I’ve mentioned I’ve been reading Mark Solms’ latest since early Feb, before the birthday holiday break, disrupted because I lent out the physical copy of which I’d only read and annotated about 20%. Was already loving it, which is why I’d been carrying it around not wanting to miss opportunities to read. I’ve since acquired a Kindle copy and I’m now about 60% through. So many notes and highlights, that I need to write one of my interim reviews.
Already a fan of his previous book “The Hidden Spring” which I have regularly paraphrased as “The conscious, wilful mind is affect all the way down!“. Part of my #MoreThanScience agenda – a science that denies the subjective is sorely inadequate, excluding any possibility of understanding the most complex system we need to understand – our brains & minds, individually & collectively. (That and “The Friston Free Energy Principle and Active Inference” as the main explanatory theories of “How?” the affective mind emerges from the physiological workings of the brain.)
Solm’s latest is “The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing“. As both a neuroscientist and a psychoanalyst / psychotherapist he’s obviously well-placed to tackle that agenda. We discover he’s also best-placed to educate us on Freud, having recently completed a 30yr project of translating and re-translating the entire Freud oeuvre from the original German.
As with Hofstadter, we could say a lot here about the work of a translator between languages that don’t have words for the same concepts. Suffice to say Strachey’s previous translations of Freud introduced some strange Freudian neologisms (ego, id and superego, etc) that were never in the original (I, it and we).
Obviously, my primary interest is in Solms’ (like McGilchrist’s) contribution to understanding how our individual & collective minds understand and act in the world, especially in addressing the complex & systemic poly-crises / meta-crisis 21st century humanity face in the world. And in doing so, overcoming the limits of objective science.
You might be interested in those same issues, whether you see the limits of objective science or not?
There’s also huge element of rehabilitating Freud in a world that thinks he’s been debunked as an unscientific coke-head. If that’s you, go read. Freud’s intuitions and descriptions did in fact get the big picture mostly right AND he was himself very scientific, even in basic terms of Popperian falsification. He’s also very much part of my #NothingNewUnderTheSun agenda. Once a number of muddled details and confusions are corrected in his and previous translators (and critics) words, he’s pretty much state of the art today.
Sex and sexual drives was notoriously one of those confusions, over-simplified by his critics, but confused and confusing none-the-less. Interesting to hear Solms’ corrected understandings in themselves, but also an extremely valuable section for those interested in the whole non-binary sex / trans-gender “woke-war” in the face of naturally evolved sexual-dimorphism. Highly recommended if that’s one of your interests. It’s one of mine simply as a topical and seriously problematic example of where objective science fails us more generally when it comes to rights and culture. [Eros and “jouissance” in pleasure generally.]
“The Only Cure” is also an autobiography of Solm’s life in neuroscience and psychology, from his earliest interests, his life as a practicing scientist and a practicing analyst-therapist, not forgetting that 30 years as a translator of Freud. Some fascinating descriptions of psychoanalytic / psychotherapeutic “talking cures” from his own case-book- and important comparisons with the relative failure of medicalised drug therapies. You may find yourself nodding along to your own psychoanalyses as you read.
Easy reading, light-hearted jocular, even irreverent style for such deep, complex technical material. Highly recommended.
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[More later on completion.]
[No mention of Maslow, despite the evolved time order of needs and drives ?]
[Lots on classification and taxonomy – an “ontology of mind”.]
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