What makes us feel? Where does consciousness come from? What do we even mean by the unconscious? And what does our growing understanding of the brain change about the way we practise psychotherapy?

This two-part MINDinMIND Legacy Series brings together a Legacy Interview exploring Mark Solms’ life and ideas with a Clinical Masterclass taking those ideas into the consulting room.

Mark Solms has spent his career looking for the link between the brain, made up of neurons, synapses and grey and white matter, and the mind that feels, dreams, desires and suffers. He brings Freud and modern neuroscience together to rethink some of psychology’s most fundamental ideas about consciousness, emotion and the hidden workings of the mind.

In the Legacy Interview, Jane O’Rourke will explore with Mark how he came to this work, from witnessing the devastating impact of a childhood brain injury on his brother, through his early career in neuropsychology and psychoanalysis, to the development of neuropsychoanalysis.

It is a chance to understand how neuropsychoanalysis developed, the questions it was trying to answer, and what bringing psychoanalysis and neuroscience together can add to our understanding of subjective experience and the workings of the mind.

With special guests Lois Oppenheim, Andrea Clarici and John Dall’Aglio, this wide-ranging conversation will also delve into Freud, dreaming, consciousness and affect.

In the Clinical Masterclass, Mark will take these ideas into clinical practice, exploring how neuropsychoanalysis can inform the way we understand our patients and what happens in psychotherapy.

The Masterclass will be structured around three parts:

• Neuropsychoanalysis and affect: what feelings are, where they come from and why they matter
• What the mind keeps out of awareness, why it happens and what this means clinically
• How psychotherapy brings about change: implications for clinical technique and therapeutic action