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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Have since read to completion. Only thing to add, an interesting part of his life, inheriting a farm in South Africa and trying to apply more enlightened thinking to the management, employment, ownership and rights of what had basically been a slavery operation, with not the most intuitive outcome. Grist to my mill on the necessity of various “elites” in imperfect non-Utopian democracies. Fascinating. Overall, even more highly recommended.
[No mention of Maslow, despite the evolved time order of needs and drives ? Ditto the same in Goldstein’s latest on “mattering” – the human drive to matter, also no mention of Maslow? Previously mentioned Maslow rehabilitation alongside Freud in the “positive psychology” work of Chris Mace, an old (deceased) colleague of mine.]
Lots on classification and taxonomy – an “ontology of mind” (An “epistemological ontology of mind & body” of course 🙂
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Post Notes:
A Solms’ interview in The American Psychoanalyst in September 2026. This is really good. A clear and succinct summary of what we’re dealing with. Part of that clarity is in the relative position of psychopharmacology vs psychoanalytical therapies. Drugs have their place for some conditions, but the true power and effectiveness of talking therapies is largely dismissed. Solms gives “Big Pharma” both barrels:
“The main impediment to getting this kind of treatment delivered on a public health care scale is the profit motive of the diabolical pharmaceutical industry and its unholy alliance with the state. They’re just laughing all the way to the bank.”
If all you see is chemistry, it’s too easy to see a chemical solution as the *scientific* response. Reality is much more subtle & complex, neuroscience & psychology, requiring *subjective* understanding and interventions too.
#Dysmemics – easy beats truth.
#MoreThanScience – subjectivity matters.
A talk on the book from 19th August 2026. Emphasising that Freud was a neuroscientist before he was a psychotherapist.
Even if his understanding of neurons “firing” was “cartoon” in the Hameroff sense – “if they fire together, they wire together” – he discovered a lot about their structures and connectivity from the functional physiology perspective. He knew he had to get to the “psycho” subjective experience side of things, if he was to learn any more, long before Chalmers’ “hard problem” was coined. Solms himself, in the talk as in his 2021 book “The Hidden Spring”, emphasises the need to cross this Rubicon if we are to understand mind. It makes absolutely no sense to study mind independent of our subjective feelings.
The architectural layering is important vs Hameroff’s criticism, there’s a lot of physiological neuroscience detail about how the systems elements work that can be studied quite independently of the (substrate-independent) functionalism, and vice versa. The same functional organisation / architecture can be inferred from either side. The consciousness and memory “apparatus” must similarly comprise multiple layered systems. Conscious here and now, pre-conscious declarative, unconscious non-declarative. Freud had these system architecture understandings long before today’s commonly held standard views.
“All thinking is wishful thinking” Friston channelling original Freudian idea.
Like other scientific pioneers like Newton, like Darwin, Freud did get some things wrong, but they didn’t get “cancelled” for their errors. Freud was right in his pleasure principle that sex is primarily pleasurable not reproductive, but he went too far explaining all pleasures as essentially sexual when there are many other pleasure reward processes. He was wrong, but even where he wasn’t he was badly misunderstood when it came to the taxonomy of our “emotional needs”.
And an earlier talk / interview / Q&A – hat tip to Eddo Rats – also on his Freud book, but linking back to his Hidden Spring work.
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