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In The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness, Mark Solms demonstrates the value of neuropsychoanalytic ideas in furthering the psychoanalytic enterprise. His work is valuable for both the novice and the experienced clinician. In this volume he explores several themes: (1) feelings as indicators of the presence or absence of homeostasis, (2) the importance of understanding the concept of “free energy” as described by Karl Friston; and (3) the nature of consciousness, considered to be the “hard problem” of neuroscience. Dating back to Freud's ideas, many neuroscientists, including contemporary figures like Joseph LeDoux, have considered consciousness to be a function of the cerebral cortex. However, Solms, the late Jaak Panksepp, Antonio Damasio, and Bjorn Merker consider the origin of consciousness to lie in the subcortical region.
For Solms, any state of feeling is exactly equal to experiencing the state of consciousness. One is always conscious when one feels (good or bad and everything in between). And so, to feel is to be conscious. He expands on some of the universally shared human feeling states (pain, fear, panic, sorrow), which come from the part of the brain that we share with other vertebrates. Hence his title, The Hidden Spring. Solms demonstrates that cognition is mainly unconscious, whereas consciousness is engineerable, or, as Friston, a computational neuroscientist, has described it: a problem of the physics of brain activity. For Solms the “hard problem” of consciousness is easier to solve by considering that feelings lead to consciousness, that affects arise from subcortical areas as in other mammals, and that, as a result of the new field of computational neuroscience, consciousness is artificially producible.
There are twelve chapters in the book, plus an introduction and a postscript. The chapter topics include dreams; before and after Freud; the cortical fallacy; what is experienced; feelings; the source; the free energy principle