Mark Solms Legacy Interview

• 2-hour live MINDinMIND Legacy Interview
• Recording access
• 2-hour CPD/CE certificate

When Mark was a child his elder brother suffered a serious brain injury. It left Mark with questions about what happens to personality, emotion and the self when the brain is changed.

That experience eventually led him towards neuropsychology and, later, psychoanalysis. Why did neuroscience alone prove insufficient for understanding the subjective experience of his patients? What did psychoanalysis offer that conventional approaches to the brain could not?

Freud began his career in neurology. In 1895, in his Project for a Scientific Psychology, he tried to explain mental life in biological terms, but the science of the time could only take him so far.

Mark does not argue that Freud was simply right. He asks which of Freud’s ideas still stand up in the light of what we now know about emotion, memory, dreaming, motivation and consciousness. Which need revising? And which may have been dismissed too quickly?

Mark’s route into Freud was also personal. Growing up in what is now Namibia, he spoke an old form of German which gave him a particular familiarity with the language of Freud’s original writing. He went on to become the authorised editor and translator of the 24-volume Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, published in 2024 after more than three decades’ work.

We will ask Mark how working so closely with Freud has changed his own thinking, and what he believes Freud still has to offer psychotherapists today.

“A landmark work that we believe will be a major contribution to psychoanalytic theory and history.”

Neuropsychoanalysis

Mark’s work goes far beyond Freud.

His research showed that dreaming is not simply the same as REM sleep, and suggested that dreams are closely linked to the brain’s motivational systems.

It then led him to another question: what makes us conscious at all?

Mark argues that affect, or feeling, is the elemental form of consciousness. Feeling tells us how well or badly our basic needs are being met, linking drives and bodily regulation to conscious experience.

“To say this work is encyclopaedic is to diminish its poetic, psychological and theoretical achievement. This is required reading.”

Susie Orbach, psychoanalyst and author of Fat is a Feminist Issue

For therapists, Mark’s work raises a basic clinical question: what is actually changing when therapy works?

He describes much of unconscious mental life in terms of patterns and predictions that have become automatic. Some may have developed as useful ways of responding to earlier experience, but can continue long after they are no longer helpful.

We will ask Mark how these patterns can change, what role insight plays, and how psychotherapy can help new ways of feeling and responding become possible.

Mark has also been giving serious thought to whether an artificial system could ever genuinely feel or become conscious. We will ask what this would mean for our responsibilities towards such systems, and whether they could suffer, have needs or possess a subjective life of their own.

“Solms’ vital work has never ignored the lived, felt experience of human beings. His ideas look a lot like the future to me.”

Siri Hustvedt, award-winning novelist and writer on neuroscience, psychoanalysis and the mind

“Extraordinary on so many levels.”

Brian Eno, musician and artist, on The Only Cure

Mark will be joined by three guests, each bringing a different perspective on his work, his influence and its clinical relevance.

Lois Oppenheim

Lois Oppenheim, PhD, is Professor Emerita at Montclair State University, where she was named University Distinguished Scholar. She is also a faculty member and Scholar Associate Member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and an Honorary Member of the Psychoanalytic Society of the William Alanson White Institute.

Her work brings together literature, psychoanalysis, the arts and neuropsychoanalysis. She is the author of books including Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion, A Curious Intimacy: Art and Neuro-Psychoanalysis and Neuroaesthetics and Psychoanalysis: Curiosity, Creativity, and Crisis.

Lois first met Mark when she enrolled in his course on neuropsychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She had little scientific knowledge and remembers that Mark never made anyone feel foolish for asking a question or for not knowing something.

His teaching helped her bring together areas she had previously thought about separately, and she has followed his work closely ever since.

Lois will reflect on Mark as a teacher and on the effect his ideas have had on her own work. She will also help us think about what his work can offer clinicians, particularly in understanding subjective experience, emotion and the relationship between what is happening in the brain and what a patient is actually feeling.

Andrea Clarici

Andrea Clarici, MD, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist based in Trieste, Italy. He is a Professor at the University of Trieste, where he teaches Advanced Dynamic Psychology in the Faculty of Psychology and Child Neuropsychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine.

His clinical work has included psychoanalytic psychotherapy with patients with brain lesions, and he is currently involved in research exploring psychoanalytic psychotherapy with people with a range of organic and functional disorders. This work sits at the meeting point between psychoanalysis, neurology and neuropsychoanalysis.

Andrea is International Liaison Officer for the Society of Neuropsychoanalysis and Chief Coordinator and Director of the Center for the Dialogue in Neuropsychoanalysis in Trieste.

He has translated several of Mark Solms’s books into Italian, including Clinical Studies in Neuro-Psychoanalysis, The Brain and the Inner World and The Hidden Spring. He has also edited a collection of Mark’s writings and is currently translating his latest book, The Only Cure, for publication in Italy in December 2026.

In the interview, Andrea will focus on the clinical side of Mark’s work: what happens when changes in the brain alter emotion, behaviour and a person’s experience of themselves, and how psychoanalytic and neurological ways of understanding a patient can be brought together in clinical practice.

John Dall’Aglio

John Dall’Aglio is a Clinical Psychology PhD Candidate at Duquesne University and a Predoctoral Clinical Psychology Intern at Northeast Florida State Hospital. His clinical work includes psychodynamic psychotherapy, group psychotherapy and psychological assessment, and his research centres on psychoanalysis, neuroscience and Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis.

He is the author of A Lacanian Neuropsychoanalysis: Consciousness Enjoying Uncertainty (Palgrave, 2024) and the forthcoming Mark Solms: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge). He received the 2021 New Author Prize from the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

John first came across Mark’s work while still at school, and it played a major part in his decision to study clinical psychology, neuroscience and psychoanalysis.

He is particularly interested in how Mark’s work allows clinicians to think about the brain without losing sight of the patient’s inner experience. His own research asks what happens when psychoanalytic ideas are tested alongside neuroscience, and what this can add to the way we understand clinical material.

In the interview, John will reflect on how Mark’s work shaped his own path and how a younger generation is beginning to develop these ideas further.

Professor Mark Solms is a neuropsychologist, psychoanalyst and leading researcher in neuropsychoanalysis. He is Director of Neuropsychology at the Neuroscience Institute of the University of Cape Town and Co-Chair of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society.

His early research on the brain mechanisms of dreaming became a major part of the development of neuropsychoanalysis. Since then, much of his work has focused on questions that sit at the heart of both psychoanalysis and neuroscience: how unconscious processes work, where feelings come from, what motivates us, and how consciousness arises. More recently, he has worked increasingly in computational neuroscience, looking at how the brain regulates bodily and emotional states and what this may tell us about Freud’s ideas on drive, affect and the self.

He has published more than 350 scientific papers and nine books, including The Neuropsychology of Dreams, The Brain and the Inner World, written with Oliver Turnbull, The Feeling Brain, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness and, most recently, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing (2026). His honours include the Sigourney Prize and the Sloan-Menninger-Shevrin Prize for established researchers.

Mark is also the authorised editor and translator of the 24-volume Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud and is currently working on the forthcoming four-volume Complete Neuroscientific Works of Sigmund Freud.

Jane O’Rourke is a Child, Adolescent and Family Psychotherapist, broadcaster and Founder of MINDinMIND.

Through the MINDinMIND Legacy Interview Series, she records the lives, thinking, clinical wisdom and intellectual history of leading figures in psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, attachment, trauma and developmental science.

This event is for psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, clinical and counselling psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors, researchers and trainees interested in psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, consciousness, the unconscious and how change happens in therapy.

It will be especially relevant to those interested in neuropsychoanalysis, Freud, dreaming, emotion and the relationship between brain, mind and psychotherapy.

No specialist knowledge of neuroscience or Mark’s work is required.