Why this is a landmark interview
This Legacy Interview captures one of the most influential scientific minds of our time speaking directly to psychotherapy.
Karl Friston has reshaped how neuroscience understands mind, brain and behaviour. His Free Energy Principle now underpins large areas of neuroscience, psychiatry and computational mental health. Many senior figures across disciplines argue that the scope and unifying power of his work places it in the territory of Nobel-level contribution.
What makes this conversation exceptional is not only Karl’s stature, but its focus. Rather than presenting theory at a distance, this two-hour interview explores how his ideas speak directly to the dilemmas therapists face every day: resistance to safety, the persistence of symptoms, relational testing, and why meaningful change takes time.
This is a wide-ranging, reflective conversation that brings neuroscience, psychoanalysis, attachment and consciousness into sustained dialogue.
This recording will help you rethink:
- Why symptoms often function to reduce overwhelming uncertainty
- Why improvement can feel destabilising rather than relieving
- How safety enables curiosity and change in the therapy room
- Transference as active testing, not repetition alone
- Therapy as a process of revising deeply held internal models
No background in neuroscience is assumed. This conversation is designed for practising therapists across modalities.
About this recording
Originator of the Free Energy Principle, Karl Friston offers a way of understanding how minds manage uncertainty, form symptoms and change through relationship. In this Legacy Interview, he joins Mark Solms and Jeremy Holmes in conversation with Jane O’Rourke to explore how ideas such as prediction, safety and active inference speak directly to everyday therapeutic work.
Across two hours, Mark explores how the brain’s drive to reduce overwhelming uncertainty shapes perception, emotion, relationships and symptom formation. Mark Solms and Jeremy Holmes, both long-standing interlocutors of his work, translate and interrogate these ideas from psychoanalytic and attachment-informed perspectives.
This interview reflects MINDinMIND’s commitment to creating dialogue clinicians consistently tell us they value: thoughtful, well-paced and grounded in the realities of therapeutic work.
What therapists will gain
Although mathematically sophisticated, the clinical implications of the Free Energy Principle are surprisingly down-to-earth. At its heart is a simple idea: that all living systems try to reduce overwhelming uncertainty and maintain a world coherent enough to survive in, yet open enough to learn from.
This gives therapists several powerful ways of understanding what happens in the room:
- Symptoms as strategies
Many difficulties can be seen as attempts to reduce intolerable unpredictability. - Safety as precision and precision as felt safety
A reliable therapeutic relationship enables an exploration of self models (and self in the world) allowing new predictions and relational expectations to form. - Curiosity and exploration
As the therapeutic environment becomes safer, clients can begin to test and revise their internal models rather than cling to older, protective ones. - Active inference in the room
Clients act as well as feel. They attempt to shape the therapeutic relationship to confirm familiar expectations. This helps clinicians work more deeply with enactment, attachment patterns and rupture-repair processes. - Karl Friston, Mark Solms and Jeremy Holmes each explore these ideas from their own vantage points, creating a conversation that bridges neuroscience, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
Special Guests
Mark Solms
Mark Solms, Director of Neuropsychology at the Neuroscience Institute of the University of Cape Town, is a neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst whose work has shaped the field of neuropsychoanalysis. His ongoing dialogues with Karl Friston have informed his thinking on affect, motivation and consciousness, grounded in the brain’s predictive regulation of bodily and emotional states. He will explore how the Free Energy Principle reframes core psychoanalytic ideas such as conflict, drive and the emergence of the self.
Jeremy Holmes
Jeremy Holmes, Honorary Professor at the University of Exeter, is a leading figure in attachment-informed psychotherapy. He has described Karl Friston’s work as bringing Freud into the twenty-first century. In this conversation he will consider how active inference enriches our understanding of attachment, transference and the therapeutic relationship.
About Karl Friston
Leading neuroscientist and originator of the Free Energy Principle
Karl Friston is Professor of Neuroscience at University College London and an Honorary Consultant at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. He is one of the most influential figures in contemporary neuroscience.
His work has shaped how brain imaging data are analysed worldwide and has advanced understanding of how different brain systems communicate. He is best known for developing the Free Energy Principle.
At its core, the Free Energy Principle addresses a fundamental question: how do living beings remain viable in an unpredictable world? Friston proposes that the brain is constantly working to reduce overwhelming uncertainty by building and updating internal models through perception, emotion and action.
This framework now influences neuroscience, psychiatry and psychotherapy. For clinicians, it offers a way of understanding symptoms, behaviour and therapeutic change as attempts to manage uncertainty and restore coherence within the self and in relationships.
His contribution has been described in striking terms by his special guests in this Legacy Interview. Neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms has referred to Karl Friston as “the Einstein of the mind.” Attachment-informed psychiatrist Jeremy Holmes has said that Friston’s work “brings Freud into the twenty-first century,” providing a scientific framework for understanding how internal models are formed, defended and revised through experience and relationship.
Interviewer
Karl is in conversation with Jane O’Rourke.
Jane O’Rourke, founder of MINDinMIND and a former award-winning BBC journalist now practising as a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, draws upon her combined expertise to create rich and thoughtful conversations with leading mental health clinicians. Her interviews weave together the personal and professional threads of her guests’ journeys, capturing the experiences that have shaped their clinical work and thinking.