The publisher’s site for the book is <here>.

The podcast is <here>.

Regarding Fliess and Bonaparte, I said Freud told Bonaparte to “bury” the documents. That was overly literal. What Jones said was,

[Freud] was indignant about the story of the sale [of the Fliess documents] and characteristically gave his advice in the form of a Jewish anecdote. It was the one about how to cook a peacock. “You first bury it in the earth for a week and then dig it up again.” “And then?” “Then you throw it away!”

Dr. Solms thought that Bonaparte acquired the documents from Paula Fichtl. But the Jones account comports with some correspondence between Bonaparte and Freud. See Masson’s introduction to The Complete Letters.

Theodor Meynert 1833 – 1892

The reader will find no other definition of ‘Psychiatry’ in this book but the one given on the title page: Clinical Treatise on Diseases of the Fore-Brain.

The historical term for psychiatry, i.e., ‘treatment of the soul’, implies more than we can accomplish, and transcends the bounds of accurate scientific investigation.

Jean-Martin Charcot 1825-1893

Charcot thought that this clinical data would someday be replaced by physiological and localizable ‘dynamic lesions.’ Freud wrote:

I, on the contrary, assert that the lesion in hysterical paralyses must be completely independent of the anatomy of the nervous system, since in its paralyses and other manifestations hysteria behaves as though anatomy did not exist or as though it had no knowledge of it.

Dualism / mysticism

Solms wrote:

In all his surviving papers, published and unpublished, and all the reports his contemporaries made about his stated opinions, there is never any hint of metaphysical dualism – of disembodied mind stuff. He was a scientist, ever the biologist of the mind.

I pressed back about (1) ego, id, superego, and (2) the Schopenhauer extract from RSE Volume 19?

Regarding Freud accusing Jung of mysticism. I asked about these two Freud quotes:

Everyone possesses in his own unconscious an instrument with which he can interpret the utterances of the unconscious in other people

and

The Ucs. of one human being can react upon that of another, without passing through the Cs. … [D]escriptively speaking, the fact is incontestable’

Freud’s Conceptualizing the Aphasias (1891).

Solms referred to “a passage so inspired that I sometimes find myself looking it up again, just to confirm that it is real.” Here it is:

We know only that the fibres which reach the cerebral cortex after their progression through other grey tissues still maintain some relationship to the periphery of the body, but they can no longer deliver an image which resembles it topologically [i.e., which literally ‘projects’ it]. They contain the body periphery in the same way as – to borrow an example from the subject with which we are concerned here [i.e., language] – a poem contains the alphabet, in a complete rearrangement, serving different purposes, with manifold links between the individual topological elements, whereby some of them may be rendered several times, others not at all. If it were possible to trace in detail this rearrangement which takes place from the level of the spinal projection up to the cerebral cortex, one would probably find that the governing principle is purely functional, and that topographic relations are maintained only in so far as they fit in with the claims of function. As there is no indication that this rearrangement is reversed in the cerebral cortex to produce a topographically complete projection, we may suppose that, in general, the body periphery is no longer contained topologically in the higher parts of the brain, including the cortex, but only functionally

From Freud 1891 to Luria and modern neuroscience

Solms wrote:

Luria’s theory of ‘dynamic localization’ built directly upon Freud’s much earlier critique of Broca-style localizationism in his Conceptualizing the Aphasias (1891). The essential points that Freud made there were, first, that language is a psychological function the disorders of which must be analysed in psychological terms, not physiological ones. However, second, the complex functional system for language arises from an interaction between elementary component functions which can be anatomically localized. Therefore, third, the functional system for language (as Luria called it; Freud called it the ‘language apparatus’) is something virtual. These three conclusions regarding language were generalizable to the mental apparatus as a whole. Thus, Freud the neurologist argued, just as Freud the psychoanalyst would later: ‘psychical structures in general must never be regarded as localized in organic elements of the nervous system but rather, as one might say, between them’ (Freud, 1900, p. 546). Any modern neuropsychologist will recognize this conceptualization as their own.

Alexander Romanovich Luria 1902-1977

‘The singling out of a symptom is not the end but rather the beginning of [this] work, which continues in depth,’ He called this process ‘dynamic localization’.

Solms writes:

[Luria’s] most basic insight: mental life arises from interactions between multiple component functions located in widely distributed parts of the brain

For Luria … neuropsychological science did not entail reduction of complex psychological functions to simple physiological mechanisms, but rather what he called ‘qualification’. He was interested in the peculiar psychological character of each mental impairment, and the pattern of other psychological symptoms that occurred alongside it. The thing you could describe in physiological terms – the thing that could be assigned to specific anatomical tissues – was not the mental capacity as a whole, but just a component, which might play a part in many different functions.II To map entire psychological systems, such as those for language or memory, you had to note all the deficits arising from each little piece of tissue damage…. Only when he had the full clinical picture could he begin to look for an underlying factor that might explain each of the psychological observations.

Project for a scientific psychology (1895)

I didn’t have the time to ask Dr. Solms about a common—and I think egregious—misunderstanding about Project. For example, consider Peter D. Kramer:

The Freudian man, the man of the Project, acts only because he must, on his journey toward inertia. For Freud, intimacy, self-knowledge, and even awareness were states humans entered faute de mieux—the price exacted by reality on creatures born to prefer isolation and ignorance. The phenomenon most readily explained by the Project is repression of unwelcome ideas: We seek not to be perturbed.

Solms, M. (2020), ‘New project for a scientific psychology: General scheme’, Neuropsychoanalysis, 22: 5–35.

Pribram had called Freud’s Project ‘the Rosetta Stone of psychoanalysis and neuroscience’, and Rosetta Stones are of course primarily of interest to translators. Rather than merely translating the German into English, however, I wanted to replace Freud’s original functional concepts with functionally identical modern ones. The paper appeared in an interdisciplinary journal, accompanied by open peer commentaries written by psychoanalysts and neuroscientists who shared Pribram’s aspirations for the future of mental science.

Didn’t have time to discuss two other points I had hoped to.

1) re Dennett, Daniel

In my interview with Prof. Dannett, he indicated he completely agreed with Freud regarding the following:

Many people, both inside and outside science, are satisfied with the assumption that consciousness alone is psychical ... It is generally agreed, however, that these conscious processes do not form unbroken sequences which are complete in themselves; there would thus be no alternative left to assuming that there are physical or somatic processes which are concomitant with the psychical ones and which we should necessarily have to recognize as more complete than the psychical sequences ... If so, it of course becomes plausible to lay the stress in psychology on these somatic processes, to see in them the true essence of what is psychical ... The majority of philosophers ... dispute this and declare that the idea of something psychical being unconscious is self-contradictory. But that is precisely what psychoanalysis is obliged to assert, and this is its second fundamental hypothesis. It explains the supposedly somatic concomitant phenomena as being what is truly psychical, and thus in the first instance disregards the quality of consciousness.

I wanted to ask Prof. Solms his thoughts on this Freud quotation (whether he too agreed with it, or how he understood its place vis-a-vis modern neuroscience.

2) Kurt Eissler

How fascinating that Dr. Solms knew Kurt Eissler! Eissler formed the classical, medicalized consensus regarding Freudian theory, a consensus that held sway in the U.S. from the 1950s to the 1970s. Eissler formed this conception in reaction to the Alexander and French theory of “corrective emotional experience.” Eissler wrote:

Alexander and French’s book will be a challenge to those who still believe that Freud—in his theories of the human mind and [in] his technique of investigation and therapy—laid the foundation not only for a scientific psychology but also created an instrument with which to liberate the individual from the shackles of his ancestors and of his society.

Heady stuff!

I also wanted to ask Dr. Solms about a key piece of that mid-century consensus, viz., Gill’s (1951) assertion that psychoanalysis was the correct treatment choice for a “middle range” of patients: viz., the middle range between too sick and too healthy. If the patient was too sick, psychoanalysis could cause decompensation. “Supportive” therapy was indicated. If the “patient” was too healthy, psychoanalysis would be boring to them. But they might benefit from one of the “expressive” modalities.