Interview with Professor and Psychoanalyst Mark Solms

Mark Solms is a psychoanalyst and a lecturer in neurosurgery at the St Bartholomew's Hospital and the Royal London School of Medicine, Chair of neuropsychology, University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Director of the Arnold Pfeffer Center for Neuro-Psychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

I am familiar with his work through his book, The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of the Subjective Experience (2002), an excellent attempt to unite some of the surviving ideas of psychoanalytic theory with what we have been learning about the mind-brain through neuroscience and neurobiology.

Interview with Professor Mark Solms, Chair of the IPA Research Committee

This video was shot at the recent IPA congress in Prague, August 2013. Interview by Kevin Billinghurst.

“The psychoanalytic method, for all of its faults, is the best method we have for dealing with all the shifting sands and subtle complexities of subjectivity.

The single biggest mistake that’s been made in brain science is to think that we can study the brain only as an object"

Here is some info from his university web page.

Mark Solms, Ph.D. (WITS)

Research interests

• Brain mechanisms of dreaming, emotion, motivation.
• Psychological mechanisms of confabulation and anosognosia syndromes.

Teaching Interests

• Neuropsychology – Research and Clinical.

Selected Publications

• Solms, M (2013) The conscious id. Neuropsychoanalysis, 15: In Press.
• Panksepp, J. & Solms, M. (2012) What is neuropsychoanalysis? Clinically relevant studies of the minded brain. Trends in Cognitive Science, 16: 6-8.
• Solms, M. (2011) Neurobiology and the neurological basis of dreaming. In P. Montagna & S. Chokroverty (eds.) Handbook of Clinical Neurology, 98 (3rd series) Sleep Disorders – Part 1. New York: Elsevier, pp. 519-544.
• Solms, M. & Panksepp, J. (2010) Why depression feels bad. In E. Perry, D. Collerton, F. LeBeau & H. Ashton (eds.) New Horizons in the Neuroscience of Consciousness. John Benjamins, pp 169-179.
• Turnbull, O. & Solms, M. (2007) Awareness, desire, and false beliefs. Cortex., 43: 1083-90 [Target paper, with 10 open peer commentaries].
• Fotopoulou, A., Conway, M.A., & Solms, M. (2007) Confabulation: Motivated Reality Monitoring. Neuropsychologia, 45: 2180-2190.
• Solms, M. (2006) “Freud” and Bullitt: A previously unknown manuscript by Freud. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 54: 1263-1298.
• Gamwell, L. & Solms, M. (2006) From Neurology to Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud’s Drawings and Diagrams of the Mind. Binghampton: State University of New York.
• Solms, M. & Turnbull, O. (2002) The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience. London & New York: Other/Karnac.
• Solms, M. (2001) ‘The neurochemistry of dreaming: cholinergic and dopaminergic hypotheses’. In Perry, E., Ashton, H. & Young, A. (eds.) The Neurochemistry of Consciousness. Advances in Consciousness Research series (M. Stamenov, series ed.). John Benjamin’s Publishing Co., pp. 123-131.
• Solms, M. (2000) Dreaming and REM sleep are controlled by different brain mechanisms. Behav. Brain Sci., 23: 843-50 [Target paper with 39 peer commentaries].
• Kaplan-Solms, K. & Solms, M.(2000) Clinical Studies in Neuro-Psychoanalysis: Introduction to a Depth Neuropsychology. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association Monograph Series, No 5. Madison CT: International Universities Press; London: Karnac Books.