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Mark Solms's Hidden Spring is an accessible, highly engaging introduction to “the hard problem of consciousness” (p. 4) as well as a story of his lifelong journey toward a rigorous and persuasive solution by reuniting two long-estranged fields: neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Specialists and nonspecialists in both fields will enjoy navigating this relatively recent phase in Solms's emergent theory of consciousness. I say relatively recent because of the breakneck speed at which new discoveries continue to be made in what Solms in his Foreword to the Psychoanalytic Review special issue on Eric Kandel (, p. 468) has called our “golden age in neuroscience.” Solms's own thinking continues to evolve, and sometimes to struggle, as he tries to reconcile often
conflicting perspectives on the workings of the human psyche—or what Oliver Sacks calls “the experiencing, active, living ‘I‘” (as quoted on p. 14).
The psyche first captured Solms's imagination as a 4-year-old child, as he watched his brother, who suffered brain damage in a bad fall, suddenly become “not the same” (p. 8). This was also Solms's first experience of the feeling Freud calls “the uncanny”—a feeling characterized by anxiety and that, in Solms's case, helped subsequently to precipitate a prolonged youthful depressive episode.
Psychoanalysis treats anxiety and depression as neurotic symptoms of unconscious conflicts and seeks to understand and resolve these conflicts by encouraging patients to talk, as freely and frankly as possible, about what it's “like” to have such feelings (and the thoughts that accompany them). But conventional neuroscience (along with behavioral and cognitive psychology) has remained distrustful, indeed largely dismissive of subjective accounts of consciousness and of the psychoanalytic theories that describe it.
Solms, however, has managed to keep a more open mind (so to speak). His neuroscientific interest in the subjective experience of consciousness led not only to his early rese