016

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Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: The Bridge Between Mind and Brain

Filippo cieri.

1 Department of Neurology, Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, Las Vegas, NV, United States

Roberto Esposito

2 Department of Radiology, Azienda Ospedaliera Ospedali Riuniti Marche Nord, Pesaro, Italy

In 1895 in the Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud tried to integrate psychology and neurology in order to develop a neuroscientific psychology. Since 1880, Freud made no distinction between psychology and physiology. His papers from the end of the 1880s to 1890 were very clear on this scientific overlap: as with many of his contemporaries, Freud thought about psychology essentially as the physiology of the brain. Years later he had to surrender, realizing a technological delay, not capable of pursuing its ambitious aim, and until that moment psychoanalysis would have to use its more suitable clinical method. Also, he seemed skeptical about phrenology drift, typical of that time, in which any psychological function needed to be located in its neuroanatomical area. He could not see the progresses of neuroscience and its fruitful dialogue with psychoanalysis, which occurred also thanks to the improvements in the field of neuroimaging, which has made possible a remarkable advance in the knowledge of the mind-brain system and a better observation of the psychoanalytical theories. After years of investigations, deriving from research and clinical work of the last century, the discovery of neural networks, together with the free energy principle, we are observing under a new light psychodynamic neuroscience in its exploration of the mind-brain system. In this manuscript, we summarize the important developments of psychodynamic neuroscience, with particular regard to the free energy principle, the resting state networks, especially the Default Mode Network in its link with the Self, emphasizing our view of a bridge between psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Finally, we suggest a discussion by approaching the concept of Alpha Function, proposed by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, continuing the association with neuroscience.

The real difference lies rather in the fact that the kind and direction of the physical vectors in Aristotelian dynamics are completely determined in advance by the nature of the object concerned. In modern physics, on the contrary, the existence of a physical vector always depends upon the mutual relations of several physical facts, especially upon the relation of the object to its environment . Levin (1935) , p. 35.

Introduction

Cognitive neuroscience has made remarkable advances also thanks to the progresses in neuroimaging techniques, such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). One of the most important aims of this discipline is the understanding of human brain function. The dialogue between cognitive neurosciences and psychoanalysis is not new, but recently it has become more prolific in the exploration of the relationship between mind and brain, already wished for by Freud more than a century ago and, among others, by the Nobel Prize winner Kandel (1999) , when he asserts that psychoanalysis still represents the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind and can help neurobiologists to plan their work.

To date neurosciences do not provide a consistent, consensual and comprehensive theory about the human brain-mind function, however it is a paramount tool in order to investigate structures and functions about mind-brain in its physiological and pathological development. Psychoanalysis flourished more than a century ago, but despite the first enthusiasm derived from initial fruitful dialogue with neuroscience, we are rather far from understanding the biological basis for all psychoanalytic theoretical frameworks, and this should not be the common goal of psychoanalysts or neuroscientists in their daily work. Although neuroscience and psychoanalysis share the same scientific object of interest, meant as a knowledge in-depth analysis about the functioning of mind-brain system, they use different tools of investigation, different methods and different languages, which requires a separation and distinction, albeit within an ongoing and steady dialogue between the two fields.

Since the birth of psychoanalysis, Freud has attempted to maintain a focus on the neurophysiological phenomena underlying the psychic processes observed. He had to abdicate the pursuit of his dream, first because the technologies available at his time were not sufficiently advanced to seek his neuroscientific ambition and on the other side because of his skepticism about the widespread phrenologic view and the disposition to fit any mental process in its specific brain region. This typical localizationist view was back in vogue after the important Paul Broca’s discoveries in 1861, about the areas of language and his homonymous aphasia, determined by the lesion of an area that still maintains today Broca’s name. Interest was renewed but not completely new, given that since the beginning of the 19th century Franz Joseph Gall, pioneer in the study of the cerebral cortex, focused his neuroanatomical investigation on the attribution of specific psychic functions to specific brain structures. In the first phrenology view Gall believed that man’s moral and intellectual faculties were innate and strictly connected to the organization of the brain. He also proposed a localizationism view of the brain where single regions were responsible for a given mental faculty, and he finally suggested that the development of mental faculties in an individual would lead to a growth or larger development in the sub-region responsible for them.

The phrenology with Gall and the Broca’s localizationism were both a kind of view, an attitude which never satisfied Freud, skeptical about the possibility of embedding every single mental function in its own presumed brain region, frustrated by a static and essentially mechanistic approach, immediately aware about the simplistic, reductive and reductionist imprint of the method. On the contrary he was starting to develop an increasingly dynamic vision of mind and brain.

The old reduction of mental functions to brain structures still finds today numerous supporters and attempts. As Tretter and Löffler-Stastka (2018) pointed out, this attempt encompasses a lot of well-known epistemological, methodological, and conceptual inconsistencies ( Block, 1980 ; Chalmers, 1996 ; Craver, 2007 ).

After his experience at the Salpêtriere Hospital in Paris, Freud began to think about large brain networks with a variety of functions, with mutual activation and inhibition properties. An inference that anticipated the concept of neural networks , as large brain areas able to activate and inhibit, depending on the activity performed. During the same period, he matured the idea that in the brain there were no isolated centers, or autonomous functions, but instead systems responsible for complex cognitive purposes, composed by several regions, able to be modified by experience.

This dialectic reflects modern day distinctions between functional segregation (or specialization) and integration that have dominated thinking about modern brain imaging. In other words, does one understand distributed processing in terms of specialized regions or the integration and coordination of neuronal activity across brain hierarchies?

Freud’s concept of large brain networks – against the localizationism and reductionist view – showed to anticipate a road that would lead to the concept of complex functional systems, developed more than 50 years later by Lurija (1976) , founder of neuropsychology, whose central aim was to reject the idea of reductionism in psychology.

In his Project ( Freud, 1895/1963 , 1895/1966 ), Freud tried to explain at various levels the physiological basis of memory, hypothesizing that one of the neurophysiological prerequisites necessary for this function was a system of barriers, which he named “contact-barrier.” He used this term to describe the neurophysiological entity which 11 years later, Charles Scott Sherrington named synapses.

The anticipation of wide and widespread systems dedicated to the realization of cognitive purposes, which today we know as neural networks, becomes impressive within the parallelism between the functions of the ego and specific neural networks, particularly Default Mode Network (DMN), one of the most studied brain networks by the neuroscientific community. Raichle and colleagues coined the term “Default Mode” in 2001 ( Raichle et al., 2001 ); they used PET and described a specific brain state of “rest,” a concept intended to quickly become fundamental in the study of the brain. DMN’s functions seem to play the same mediation function attributed by Freud to the ego ( Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010 ). In particular, within the DMN, specific regions seem to support the monitoring phases regarding psychological state ( Phan et al., 2002 ), considered areas in which the internal stimuli (bodily and proprioceptive sensations) and inputs from the external environment (e.g., visual and auditory) converge for their integration and development. We will discuss this specific aspect further later.

In the last 10 years, the free energy principle has become the royal road in the dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis, the bridge between mind and brain. It is linked to the work of Friston and colleagues ( Friston et al., 2006 ; Friston, 2010 ) and it describes the function of the mind-brain system as any other adaptive biological system, connecting psychological sciences, neurosciences and related fields in perfect confluence and synergy with psychoanalytic concepts ( Hopkins, 2012 ). This approach shows many similarities with typical psychoanalytical concepts as the secondary principle of mental functioning ( Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010 ), unconsciousness and motivation ( Hopkins, 2012 ), complexity of emotions in attachment ( Hopkins, 2015 ), wish fulfillment within dreaming ( Hopkins, 2016 ), quantitative approach for a formulation of conflict ( Hopkins, 2016 ), and the energic theory within psychoanalysis ( Connolly, 2016 ).

The free energy principle considers the brain as a hierarchical, inferential, Helmholtzian machine, where large-scale intrinsic networks occupy supraordinate levels of hierarchical brain systems that try to optimize their representation of the sensorium, minimizing the amount of free energy ( Friston et al., 2006 ). It represents a process formally close to Freudian metapsychology, in which Freud distinguished two ways of mental functioning: the primary and the secondary processes, corresponding to the pleasure and reality principle, respectively. According to the free energy principle the Bayesian brain uses the Bayesian probability approach to formulate perception as a constructive process based on internal or generative models ( Knill and Pouget, 2004 ; Friston et al., 2006 ). The brain, with its personal model of the world ( von Helmholtz, 1962 ; Gregory, 1980 ), tries to optimize this model using new information coming from sensory inputs ( Ballard et al., 1983 ; Friston, 2005 ). These Bayesian formulations represent a fundamental advance over earlier formulations of optimization in the brain that inherit from behaviorism (e.g., reinforcement learning and optimal control) by explicitly considering (Bayesian) beliefs. In other words, the imperatives for neuronal message passing are framed in terms of belief updating. In this setting, the free energy functional that underwrites active inference under the FEP is actually a functional (i.e. function of a function) of probabilistic beliefs. This is important because it furnishes a calculus of beliefs that is much easier to relate to psychoanalytic constructs (relative to cost or value functions used in behaviorism).

At Freud’s time, one of the most important mental disorders was hysteria, quite widespread among the population at the end of the 1800s. Within this syndrome, neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts – mostly under the debate of the schools of Salpetriêre and Nancy and their leaders Charcot and Bernheim, respectively – were especially interested about the link between mind and body. Among these scholars there was a young Freud as well, who tended to attribute a central role to the body in its connection to the mind. In his Studies on Hysteria ( Freud, 1895/1963 , 1895/1966 ), he observed somatic symptoms associated with mental disorders, underlying a close psychosomatic connection, after which he elaborated the concept of drive (Instincts and their Vicissitudes, Freud, 1915 ). With his second topical, in the ego and the id, the psychoanalytic meaning of the body assumes even greater centrality: “the ego is first and foremost bodily entity” ( Freud, 1923 ). Freud thought of the ego as an entity derived from bodily sensations, especially from the sensations coming from the surface of the body. Over the years and deepening of clinical practice, psychoanalysis has begun to configure the link between body and mind not only as fundamental in structuring the ego and with a key role in the relationship with reality, but also with a vision of greater continuity and dynamic fluidity between organic and psychic dimensions, in which the free energy principle represents a useful bridge for the comprehension and communication between neuroscience and psychoanalysis.

Bion (1959) elaborated Freud’s writing “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” ( Freud, 1911 ), particularly focusing his observation on the body and sensory organs as instruments of access to the perception of reality. Bion considered thought and emotion as inseparable components, underlying the central role of the body as the start for the thought phenomena. He focused his observation on sense organs as instruments of access to the perception of reality, explaining how thought is a direct evolution of body sensations. Bion reversed the traditional philosophical conception in which mind produces thoughts: in his theory, there are first thoughts, and mind arises to think them. In other words, mind-body unit is constituted by the body that is in contact with external reality, then there are internal and external sensations, their perception and elaboration that generate emotions, moods and finally thoughts that we eventually perceive as products of the mind ( Ciocca, 2015 ). All this process is supported by α-function. The capacity to transform the sense impressions related to an emotional experience, into α-elements is described as continuous in both sleeping and waking states ( Mellor, 2018 ).

Bion builds a unique model of mind functioning, where the mind faces up continuously to new experiences that cause an emotional impact (positive or negative), and he proposes a general model of functioning of mind in which mental growth depends on the ability of the mind to digest new experiences 1 .

In our manuscript, we try to move through development of a systemic view of the mind, taking in considerations of psychoanalytic models from Freud to Bion, their connections with modern neuroscience and neural networks, underlying the role of the Free Energy Principle as a bridge between mind and brain. We try to assume a methodological parallelism as it was seen for instance by the founder of General Systems Theory, Ludwig von Bertalanffy ( von Bertalanffy, 1967 ), in which a systemic non-reductive multi-level approach might offer better options for integration ( Miller, 1978 ; Tretter and Löffler-Stastka, 2018 ).

Psychoanalysis and Free Energy Principle

Despite the extraordinary progresses made by psychology and cognitive neurosciences – among others the deepening of memory functioning and neuroimaging methods – there are few global theories regarding the operating of mind-brain, and no generalized or complete agreement in the neuroscientific community, not even with regard to the meaning of consciousness and unconscious. The proposal of the free energy principle (FEP henceforth) for adaptive systems provides a unified theory of action, perception, and learning ( Friston, 2009 ).

According to Friston (2009) , the FEP argues that any self-organizing system in nonequilibrium steady-state with its environment must minimize its free energy, describing how adaptive systems (as biological organisms) resist a natural tendency to disorder ( Ashby, 1947 ; Kauffman, 1993 ; Friston, 2009 ). The defining characteristic of biological systems is their attempt to maintain a state of balance toward the constant changes in the environment ( Ashby, 1947 ; Kauffman, 1993 ), as any homeostatic principle. In the allostatic principle proposed by Sterling and Eyer in 1988, also called a major revision ( McEwen, 2004 ), replacement ( Sterling, 2004 ) of the classical theory of homeostasis, the brain is identified as the central mediator of ongoing system-wide physiological adjustment to environmental challenge ( Sterling and Eyer, 1988 ; McEwen, 2007 ). Both homeostasis and allostasis are endogenous systems engaged in maintaining an internal balance of the organism, coping with the continuous internal and external changes.

FEP rests on the idea that all biological systems instantiate a hierarchical generative model of the world that implicitly minimizes its sensory entropy by minimizing the level of its free energy ( Ramstead et al., 2018 ). In other words, self-organizing systems, including human being as an example of biological organism, must resist the distributed effects of a natural increase in entropy for their existence, development, and evolution by trying to minimize free energy.

According to Friston et al. (2015a) , these self-organizing systems must have a specific identifiable boundary condition: the so-called Markov blanket, which acts as a protective screen, described by Friston et al. (2015a) as a veil through which we are able to recognize and distinguish an internal side from an external environment of an organism, inferring the external or internal causes of sensations, perceptions, or changes. The Markov blanket is not only a protective screen thanks to which we can infer the external causes of the sensorium, it is also operates as a “projection screen” onto which sensory impressions are cast – that are actively solicited by habitual mechanisms (i.e., reflexes mediated by active states), which are used to make sense of the world ( Friston et al., 2015a ). As any other screen, the Markov blanket allows the separation of an internal dimension from an external environment of an organism, as the case of the cell, which typically represents an immediate and primordial example of a living system with a Markov blanket ( Kirchhoff et al., 2018 ; Mellor, 2018 ). In this view, the boundaries of a neuron are defined by the external cell membrane, called plasmalemma , which is the Markov blanket of the neuron, ensuring separation and identification between an external environment and an internal state, protecting the cell from the external environment, guaranteeing its functions also through this distinction of environments and different electrical charges.

As Connolly (2018) points out, the Freudian energic theory has been widely critiqued by some authors, such as the lack of empirical evidence from neuroscience of the energic processes as described in “The Project” ( Zepf, 2010 ), or the well-known critique by Rapaport (1960) , which underlined the impossibility of direct energic processes observation in the clinical situation ( Connolly, 2018 ). Although we cannot observe directly the energy and measure it during the clinical situation (the usefulness of which would be rather limited in any case), we can see the implicit or explicit physiological and psychological attempts by the patients to avoid surprises, especially with non-psychotic patients, who often seem to “prefer and choose” unpleasant and/or painful states (e.g., repetitive, anxious, depressive), but perfectly known, compared to a choice of a change, which apparently could bring emotional, personal, social, or professional benefits, but includes an unavoidable change, surprise, novelty, a new unknown and therefore strongly aversive state. These attempts are definitely psychological and physiological, thus of physical nature.

The mind-brain system tries to maintain the states within physiological bounds, which means trying to maintain a condition where the chances of surprise are minimized, ensuring that internal states remain within physiological and acceptable bounds for the organism. These kinds of attempts are often steady and strenuous, and they are felt as real imperatives in clinical, psychotherapeutic/psychoanalytic settings, in which patients try to avoid surprises and novelties often might be represented by a change of job, partner, or change of any other current distressing situation. A clinical frame experienced as painful by a patient who feels stuck but somehow safer in the current situation experienced as suffering but known, and for this reason is “preferred” to a new one that is potentially and surprisingly dangerous. During this clinical moment it is possible to observe the individual’s effort engaged in his data assimilation from the environment, comparing it with the internal data and reality, trying to keep down the entropy levels and minimizing the possibility of surprise, avoiding excessive energy investment in an extremely hard and tiring psychophysical work.

As we mentioned, in the Bayesian brain principle the brain acts having a model of the world ( von Helmholtz, 1962 ; Gregory, 1980 ), working through active inference, as an inference machine, generating actively predictions ( von Helmholtz, 1962 ; Gregory, 1980 ; Dayan et al., 1995 ; Friston, 2010 ), and with this principle the brain tries to resist to a natural tendency to disorder, maintaining a sustained and homoeostatic exchange with its environment. According to Friston (2010) , the brain’s attempt to minimize the variations of free energy (maximizing Bayesian model evidence) not only provides a principled explanation for perceptual (Bayesian) inference in the brain but can also explain action and behavior ( Ortega and Braun, 2010 ). Helmholtz’s model about the brain as an inference machine ( Helmholtz, 1866/1962 ; Dayan et al., 1995 ) remains a key concept in neurobiology ( Gregory, 1980 ) and psychology.

In this framework the brain works continuously trying to find pattern – thereby reducing free energy and minimizing surprise 2 – an effort that tries to reduce the free energy, minimizing the surprise from the system. This effort for the most part takes place in a completely implicit, unconscious way. For the individual, surprise means high level of free energy, leading the system to possible incorrect, erroneous, and unreliable predictions in relation to the world around it ( Friston et al., 2015b ). In psychoanalysis, this inaccurate prediction is translated as a poor testing of reality. Optimal reality testing would therefore require a minimization or reduction in free energy (surprise). This is implicit in belief updating that converts prior beliefs into posterior beliefs that minimize free energy. This can be thought of as the mathematical image of “binding energy” in a Freudian sense, where this “binding” occurs within the boundary established by the Markov blanket ( Friston et al., 2015b ).

The link between free energy and complexity is straightforward: free energy or surprise can be decomposed into complexity minus accuracy. This means that minimizing surprise (or maximizing model evidence) entails a maximization of accuracy in terms of explaining sensory impressions while, at the same time, minimizing complexity. This corresponds to Occam’s principle and says that we try to find the simplest possible explanations that provide an accurate account of our sensorium.

According to Hopkins (2016) , the FEP allows one to observe how the statistical conception of complexity employed by Friston and colleagues relates to emotional conflict and trauma; how symptoms as well as dreams can be understood in terms of complexity-reduction; how in a similar way REM dreaming reduces complexity though the consolidation/reconsolidation of memory; and how complexity and the mechanisms that have evolved to reduce it seem to play a key role for the understanding of mental disorders.

FEP today has a fundamental role in the dialogue with neurosciences and within psychoanalysis itself, describing an important model in understanding and deepening the functioning of the mind-brain system, offering a bridge between neural and psychological processes. As pointed out by Hopkins (2016) , this linking of complexity, dreaming, and disorder also indicates that Freud and free association offer a clear and sharp path with cognitive science, free energy neuroscience, and computational psychiatry in order to create a consistent and solid connection between the psychological and neuroscientific views ( Hopkins, 2016 ).

Thanks to the dialogue with neuroscience and the FEP, Freud’s free energy can be related to the potentially unifying paradigm advanced by Friston and colleagues, giving us the opportunity to better understand the mind-brain system in functional and dysfunctional disposition, through the investigation of psychoanalytic theory and models.

Resting State Networks and the Default Self

In the Ego and the Id ( Freud, 1923 ), Freud claims that the ego is not master in its own house, in other words the conscious instance is neither the only responsible nor the most important factor for the human behavior. The ego is influenced by the contradictory impulses of other instances, whose actions are often hidden. These other instances are the id, present at birth, established by constitution, consisting of impulses and instincts that originate from the bodily organization, finding expression in a psychic unknown form. The other instance, to which the ego is exposed, originates from the internalization of behavior codes, injunctions, social prohibitions felt as constraint and impediment to the enjoyment of satisfaction, a censorship system that regulates the passage by the instinct from the id to the ego. It is a kind of moral censor able to judge human instinctive acts and desires, based mainly on models of value that the child brings from his relationship with parents, often almost completely unconsciously. Freud named this instance superego.

The concept of psychic function elaborated by Freud seems to be consistent with the latest physiological results on the functional organization of the cerebral cortex. The ego is a mental structure characterized by the function of mediating between the inner world, pulses, impulses, desires from the id, prohibitions from superego and stimuli of external reality by ensuring integration and continuity of the individual. This operating entity identified by Freud finds numerous points of contact today with recent studies coming from the resting state networks of the brain.

As with Freud, many other scientists have tried to explain the organization of thinking apparatus with different theories. The father of American psychology, James (1890) , proposed the idea of stream of consciousness , underlying how the daily life mental activity flows smoothly with or without the presence of specific stimuli from the external environment. During this state of consciousness, the individual is engaged in recording all the information-bodily sensations (somesthesic and vegetative), experiencing free association of stimuli such as thoughts, memories, past experience, inner dialogue, mental images, emotions, day dreaming, planning future events, and other activities. In this state the mind jumps from one thought to another with fluidity and usually with readiness ( Cieri and Esposito, 2018 ). This state of mind, nowadays called Random Episodic Silent Thinking (REST; Andreasen et al., 1995 ), emphasizes the free and errant nature of this way of thinking, partly in contrast with the engagement of mind during cognitive tasks.

Among modern neuroimaging techniques, today fMRI and Magnetoencephalography (MEG) allow for the study of the brain in vivo , opening the intersection of anatomy and functions ( Cieri and Esposito, 2018 ). fMRI can be performed during the execution of an experimental paradigm involving specific cognitive tasks or to study spontaneous oscillations of brain activity while the REST of the subject (resting-state fMRI, rs-fMRI; Raichle et al., 2001 ; Buckner et al., 2008 ; Cieri and Esposito, 2018 ; Esposito et al., 2018a ). Since it does not require any task, rs-fMRI is characterized as particularly suitable for studies on subjects such as children and elders, because this protocol does not require any particular skill or specific attention focus from the subject, increasing the compliance of the participant and reducing intersubjective variability due to the task performance ( Esposito et al., 2018a ). Indeed, in recent years a growing number of studies showed that rs-fMRI could be considered as an additional important tool for the investigation of physiological and pathological mental conditions.

Spontaneous brain activity generated in absence of cognitive task has been discussed in the last two decades, representing a pivotal role among psychological and cognitive neuroscientific fields. Many neuroimaging studies considered this brain activity a functioning model of the mind. Cerebral activity recorded during cognitive tasks showed a baseline low frequency fluctuation (0.01–0.1 Hz). In this light some researchers examined these cerebral baseline activities based on the idea that those low levels of brain activity could represent real active states, and that brain activation patterns represent a shift in focus from an internal self-referential state to an external focus ( Raichle et al., 2001 ). This discovery encouraged neuroscientists to begin to consider two different types of neuronal activity: evoked and spontaneous ( Fox and Raichle, 2007 ; Barrett and Simmons, 2015 ). Brain spontaneous activity has received growing attention ( Buckner et al., 2008 ) in the last decade, supported by several studies showing electric activity, hemodynamic and metabolic parameters, spontaneous fluctuations of membrane potential, spontaneous spikes and neurotransmitter release ( O’Donnell and van Rossum, 2014 ).

During the early 21st century, several studies using PET ( Shulman et al., 1997 ) and task-fMRI ( Gusnard and Raichle, 2001 ) identified specific regions active during cognitive task execution and other brain areas active during different REST conditions. These latter neural regions constituted a network involving both hemispheres: the Medial Prefrontal Cortex (MPFC), the Posterior Cingulate Cortex (PCC), the Inferior Parietal Lobules (IPL), and Hippocampal Regions (HP), forming the neural network called DMN, engaged when mental activity is internally directed, when an individual is left “undisturbed” to think about himself, wondering about his life, his past or future. One hypothesis about the DMN’s functioning concerns its involvement in inner mental processes far from all external stimuli, building dynamic mental simulations based on past personal experiences used in recalling memories; it also supports the mental process about the future, and generally when an individual imagines alternative scenarios to the present ( Buckner, 2013 ). This network is also known as a task-negative network because its regions are typically deactivated during execution of attention demanding tasks ( Passow et al., 2015 ).

For many years, modern neuroimaging techniques neglected this important spontaneous activity of the brain, focusing only on changes evoked by external cognitive tasks. During the last two decades, rs-fMRI has become a most utilized tool to study the brain in vivo , especially for those patients less cooperative as we mentioned, offering detailed and clear information about the spontaneous brain dynamics in both physiological and pathological conditions ( Cieri and Esposito, 2018 ). Indeed, one of the most important common aims of neuroscience is to identify early biomarkers in order to reach an early diagnosis, providing a timely and specific treatment, even if today we are far from understanding, the neurobiological or neuropsychological markers of all neurological or neuropsychiatric conditions. An important step for neuroscientists and psychoanalysts, useful to reach the mentioned aim to identify early biomarkers, is linked to the deepening of the relationship between mind and brain and mind and body communication. According to Solms (2019) , adopting a dual-aspect monist position on the philosophical mind-body problem allows one to find the causal mechanism of consciousness not in the manifest brain but rather in its functional organization, which ultimately underpins both the physiological and the psychological manifestations of experience. Adopting a dual-aspect monist position, using neuroimaging techniques and approaches such as FEP will allow psychoanalysis and neuroscience to investigate this functional organization, studying in deep analysis the mechanisms underlying physiological or pathological human conditions. In this sense and with this common aim, the resting state networks together with the FEP could play a key role in the study of the mind-brain system.

Within this dialogue, the DMN seems to play the same function of mediation attributed by Freud to the ego, and some authors have spoken about Default Self ( Beer, 2007 ; Qin and Northoff, 2011 ) in order to define the DMN as a kind of biomarker of the Self. Nevertheless, the experience in the perception of the Self is extremely complex, characterized by high variability, and it is not always easy and clear to distinguish the Self from all other phenomena related to cognitive processes. In any case, the role of DMN within the functions of the Self is conspicuous as shown from several psychopathological studies, where the impairment of DMN connectivity associated with an impairment of Self’s experience is noticeable.

Resting State Networks in Neuropsychiatry

In recent years, there has been a growing interest about abnormal functional connectivity in neurologic and neuropsychiatric disorders, although the results remain debatable. For instance, despite still controversial claims, DMN shows anticorrelated activity with another REST network, the Dorsal Attention Network (DAN), conversely active during externally-directed cognition, such as cognitive tasks that require conscious and focused attention. This anticorrelation could be impaired in some neurological conditions such as Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI – Esposito et al., 2018a ).

Although the focus of this article is not about the use of resting state functional connectivity to assess brain circuits in psychiatric or neurological disorders, it is certainly useful to underline some important issues and connections. Abnormal functional connectivity could be found both in studies on neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders, including anxiety, major depressive disorder (MDD), bipolar disorder (BD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), schizophrenia (SZ), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), Eating Behavior Disorder (EBD), Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and other neurodegenerative disorders ( Buckner, 2013 ; Andrews-Hanna et al., 2014 ; Cieri and Esposito, 2018 ; Esposito et al., 2018a ).

In the physiological aging process, the integrity of the DMN is diminished both in function ( Andrews-Hanna et al., 2007 ; Cieri and Esposito, 2018 ) and structure ( Turner and Spreng, 2015 ), and these changes are associated with MCI, especially in memory functions. Moreover, social cognitive impairments in aging have been associated with reductions in activity within the Dorso Medial Prefrontal Cortex (DMPFC; Moran et al., 2013 ). These impairments increase in the dimensions of pathological aging as AD and forms of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), including semantic dementia (SD) and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD – Andrews-Hanna et al., 2014 ).

Schizophrenic patients have shown a dysfunction of an important area of DMN, the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) associated with difficulty of recognizing actions and functions, correlating with their positive symptoms ( Carter et al., 2001 ). ACC reduces its activity during external cognitive stimulation, highlighting its fundamental role in self-referential mental activity, in close relation with another important region in this process: the anterior insula (AI). Coactivation of these two areas might play a key role in establishing the self-functions ( Esposito et al., 2018a , b ). In schizophrenic patients, we can observe the typical lack of symbolic ability, lack of activity to make predictions, and mental simulations, often accompanied by the absence of dream activity.

As Andrews-Hanna et al. (2014) pointed out, both the nature and topographical locations of DMN alterations differ across disorders, paralleling varied symptom profiles. While disorders of integrity (e.g., AD) are often associated with hypo-activation or connectivity of a particular DMN component and impairments in specific aspects of self-generated cognition, disorders of content (e.g., depression) and regulation (e.g., ADHD) are typically associated with hyperactivation and hyperconnectivity, paralleled by polarized or excessive forms of self-generated thought ( Andrews-Hanna et al., 2014 ). Moreover, the body image disturbance in EBD may be supported by a modification in connectivity within specific cortical areas like the precuneus (PrC; Seojung et al., 2014 ), and this result could represent the neural correlates underlying increased self-focus, rumination, and cognitive control in relation to eating disorders and the impairment about the body perception ( Esposito et al., 2018a , b ).

Within the DMN, specific regions support the self-reported mental processes, monitoring psychological states ( Phan et al., 2002 ) and could be considered regions of convergence receiving internal (bodily and proprioceptive sensations) and external inputs (visual and auditory), for their integration and development. These areas are the cortical midline regions and among these regions the most important are MPFC and ACC, associated with the control of various functions such as selecting or inhibition of some response, monitoring the conflict and identification of errors ( Schneider et al., 2008 ). ACC plays a fundamental role in affective evaluation ( Allman et al., 2001 ), conflict monitoring and detection ( Botvinick et al., 2004 ), response selection ( Awh and Jonides, 2001 ), and attentional control ( Posner, 1994 ).

Andrews-Hanna (2012) and Buckner (2013) hypothesize that one of the major functions of the DMN, perhaps the most important, is to support internal mental simulations used adaptively. This concept is consistent with FEP in which the system is engaged with its simulations, searching of patterns, trying to maintain an internal sensitive balance of the organism, supporting internal mental simulations used in an adaptive way. In other words, the research of patterns claimed by the FEP is consistent with the DMN’s most important role, mediating between the external and internal stimuli, building dynamic mental simulations based on past personal experiences used in recalling memories. This is the same function attributed by Freud to the ego ( Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010 ).

The “investment” of the system in energy terms, in trying to keep lower levels of entropy, decreases the chances of having to face surprises or when optimally attuned to the world, seek out novel situations that will minimize surprise in the future (i.e., expected surprise or uncertainty).

Many neuropsychiatric and neurological diseases are characterized by the impairment or lack of important symbolic function, strictly linked to the Self and to the ability of the system to support internal mental simulations used in adaptive way. Recent findings suggest the existence of a frontoparietal control system consisting of flexible hubs that regulate distributed systems (e.g., visual, limbic, motor) according to current task goals ( Cole et al., 2014 ; Cieri et al., 2017 ).

DMN seems to directly contribute to all inner mental processes supported by the MPFC and its links to the HP, with its known key role in memory functions. To support this complex interaction, DMN is constituted by two subsystems. The first is the temporal-mesial subsystem, associated with mnemonic processes, activated during retrieval of past memory; this subsystem is predominantly made up of HP and shows high connectivity with another two important brain regions typically active during memory tasks: PCC/PrC (Posterior Cingulate Cortex/Precuneus) and IPL. The second subsystem is connected to the MPFC, specifically dorsal-MPFC activated during mental situations of self-exploration and sensations. The results suggest that self-referential mental activity engages a preferential MPFC subsystem ( Szpunar et al., 2007 ). These functions are closely related to DMN anatomy: two interactive subsystems whose predominant areas are HP and MPFC that converge on the retrosplenial cortex (PCC/PrC).

In the last two decades, rs-fMRI studies have allowed the identification of a set of different networks, not only the DMN, identified in a series of resting-state functional connectivity studies ( Greicius et al., 2003 ; Fransson, 2005 ; Fox et al., 2006 ). In fact, besides the DMN, at least 10 RSN networks have been consistently described in healthy populations ( Mantini et al., 2009 ; van den Heuvel and Hulshoff Pol, 2010 ; Deco et al., 2011 ), highlighting that the human brain has a network-based organization at REST. Of these 10, the most studied include the DMN, the Salience Network (SN), the Control Executive Network (CEN) (lateralized in both hemispheres), the primary Sensory Motor Network (SMN), the Extrastriate Visual System (EsV), and the DAN ( Deco and Corbetta, 2011 ).

Important to note in this context is the DAN and its specific behavior related to DMN and the Self. DAN includes Inferior Parietal Sulcus (IPS), Frontal Eye Field (FEF), ACC, and bilateral Middle Temporal Gyrus (MidTempG), and it has received much attention because – conversely to DMN – it is called the task-positive network, being active during cognitive tasks which demand attention and mental control ( Corbetta and Shulman, 2002 ; Fox et al., 2006 ; Esposito et al., 2018a , b ). DMN and DAN show a pattern of anticorrelation in their activity in both task and resting state studies, suggesting that they are intrinsically organized into anticorrelated networks ( Fransson, 2005 ; Esposito et al., 2018a , b ). This DAN-DMN anticorrelation during resting state may represent a cerebral mechanism supporting cognitive functions ( Gopinath et al., 2015 ), switching focus between internal, supported by DMN, and external channels and attention demanding events, supported by DAN ( Esposito et al., 2018a , b ). Interestingly, this negative correlation between DAN and DMN modifies its function during life span. In fact, consistently with function and evolution of the Self, it appears during the first year and it strengthens during the second year of life ( Barber et al., 2013 ).

As mentioned, the concept of Self cannot be seen as a static and steady entity, but rather dynamic in its development and evolution. Developmental psychology claims that a first concept of Self flourishes between the first and second year of life, when the child begins to recognize himself as an object. According to Craig (2011) , the most important sign of self-awareness is the ability of the child to recognize himself in the mirror. In parallel, with the growth of the individual Self, the negative correlation between DAN and DMN becomes stronger in adults to support the development of executive functions and working memory from childhood to adulthood ( Andrews-Hanna et al., 2007 ; Cieri and Esposito, 2018 ).

Following this process, a decreased anticorrelation between these two networks starts to appear weaker during physiological aging ( Wu et al., 2011 ), increasing its weakness in the case of MCI ( Esposito et al., 2018a , b ), representing a possible biomarker of neuroaging, cognitive decline, and first impairment of self-functions.

DMN and Freudian Secondary Principle

Carhart-Harris and Friston (2010) proposed the consistency of the Freudian concept of secondary process with the DMN functions, capable of self-organizing and suppressing free energy, such as the anarchic and unconstrained endogenous activity from the limbic and paralimbic systems. The mind-brain system tries to maintain its state within physiological bounds, trying to minimize the possibility of surprise. This constant attempt to avoid surprise, ensuring that the states remain within physiological bounds, is consistent with the neurophysiological functions of the brain, specifically with the function of DMN.

According to Carhart-Harris and Friston (2010) , the construct validity of Freud’s hierarchical organization of the mind, with its distinction between id and ego – belonging to the primary and secondary processes, respectively – can be enhanced by remarkable consistency with contemporary models of cognition based on hierarchical Bayesian inference and Helmholtzian free energy. In fact, Freudian metapsychology distinguished two ways of mental functioning, the primary and the secondary processes, corresponding to the pleasure and reality principle, respectively. The primary process is driven by the pleasure principle, which is in turn driven by the id and its instinctual functioning with its instincts and desires, without taking into account the constraints of the external environment with its rules and laws. The secondary process, also called the reality principle, is governed by the ego, which controls the instant gratification mentality of the id. The reality principle is the ability of the mind to assess the reality of external world and to act accordingly with it, as opposed to the pleasure principle.

Freud studied the function of the mind through these different processes, as two fundamentally different styles of cognition, also through a study of non-ordinary states of consciousness (e.g., hallucinations and dreams), in which he recognized a mode of cognition characterized by a primitive style of thinking ( Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010 ). He speculated that in these primitive non-ordinary states of consciousness, the exchanges of neuronal energy are free, and he designated it as the primary process ( Freud, 1940 ). Moreover, in these non-ordinary states, he identified the loss of certain functions, usually present in “normal” waking cognition, ascribing these functions to a central organization of the ego, which works in order to minimize free energy of the mind, underlying the specific property of this function belonging to the secondary process, defining its aim as one of converting free energy into bound energy states ( Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010 ).

The Freudian concept of reality principle seems consistent with the functional role of the DMN in its hierarchical and self-organizing role of suppressing free energy originated from subordinate levels, such as the limbic and paralimbic systems. In fact, the Freudian secondary process with its top-down mode of operation, in which it transforms free energy of the lower levels into bound energy trying to keep the system on physiologically acceptable levels, seems to be consistent with the functions of the DMN.

Under this mapping between Freudian and Helmholtzian models, is possible to link the energy associated with the primary process and the free energy of Bayesian formulations; in both accounts, higher cortical areas try to organize the activity from the lower-levels through suppression of their free energy ( Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010 ).

Another important feature of DMN consistent with FEP is the mentioned anticorrelation, the inverse relationship of its neurophysiological activity with DAN ( Corbetta and Shulman, 2002 ; Fransson, 2005 ; Fox et al., 2006 ; Esposito et al., 2018a , b ). These intrinsic networks correspond to the high-levels of an inferential hierarchy, which function to suppress the free energy of lower levels (i.e. suppress prediction errors with top-down predictions), associating this optimization process with the Freudian secondary process. Also, the failures of top-down control with non-ordinary states of consciousness, such as early and acute psychosis, the temporal-lobe aura, dreaming, and hallucinogenic drug states ( Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010 ), might be associated with an impairment of the supraordinate system, as DMN is unable to control in a top-down mode the excess of the free energy from the lower system.

Moreover, as we noticed, the DMN functional connectivity seems to become relatively weak in the elderly ( Damoiseaux et al., 2006 ; Andrews-Hanna et al., 2007 ), representing a neurological impairment of the mechanism able to support cognitive functions, switching the focus from the inside supported by DMN, to the outside supported by DAN. We can observe the higher control system apparently impaired and unable to bind the free energy, making difficult the executions of cognitive tasks. In cases of ADHD ( Castellanos et al., 2008 ) or impulse control disorders ( Church et al., 2009 ), the hierarchically lower system seems to become too active to be managed by the hierarchically superior system, operating a sort of “mutiny,” or “hijacking,” leading to an impairment of the system control.

MPFC-PCC connectivity is entirely absent in infants ( Fransson, 2005 ) and the DMN develops through ontogeny, in a way that runs parallel to the emergence of the individual Self with its complex functions.

The spontaneous fluctuations in neuronal activity from cortical nodes of DMN suppress or contain the unconstrained and anarchic endogenous activity of limbic and paralimbic systems (Helmholtz free energy). This neurobiological view rests on the basis of the brain as a hierarchical, inferential, Helmholtzian machine, in which large-scale intrinsic networks such as the DMN are located at higher levels of cerebral hierarchy and work to optimize the representation of the sensorium, minimizing the level of free energy. As Carhart-Harris and Friston (2010) indicate, this optimization, formulated as minimizing free energy, is similar to the treatment of energy in Freudian formulations, and developing these points of contact may help anchor Freudian concepts to more rigorous biological phenomena, helping not only psychoanalysis but the entire neuroscientific field.

As Solms (2014) specifies, when Friston claims about minimizing prediction error and giving up on predictive models that do not correspond to external states, he is making reference to Freud’s reality principle, while in a different frame of reference. Freud’s descriptions of the secondary process are consistent with the functional anatomy of large-scale intrinsic networks and how this process works to minimize free energy, with its hierarchical organization and continuous and constant attempt trying to keep low levels of surprise. Also, as outlined above, this concordance find is an interesting conceptual hook trough the development of functional connectivity between the nodes of the DMN during ontogeny, as a process that runs parallel to the emergence of the Self’s functions.

Freud always explained clinical phenomena in terms of natural forces and energies, not surprisingly he was a student of Helmholtz’s medical school and in this regard, it is interesting to note that in 1898 Wilhelm Fliess – an otorhinolaryngologist, passionate scholar of psychoanalysis, and close friend of Freud – sent to him two big volumes of Helmoltz’s lessons as a gift in honor of their good friendship and their common attendance and interest in the famous physiologist’s lessons and theories.

In the context of the dialogue between psychoanalysis and neuroscience, it might be beneficial for the neuroscience field to try to find contact points with psychoanalysis in order to nourish an inextricable dialogue, started from the birth of psychoanalysis which can certainly improve, providing benefits to the understanding of the mind-brain system in physiological and pathological conditions.

Wilfred Ruprecht Bion: The Theory of “Alpha Function”

Freud described the establishment of the principle of reality, underlying how consciousness develops through the perception of the outside world and in addition to the dualism of pleasure-sorrow (the principle of Nirvana – primary narcissism), perception is characterized by manifold sensory qualities ( Freud, 1911 ). Freud’s principle of reality is the ability of the mind to assess the outside world, acting accordingly with it in opposed direction to the principle of pleasure ( Freud, 1940 ). Thought is a substitute for motor discharge, even though the latter never stops functioning as a mechanism to release psyche. The establishment of the principle of reality allows the development of a mental function to defer instant gratification, the governing principle of the actions taken by the ego, after its slow development from a “pleasure-ego” into a “reality-ego” ( Freud, 1940 ).

What Freud defined as attention, a mental function that explores outside world, is consistent with Bion’s alpha function (α-function), theorized in “Learning From Experience” ( Bion, 1962a ). In the personality, there are several factors that combined with each other form the personality functions, a term with which Bion intends the mental activity ( Bion, 1962a , b ). Through α-function, non-mental elements (sensory impressions, β-elements) are processed into mental elements (α-elements), giving them an emotional connotation (good, pleasant, unpleasant, and bad). β-elements are the raw material of mental process, impressions of sensory activation, perceptions of internal and external body state changes that have no meaning and are perceived physically. Everything that is emotionally lived must be at first elaborated by the α-function; this implies that emotional experiences, lived both during sleep and wakefulness, must be elaborated by α-function. When a patient is insufficient in α-function, the β-elements are not thinkable and they can fall under projective identification (Acting-Out). In this case, a patient cannot transform sensory impressions into α-elements and therefore cannot dream. In order to learn from experience, α-function must operate on the basis of emotional experience by generating α-elements that will be used by thought that works in the dream and in the unconscious ( Bion, 1962a , 1973 ). Dream and α-function are located between conscious and unconscious, differentiating them through a barrier that Bion calls the contact barrier that preserves personality from psychotic state. α-function (both awake and during sleep) transforms sensory impressions linked to a specific emotional experience in α-elements that proliferate and condense, forming the contact barrier. The elements can pass freely through the contact barrier between conscious and unconscious states, and the dreams allow us to access directly the contact barrier ( Bion, 1962a ; Mellor, 2018 ).

Psychotic patients do not have α-function, resulting in the inability to transform sensorial impressions into α-elements, to dream and to generate conscious and unconscious. In fact, the contact barrier, with its properties necessary to distinguish mental phenomena (conscious and unconscious), is missing in psychotic patients and replaced by the beta screen (β-screen) composed of β-elements. Psychotic patients invert α-function, and sensory impressions are no longer used to form α-elements and the contact barrier. α-elements, contact barrier, unconscious thoughts, and dreams are redirected to β-elements and projected to form the β-screen. The inversion of α-function does not recompose β-elements but creates “ bizarre objects .” Indeed, β-elements are sensory impression and do not have traces of personality, while bizarre objects have traces of personality (ego and super-ego). α-function, during the transformation of emotional experience into α-elements, plays a key role in the sense of reality and its inactivity produces disastrous effects on personality such as deep psychotic deterioration.

According to Freud, thoughts are born through the absence, while for Bion thoughts are precedent to thinking, and the latter develops for the necessity to treat thoughts. Bion hypothesized that the mind is a container of thoughts and the α-function develops to contain and process thoughts. It is possible to disengage the mind from thoughts by primitive defense mechanisms, such as expulsion ( Freud, 1937 ), if the personality is prepared to avoid frustration. If, on the other hand, personality is dominated by the impulse to bear and change frustration, it will think the thoughts. If the patient is not able to think his own thoughts, he will have an increase in frustration. Bion underlines that the bear of frustration is a genetically pre-established factor of personality. Models of mental functioning are characterized by the inability to tolerate frustration, suffering, anxiety, and the need to use powerful defense mechanisms: splitting, projection, and projective identification. However, Bion adds that the defense mechanisms concern not only emotions and feelings. Indeed, he proposes a psychotic defense mechanism that splits and free ourselves not only of the intolerable affective content, but of the apparatus that allows its perception, a kind of amputation of specific mind functions. Psychotic defense leads to the impoverishment not only of emotions but also of mental abilities.

All the noted Bion’s mind-body unit is in contact with the external reality with the internal sensations supported by α-function. In light of this hypothesis, the mind-body relationship must be seen in continuous dynamism: in harmonic condition, body and mind are integrated with each other, while in disharmonic condition a messy sensoriality that hampers thinking predominates ( Ferrari, 1992 ; Lombardi and Pola, 2010 ; Lombardi, 2016 ). In “Transformations” ( Bion, 1965 ), Bion introduces the concept of O. O is the origin as in the geometrical example of the Cartesian axes: experiencing O represents the experience of whole sensations and emotions, which are activated in contact with reality.

As we noted, Francis Joseph Gall ( Livianos-Aldana et al., 2007 ) was the first neuroscientist to study the cerebral cortex, underlying that the brain was made up of several interconnected areas and each of these areas with a specific function. Questioning René Descartes’s theory of mind-body dualism, Gall argued that the brain was the seat of intelligence, a theory that was elaborated only after the development of modern psychology. Thanks to Gall’s theory, mind was no longer considered separate from body, but as an integral part of the organism in its totality. He noted that the brain was the organ delegated to intellectual, moral and affective faculties, identifying higher psychic functions in the frontal cortex. Empirically, through fMRI studies, cortical midline structures and DMN have often been highlighted to be specific for the Self ( Qin and Northoff, 2011 ). DMN is involved in internally oriented self-related processing that comprises surveillance of internal states (emotional, bodily), resulting in what is called “mind wandering” ( Mason et al., 2007 ). Observing resting state networks in their totality, including the subnetworks ( Deco et al., 2011 ) and their interconnection, we may better understand the mind-body unit. Menon (2011) talks about the “Triple Network,” underlying functional interchange between three neural networks: DMN, SN, and CEN. Specifically, DMN with its areas MPFC, PCC, Angular Gyrus, and medial temporal lobe structures plays and important role in monitoring self-referential mental activity; the SN through ACC and Insula, receives and elaborates body sensations and cognitive relevant events engaging frontoparietal systems; CEN, whose key nodes include the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and PCC, maintains and elaborates working memory information and decision-making of goal-directed behavior. These networks interact dynamically, mediating cognitive and emotional states ( Yu et al., 2018 ). The SN ( Seeley et al., 2007 ) is involved in bottom-up direction of salience events, involved in detecting, integrating and filtering relevant interoceptive, autonomic and emotional information, and it plays a key role modulating and switching other resting state networks ( Menon and Uddin, 2010 ).

Activation of SN determines an increase of connectivity between DMN and CEN, modulating not only the activation of the networks but also their interconnectivity ( Di and Biswal, 2015 ). SN indeed represents core hubs of the whole brain sending information in other regions and networks. SN through the AI constitutes the hub involved in the registration of internal (body sensations) and external salient events, sending information to DMN that integrates and elaborates information supporting mental activity connected with the Self ( Craig, 2010 ). AI elaborates affective information, pain and empathy, whereas the dorsal part of ACC (dACC) was most closely associated with conflict resolution and cognitive control. The insula and dACC probably constitute a functional circuit involved in interoceptive and affective processes and form an anatomically tightly coupled network ideally placed to integrate information from several brain regions. The insula distributes sensory information coming from the body, in contact with the external reality, and transmits it to further brain regions that allow its processing. In summary, the insula supports emotional experience resulting from bodily states. In line with Bion’s theory, bodily sensations shape emotional experiences, and experiencing O implies the possibility to record the sensations, perceptions and emotions that are activated in contact with reality and therefore experiencing them ( Damasio, 1996 ; Ciocca, 2015 ). The insula is anatomically situated in a brain area connected with several neural functional circuits supporting cognitive, homeostatic, and affective systems and constitutes a bridge between brain regions involved in monitoring internal states (visceral sensory, somatic sensory processes, autonomic regulation of the gastrointestinal tract and heart; Menon and Uddin, 2010 ) and that support their processing. The insular cortex registers body sensations and through the interaction with other brain areas, gives rise to emotions that modulate the behavior ( Singer et al., 2009 ; Craig, 2010 ). Craig and colleagues, in an animal model, identified an ascending pathway from the spinal cord (lamina I neurons in the spinal cord) through the spinothalamic tract, passing through the Nucleus of the Solitary Tract (NTS) and ventromedial nucleus of the thalamus and finally landing at the dorsal insula projecting information to AI and ACC ( Critchley and Harrison, 2013 ). They called this pathway the “ homeostatic afferent pathway ” ( Craig, 2009 ) that carries information about the body. Particularly, information arising from the body reaches the middle and posterior parts of the insula and then is projected in the anterior insula. The awareness of salient events is represented in the anterior insula, whereas more sensory attributes are represented posteriorly ( Craig, 2002 ). The insula represents a core area that receives bodily information, filtering salient stimuli, processing them and then engaging, through ACC, the CEN that supports working memory, higher order cognitive processes and the DMN that supports cognitive functions and Self.

The Freudian description of the mind underlines how bodily experience gives rise to and shapes thought. Pre-reflective representations of visceral states of the Self are linked to activations in the posterior and middle Insula; DMN is engaged when introspection and reflection are needed ( Critchley and Harrison, 2013 ). Interactions between the DMN and insula support the ability to represent one’s bodily states to enable conscious reflection on those states ( Molnar-Szakacs and Uddin, 2013 ). Thoughts derive from integrated physiological activation filtered by the insula and he mind develops to process, contain and give them meaning through DMN.

Discussion and Conclusion

The dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis is still complex and often conflicting; a controversy deriving foremost from the complexity of the study object: the mind-brain system, perhaps the most complex and challenging subject for the human being, from a scientific, philosophical, and psychological point of view. A second reason, which probably did not favor the discourse between these two disciplines, derives from the conceptual conflict of conceiving a system able to study itself. Both in the case of neuroscience as in the case of psychoanalysis, the subject and the object of the investigation coincide, and this aspect becomes an evident limitation in the study of any phenomenon. Specifically, these two disciplines use different tools and methods, sharing the same target: the knowledge of the mind-brain system, its development, and its physiological and pathological expressions. The differences in methods and tools used have not discouraged and should not discourage at all this fundamental relationship. Instead, the innovative approach of resting state network investigations has facilitated the communication, opening new horizons. Resting state networks in general and DMN in particular opened a window on neurophysiological mechanisms linked to spontaneous thought processes, not exclusively related to the active execution of cognitive tasks. The greater knowledge of neural networks functioning allows a theoretical deepening on spontaneous and unconscious thought processes and in general on mind-brain functioning and on the mind-body relationship. Although the beginnings of modern neuroscience have been characterized by a cognitive psychology approach, with a tendency to exclude affective, emotional and unconscious processes – in which the unconscious was often defined as implicit or unaware – over time thanks to scientific evidence and clinical practice, it was no longer possible to exclude emotional and unconscious states from neuroscientific studies. This point brought neuroscience back to the approach originally conceived by Freud with the investigation through the resting state networks that confirms and deepens this relationship. Progresses made in the field of neuroimaging allow a deeper and more detailed investigation, therefore a greater understanding of psychoanalytic theory, models and observations, and the mind-brain system in its functions and dysfunctions, finding in concepts such as FEP its natural meeting point, its bridge between mind and brain, in which Freud’s more speculative free energy theory, based on the clinical method, find a natural connection with the more rigorous methods of neuroscience, a goal to which Freud himself aspired since the birth of psychoanalytic theories.

FEP takes elements from the Bayesian and Helmoltzian approaches, conceiving the human mind as perpetually committed in active inference, analyzing data from the sensorium and from external reality, comparing and analyzing them, trying to keep down the entropy levels and therefore minimize the possibility of surprise (and seeking out opportunities to minimize surprise), thereby avoiding excessive levels of free energy ( Friston, 2010 ). Seth and Friston (2016 ) recently described active interoceptive inference, providing an interesting and detailed set of concepts within which to conceive the neurofunctional basis of emotion, embodied selfhood and allostatic control. The neuronal activity encodes expectations about the causes of sensory input, where these expectations aim to minimize prediction error and where the prediction error lies in the difference between (ascending) sensory input and (descending) predictions of that input. This minimization rests upon recurrent neuronal interactions between different levels of the cortical hierarchy. For interoceptive inference, predictions issue from visceromotor areas and project to viscerosensory areas (to provide corollary feedback) as well as to brainstem and subcortical areas (to engage autonomic homoeostatic reflexes). The authors point out how visceromotor predictions are best interpreted as providing homoeostatic set-points that enslave autonomic reflexes and guide allostatic (behavioral and physiological) responses via interoceptive prediction errors at different hierarchical levels and timescales ( Seth and Friston, 2016 ).

In the FEP the brain acts having a model of the world, working through active inference generating actively predictions to minimize the variations of free energy (maximizing Bayesian model evidence), providing a principled explanation for perceptual inference in the brain. With this principle, the brain tries to resist its natural tendency to disorder, maintaining a sustained and homoeostatic exchange with the environment.

As we mentioned, the DMN is consistent with ego functions and with its target of containing free energy levels of underlying structures, a function of the secondary process. The result is a top-down hierarchy of DMN which aims to reduce the free energy associated with the Freudian primary process. The cortical regions modulate the activity of subcortical areas, ontogenetically and phylogenetically older, through the lowering and optimization of free energy. Freudian constructs of the primary and secondary processes seem to have neurobiological substrates, consistent with self-organized activity in hierarchical cortical systems, and Freudian descriptions of the ego are consistent with the functions described of the DMN with its reciprocal exchanges with subordinate limbic and paralimbic brain systems.

Even in Bion’s theory, the body is in close contact with external reality; internal and external sensations trough α-function shape emotional experiences and finally thoughts. Learning from experience represents the attempt of individuals to experience the emotion of the moment without running away in the knowledge, which would be the result of a defense mechanism aimed at the avoidance of that specific emotional state. The insula, with its connections with several neural functional circuits, supports emotional experience resulting from bodily states.

The anterior insular cortex is a part of the visceromotor area, situated at the top of an interoceptive hierarchy ( Seth and Friston, 2016 ); it receives ascending projections from viscerosensory areas (e.g., posterior and mid-insula) and their descending connections engage a range of subcortical, brainstem, and spinal cord targets involved in visceromotor control, such as the periaqueductal gray and the parabrachial nucleus ( Seth and Friston, 2016 ). The anterior insula constitutes a hub involved in the registration body sensations and filters external salient events, then sending information to the DMN that integrates and elaborates information supporting mental activity connected to the Self. The insula and dACC constitute a functional circuit that integrates information from several brain regions. They form an anatomically tightly coupled network ideally placed to distribute sensory information to further brain regions that allow their processing.

As we noted, Bion (1959) focused his observation on body and sensory organs as instruments of access to the perception of reality, considering thought and emotion inseparable components of the same process, underlying the central role of the body as the start for the thought phenomena. In his theory, digestion of new experiences corresponds to the “data assimilation” or “evidence accumulation” implicit in “belief updating” under the FEP.

Although we do not know if psychoanalysis should help to plan the work of neurobiology, as claimed by Kandel 20 years ago ( Kandel, 1999 ), we believe that a dialogue between these two disciplines should increase in light of new developments, without prejudices in name of curiosity and respect for the history, tools, methodologies, and languages used by the different approaches, in order to reach important advances in the knowledge of the mind-brain system, in which other disciplines as psychiatry, psychology, and neurology could naturally take advantage in order to improve the diagnostic and therapeutic approach to mental suffering.

Author Contributions

RE and FC equally contributed to the manuscript.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

1 Technically, the digestion of new experiences corresponds to the “data assimilation” or “evidence accumulation” implicit in “belief updating” under the FEP.

2 An interesting corollary of surprise minimization is that we are compelled to seek out novelty, because novelty affords the opportunity to reduce expected surprise or uncertainty. One common feature found in non-psychotic patients concerns a certain “extension”, or shift of discomfort from surprise to novelty in general, as if any novelty could lead to a risk of compromising the system. This mechanism is easily found in depressive, anxious or obsessive patients, in which we can observe how they try to avoid and defend themselves from novelty, as well as from surprise, repeating their same known and “safe” patterns.

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The effects of need satisfaction on active academic procrastination and the mediating roles of academic buoyancy and self-regulated learning

• Published: 08 April 2024

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• Yuxia Shi   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0005-5910-4554 1 ,
• Yupeng Lin   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3182-2459 1 &
• Zhonggen Yu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3873-980X 1  

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There is a lack of research exploring the correlations between need satisfaction, active academic procrastination, academic buoyancy, and self-regulated learning. This study aims to address these gaps by combining quantitative and qualitative methods that employ structural equation modeling, bootstrapping techniques, and word frequency in AntConc to moderately and deeply analyze these constructs. The findings reveal that higher-education learners’ need satisfaction, specifically in terms of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, positively and significantly predict their academic buoyancy. Furthermore, academic buoyancy can positively affect active academic procrastination, which showcases its positive mediation between basic need satisfaction and active procrastination. The basic psychological need satisfaction also positively relates to self-regulated learning, i.e., metacognitive strategies and resource management strategies. Moreover, resource management strategies positively influence active procrastination, indicating a positive mediation between need satisfaction and active procrastination. However, metacognitive strategies fail to significantly predict active procrastination and show non-significant mediation. Qualitative analysis suggests that higher-education students’ active procrastination is influenced by factors such as task complexity, task interest, and external distractions. This study contributes to the development of self-determination theory and provides insight into the relationships among the aforementioned concepts.

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This work is supported by Key Research and Application Project of the Key Laboratory of Key Technologies for Localization Language Services of the State Administration of Press and Publication, “Research on Localization and Intelligent Language Education Technology for the ‘Belt and Road Initiative” (Project Number: CSLS 20230012), and Special fund of Beijing Co-construction Project-Research and reform of the “Undergraduate Teaching Reform and Innovation Project” of Beijing higher education in 2020-innovative “multilingual +” excellent talent training system (202010032003).

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Shi, Y., Lin, Y. & Yu, Z. The effects of need satisfaction on active academic procrastination and the mediating roles of academic buoyancy and self-regulated learning. Curr Psychol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-05916-7

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Psychology Major’s Research Empowers Families with Autism

Mackenzie Fowler ’24 has a passion for helping parents of children with autism. As a psychology major with minors in applied behavior analysis (ABA) and art, she plans to work as a board-certified behavior analyst in school environments. Mackenzie’s undergraduate research, study abroad experience and campus job taught her to apply textbook knowledge in the real world and deepened her commitment to the field of psychology.

A required introductory course sparked Mackenzie’s interest in psychology, and a subsequent ABA class introduced her to the science of therapy. She later applied for an internship with a local clinic, C.A.B.S. Autism & Behavior Specialists, where she became a registered behavior technician and began focusing on early intervention with families and parents.

Awarded the psychology department’s George Scholar grant, Mackenzie asked her professor and advisor, Assistant Professor of Psychology Miguel Ampuero, to partner with her on a project. Their research supports parents teaching communication skills to their children with autism. Mackenzie is investigating how much training parents need and how to make it faster and more efficient. Younger psychology students have joined the project, growing undergraduate research opportunities at Berry while giving Mackenzie more mentoring practice.

Her job as the student director of the alumni center also reinforces her supervisory skills: “This role is less focused on discovery and more on professional management experiences such as event planning and building schedules. Here, I’m learning how to manage a work environment and growing professionally in a different way.”

Mackenzie also pursued a summer international program in Peru, saying it was a significant step out of her comfort zone and her most formative college experience. Each year, Berry professors accompany students abroad as they navigate special topics classes and engage in related cultural and professional work. The program coordinators assigned Mackenzie’s group to autism clinics and a special needs school implementing new behavior intervention plans in the classroom.

“If C.A.B.S. helped affirm that I wanted to work in behavior analysis, this trip really solidified it,” she says. “It was amazing to see the basics of the clinics were similar but with cultural differences. It was also neat to see the new program taking shape.”

Recalling how her learning and career possibilities expanded throughout college, Mackenzie is grateful for the ways Ampuero helped shape her future.

“Dr. Ampuero has guided me in so many areas,” says Mackenzie. “He taught several of my classes at Berry, then led me through coursework and practical, real-world experiences in Peru. He also acts as my research advisor, and we plan to publish a paper on our work. He has supported me through every step of my academic and professional decisions in psychology.”

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