5 things Freud got right about your brain

Below, Mark Solms shares five key insights from his new book, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing. Mark is a neuroscientist who took the unusual step of also training as a psychoanalyst. For 40 years, he has used the tools of modern neuroscience to test and refine psychoanalytic theory. A pioneering figure in neuropsychoanalysis, his research uncovered key brain mechanisms involved in dreaming, reshaping our understanding of the sleeping mind. He is also the science director of the American Psychoanalytic Association. What’s the Big Idea? Freud should not be dismissed as an outdated or discredited thinker. Many of his core insights anticipated modern neuroscience, and the task now is to update and correct psychoanalysis using contemporary scientific evidence. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Mark himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book. 1. Freud was a neuroscientist. Freud spent 23 years doing neuroscientific and neurological research. During that time, he published over 200 titles, four of which were books. He contributed to the discovery of neurons, the basic element of the nervous system, in the 1880s. In the 1890s, when th…