The world-leading neuroscientist who thinks that Freud was right about everything

Sly Saint · Nov 7, 2024

Amad “shrink” high on cocaine, obsessed with sex, death and bizarre theories of the mind – that’s how many people remember Sigmund Freud, whose work has given us concepts like Freudian slips, the Oedipus complex and penis envy.

But Prof Mark Solms, of the University of Cape Town, has other ideas. “Freud is to the field of psychology and psychiatry what Darwin was to genetics, or Newton to physics,” he says. “Before Freud there was really no understanding of the psychological aspects of mental disorders and distress.”

A neuroscientist by training, beginning his work in the 1980s, Solms was fascinated by consciousness, and especially by the parts of life that biology can’t explain, such as “feelings, and why we experience memories”. He says: “But I was told not to ask questions like that, and that it was bad for my career.”

Solms then went on to train as a psychoanalyst, a decision that he was told “was like an astronomer studying astrology”. “But I thought it was the right thing to do,” he says. “Both disciplines had a lot to learn from the other.”

Freud’s ideas are treated with scepticism as much today as they were then, almost fifty years later. Given his outlandish theories about sex and his unscientific methods, the doctor was discredited by later psychologists, Solms says. But there is still an awful lot that he “should be given credit for”.
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Trauma causes mental illness
It might seem like an obvious fact today, but Freud was the first person to consider “the role of trauma” in why people develop mental illnesses.

Freud put this forward in his theories about hysteria, a mental illness that was thought to cause anxiety, chest pain, fainting and changes in sex drive in women. Freud believed that his patients with hysteria had “a disorder of the uterus”. Again “ludicrous”, Solms says, but what was then called hysteria is in fact real.

Solms says that “today we call it functional neurological disorder” – a neurological condition causing muscle weakness, movement problems and convulsions, but with no actual cause in the brain. However, it isn’t a condition that only affects women.

“Not every patient with functional neurological disorder has a psychological trauma, but a very huge percentage of them have, way more than in the healthy population,” says Solms.
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The world-leading neuroscientist who thinks that Freud was right about everything

Jonathan Edwards · Nov 7, 2024

I know Solms. He is a pleasant chap but his theory of consciousness is wrong too.
I hadn't realised just how uncritical his thinking is in other areas.

Hoopoe · Nov 7, 2024

Freud put this forward in his theories about hysteria, a mental illness that was thought to cause anxiety, chest pain, fainting and changes in sex drive in women.
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Sounds like small fiber neuropathy or similar illnesses.

I suspect at the time of Freud these were unknown or very underdiagnosed.

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