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The aim of this book is no more and no less than to introduce a new scientific method that is able to combine psychoanalysis and neuroscience in order to map the mind, or rather the mind-brain relationship. Solms describes this aim as ‘modest but far-reaching’. I found the book intensely exciting, especially Part Two, ‘Observations’, the clinical section of the book, which made the ideas contained in Part One, ‘Foundations’, and Part Three, ‘Integration’, so much more accessible to a working clinician like myself. Indeed this section might be described as the bedrock of the book, based as it is on research with 35 patients with localized cerebral lesions, 12 of whom are described in this part of the book. Before embarking on this task, Solms rejects attempts to reunite neuroscience and depth psychology via other neurosciences, arguing that neuropsychology should be the neuroscience of first choice for such an enterprise as it is already both clinically and psychologically based.
This is an unashamedly Freudocentric book. Freud's contribution as a neurologist as well as a psychoanalyst is clearly documented. Chapter one might be described as a sophisticated attempt to show Freud not only as the father of psychoanalysis but also as the father of neuropsychoanalysis. Solms emphasizes that for Freud the neuroses were not non-physical disorders, but they were physiological rather than anatomical and could best be understood by reference to ‘a functional system dynamically represented between the elements of the brain’. This dynamic neuropsychological view of Freud's work is seen as a natural starting-point for a dialogue with neuropsychology.
The Drs Solms' method of study is underpinned by that developed by the Russian neurologist Luria, himself indebted to Freud in his earlier years. Although he renounced any connection under the pressures of living in the Soviet Union, Solms notes his ‘life-long commitment to the clinical method and intensive study of single cases’. Lur