September 2006

538

The Psychologist Vol 19 No 9

Putting the psycheinto neuropsychologyI

TRAINED in neuropsychology in theearly 1980s. At that time (even morethan today) the field was dominated by

cognitive theory and methods. We learneda great deal about the manner in which themechanisms of language, memory, visualrecognition and the like were organised inthe brain, but we learned very little indeedabout those aspects of mental life that wereless readily amenable to information-processing models. Subjects like emotion,motivation and personality were barelytouched upon.

The great strength of scientificpsychology in general, andneuropsychology in particular, is that itconsiders the mind objectively. The mindis, after all, just a part of nature – it mustsomehow be reducible to lawfulmechanisms that can be precisely definedin objective, third-person terms. All theachievements of scientific psychologyderive from this. Especially in the case ofneuropsychology, the fact that the mind canbe literally objectified in the form of aphysical organ, is a great advantage.Studying mental mechanisms from theviewpoint of their physical basis inanatomy and physiology has enormousvalue from the natural-scientific standpoint,for it introduces into psychology all thepossibilities of measurability and controlthat a physical science provides. Thefleeting, fugitive stuff of the mind hasalways been an embarrassing handicap to scientifically minded psychologists.Neuropsychology changed all that; andthat, no doubt, was part of its appeal for me as I entered the field.

The problem with this approach,however, is the obvious fact that the mindis also not just another object. It is in thevery essence of what we call ‘mind’ that itis also a subjective thing. The mind could,in fact, perhaps best be defined as thesubjective aspect of nature. When we saythat the mind is just a part of nature, whatwe mean is that subjective experience – noless than other perceivable things – actuallyexists. We experience the world not only inthe form of physical objects that we cansee, hear and touch, but also in thesubjective form of feelings, volitions andintentions. Such things, too, are therefore

part of empirical reality. As such, they havecausal, explanatory power. Much behaviourwould be extremely difficult to understandwithout recourse to variables of this kind.Consider the case of suicide. How couldone possibly explain the causal chain ofevents in a suicide without reference toemotional feelings and subjective thoughts– such as ‘my life is too painful to endure’?Although it might be possible in someabsurdly roundabout way to exclude suchthings from our explanatory accounts, itwould clearly require disingenuous re-labelling of a great deal of what actuallyhappened. And what is the point of that?

Unlike every other bodily organ thebrain cannot be reduced to mechanismsalone; it cannot be adequately described as just a machine. In my view, the definingcharacteristic, the distinguishing feature ofthe brain is that – unlike the liver, lung orstomach – it possesses subjectivity; i.e. thecapacity to feel what it is like to be a brain.Moreover, it has the capacity tocommunicate that feeling to other minds;the human brain can speak and tell us whatit feels like to be what it is. Thesecapacities provide us with an absolutelyunique perspective on nature. And perhapsmost important of all: the mind has agency.Unlike any machine, it is master of its ownhouse, an intentional being in the world,possessed of that ineffable quality we call‘free will’.

Any science of the brain which ignoresthese facts will be ignoring the mostessential distinguishing features of itsobject of study. And yet that was preciselywhat the neuropsychology of the 1980sseemed to want to do.

When I asked my professors about these things – about the neural basis offeeling, meaning, and the intentional self –I quickly learnt that one was not supposedto ask such questions in neuropsychology. I am sure I am not the only person who

entered the field with the expectation that itconcerned itself with exactly those things.If psychology is not concerned with them,then what science is?

I later realised (in analysis, as ithappens) that I also had a more personalreason for wanting to understand theseaspects of the brain. When I was four yearsold, my six-year-old brother sustained atraumatic brain injury as a result of fallingfrom a clubhouse roof while our parentswere yachting. Needless to say, thisdramatically altered the course of his life aswell as the lives of all of us in the family.No doubt this event, and its painfulsequelae, impressed upon me in a mostdirect way the real profundity of the linkbetween mind and brain, between personand brain. It was, I am sure, the traumaticconsequences that this connection causedmy brother– more than any other singlecause – that aroused my interest in thephysical basis of the mind. And yet myteachers in the 1980s were telling me thatthings like personality and identity and selfwere not appropriate topics for a promisingyoung student of neuropsychology toconcern himself with. Such interests werein fact positively dangerous – at least as faras academic career prospects wereconcerned.

But still, my frustrations at thelimitations of the discipline grew. This wasthe origin of my interest in psychoanalysis.A friend in the philosophy department – ofall things – suggested that I attend aseminar on Freud’s Project for a ScientificPsychology. I remember well the mixedfeelings I had in that seminar. It felt as if I were committing treason. But I quicklylearned why I was there. Freud, for all hisfaults, was evidently a scientist of the kindthat I aspired to be: he had clearly made aserious attempt to incorporate the mind (thereal mind) into the realm of neurologicalscience. He seemed to be a truth-loving

MARK SOLMS on a perhaps unlikely alliance.

researcher who, when confronted with theenormous difficulties implied by the veryidea of a ‘science of subjectivity’ decidedthat his methods had to be adapted to thissubject matter, rather than the other wayround. The other approach could onlyresult in the exclusion of the human subjectfrom science.

I was soon compulsively readingeverything about Freud and his work that I could lay my hands on. To his enormouscredit, my supervisor – while clearlydisapproving – made no attempt to preventme, while simultaneously making clear thatnobody in neuropsychology today still tookseriously the speculations that Freud laidout in his 1895 ‘Project’, and even more sohis subsequent work.

I found it difficult to understand theprejudice. If Freud was wrong, or limitedby the primitive scientific methods of histime, then surely all we needed to do nowwas subject his conclusions to modernscientific scrutiny. Using moderntechnology, such as neuroimaging, it would surely be possible to test, revise, and replace his findings where necessary.Surely that was preferable to excluding the subject matter of psychoanalysis fromscience.

My determination to take the formercourse was greatly strengthened by theknowledge that Freud himself had been a neuropsychologist. He had in fact madevery valuable contributions to aphasiology,and had introduced the concept of agnosiain the early 1890s. He had only abandonedthe study of the brain – very reluctantly –due to the lack of any valid methods forexploring the neural basis of the complexmental phenomena he discerned in hisclinical work. This historical origin ofpsychoanalysis provided a usefulfoundation for re-integrating Freud’s latercontributions with neuropsychology. Freudwas, after all, one of us, he thought like a neuropsychologist, at least in what cameto be known as his ‘metapsychological’writings.

And so I decided to jump ship. In 1989 I began training at the Institute ofPsychoanalysis in London. In the ensuingyears I was gradually immersed in themethods and findings of that discipline –devoted to the study of real lived lives.Needless to say, there were once againmany frustrations and disappointmentsalong the way, but at least I was now amongcolleagues who were trying to understandthe things that had interested me all along.

What was lacking, of course, wasadequate scientific control, which wasclosely linked in my mind to the lack ofany serious effort on the part of analysts todiscover the neural basis of the complexmental processes that their clinical workhad uncovered. This, then, was thecontribution that I myself could make.Basing myself on the enormous advancesthat had occurred in neuropsychology inthe intervening century, I could find the

neural foundations that Freud had sought in vain. This could serve as a starting pointfor a new, deeper neuropsychology of theperson. I immediately set out to researchthe brain mechanisms of dreaming, myrationale being that dreaming was themental function that Freud (1900) haschosen to use as the starting point for hisfirst attempts to conceptualise the overallstructure and function of the mind. If Icould establish the neural correlates of thisaspect of his model, I assumed, I wouldhave forged something of a Rosetta Stonefor correlating the findings ofpsychoanalysis with those of modernneuropsychology. The results of my effortsin this direction quickly paid dividends(Solms, 1995, 1997, 2000).

Thereafter I broadened my focus invarious directions, concentrating mainly on complex neuropsychiatric phenomenaproduced by focal brain injury, such asanosognosia and confabulation. It waspossible to show, initially usingpsychoanalytic methods, that confabulationcannot be understood in terms of memoryand executive deficits alone; disinhibitedmotivational factors are at work whichpositively distort memory construction in a wishful direction (Fotopoulou et al.,2004; Kaplan-Solms & Solms, 2000).Likewise anosognosia seems at least in

part to involve ‘the repression phenomenathat form the cornerstone of classicalpsychoanalytical theory’ (Ramachandran,1994). The role of psychodynamic factors,here too, was initially demonstrated usingpsychoanalytic methods (Kaplan-Solms &Solms, 2000) and later confirmedexperimentally (Turnbull et al., 2005).

The unfolding results of this excitingwork have more than vindicated mydecision to take psychoanalysis seriously.On this basis, I and a growing number oflike-minded colleagues have established a new interdisciplinary area called neuro-psychoanalysis, the simple aim of which isto introduce the psyche intoneuropsychology – to demonstrate that thebrain cannot possibly be understood if thesubjective aspect of its nature is neglectedor even ignored (see www.neuro-psa.org).

In closing, if I may be forgiven forquoting a journalist in this context, I canthink of no better description of whatneuro-psychoanalysis aims to achieve thanwhat Fred Guterl wrote in Newsweek: ‘It isnot a matter of proving Freud wrong orright, but rather of finishing the job’. I amdelighted to be participating in that task.

■ Mark Solms is Professor inNeuropsychology at the University of CapeTown, South Africa. E-mail:msolms@humanities.uct.ac.za.

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Freud 150th anniversary

ReferencesFotopoulou, K., Solms, M. & Turnbull, O. (2004).Wishful reality

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complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vols 4 & 5.

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Guterl, F. (2002, 5 November).What Freud got right. Newsweek.

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psychoanalysis: Introduction to a depth neuropsychology.

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Ramachandran,V. (1994). Phantom limbs, neglect syndromes,

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Korsakoff’s syndrome. Bulletin of the British Psycho-Analytical

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Turnbull, O.H., Owen,V. & Evans, C.E.Y. (2005). Negative

emotions in anosognosia. Cortex, 41, 67–75.

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