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It is a privilege to have been asked to review this momentous publication, something that the psychoanalytic world has been anticipating for a long time now - far too long for the expression ‘with bated breath’ to have any realistic application here: no one could hold their breath for that long!
For more than one reason, it is a particular pleasure to review this updated version of the Standard Edition. When I trained at the BPAS, Mark Solms was one of my Freud teachers - by some distance the best of them. I have since gone on to be a frequent Freud teacher myself, in various psychoanalytic contexts, and I have always kept the folder containing my notes from his seminars close at hand. Even before becoming an analyst, my educational and academic path through literature and philosophy provided access to many impressively erudite versions of Freud: those of Lionel Trilling, Phillip Reiff, Harold Bloom, Jacques Lacan, Paul Ricoeur, Joseph Sandler, Richard Wollheim, Jonathan Lear, to name just some. Solms’ Freud is as expansive and intellectually stimulating as these, but with the additional benefit of how seriously he takes Freud’s claim to being a scientist of the mind. Solms has now, of course, become a world-renowned neuroscientist in his own right, a development that might well have carried him far afield, well away from anything to do with psychoanalysis. This long-awaited publication of the RSE (there is also a companion publication of Freud’s neuroscientific writings in the works) is as much evidence as could be required that he is still flying the psychoanalytic flag; it remains his mission not to break, but to consolidate and further forge, the intimate connections between the Freudian mind and the scientific brain.
A perhaps more personal reason has to do with the fact that Solms and I are fellow South Africans and I am frankly proud that someone from our background can now be credited with producing this new version of Freud’s writings. Moreover, during approx