Below, Mark Solms shares five key insights from his new book, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing.
Mark is a neuroscientist who took the unusual step of also training as a psychoanalyst. For 40 years, he has used the tools of modern neuroscience to test and refine psychoanalytic theory. A pioneering figure in neuropsychoanalysis, he conducted research that uncovered key brain mechanisms involved in dreaming, reshaping our understanding of the sleeping mind. He is the science director of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Freud should not be dismissed as an outdated or discredited thinker. Many of his core insights anticipated modern neuroscience, and the task now is to update and correct psychoanalysis using contemporary scientific evidence.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Mark himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.
Freud spent 23 years doing neuroscientific and neurological research. During that time, he published more than 200 titles, four of which were books. He contributed to the discovery of neurons, the basic element of the nervous system, in the 1880s. In the 1890s, when the synapse was discovered—that’s the junction that connects neurons—Freud was the first person to interpret it as the site where memories are formed.
In 1895, Freud formulated the idea that neurons that fire together wire together. This is now known as Hebb’s law [Donald Hebb was a Canadian psychologist], even though Hebb formulated this law decades later. Freud discovered the origin of one of the cranial nerves, then called the acoustic nerve, in the brain stem. We now call it the vestibular-cochlear nerve. Every medical student learns the anatomy of these cranial nerves.
Freud was one of Europe’s leading experts on a movement disorder known as cerebral palsy. In 1891, he published a breakthrough book on the brain mechanisms of language, showing that language is the product of a functional system distributed across many different brain regions. This provided the transition to psychoanalysis because language function is a psychological function.