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Mark Solms is a name synonymous with the field of neuropsychoanalysis. It was therefore no surprise that he had been asked to collect his papers into this volume, part of the Psychoanalytic Ideas series from Karnac Books edited by James Rose, usually dedicated to the best lectures and writings of analysts associated with the British Psychoanalytical Society.
What was a surprise to find out—and a delightful one—was the way Solms's career began. As a young neuropsychologist, with a Penguin copy of Freud in his back pocket and still several years away from starting his psychoanalytic training, he requested placement on the brain and spine rehabilitation unit of University of Cape Town Hospital, a move his peers told him was professional suicide. There, he and his wife, both working on their dissertations, took patients into psychotherapy and began listening to how the brain lesions these patients had sustained shaped their views and interactions with the world. Mark studied the evolution of their dreams as they recovered.
Not unlike the impact of the early studies of Freud, examining crayfish brains under a microscope in Brucke's lab, this first working experience has become central to Solms's approach. Turning an analytic ear towards symptoms usually dulled down as neglect, phantom limb, and apraxic error has been Solms's road to insights that have several times turned traditional neurological understanding on its head. Dr. Solms listens analytically but thinks neurologically. He believes absolutely that mind, the “subjective aspect of nature” (p. 36), exists as definitively as brain, and that the embrace of this duality can help us to new neuroscientific understanding.
The essays he has selected for this volume, several coauthored with Jaak Panksepp, Eleni Pantelis, and Oliver Turnbull, and ranging in original publication date from 1994 to 2014, are organized to take us through the way he defines neuropsychoanalysis and the conclusions drawn from his approach. In part I