The Mark Solms Legacy Series

In the Legacy Interview, Jane O’Rourke will explore with Mark the experiences and questions that have shaped his work, from his brother’s brain injury and his early years in neuropsychology to psychoanalysis and the development of neuropsychoanalysis.

The conversation will look at what contemporary neuroscience can tell us about some of Freud’s oldest questions about consciousness and the unconscious, dreaming and affect. For therapists, it raises practical questions: what actually brings about change in psychotherapy, how much weight insight really carries and how feeling and bodily states shape the patterns people bring into the consulting room.

Mark’s path began unexpectedly, in the neurology ward, not the therapist’s chair. His early research on brain injury and dreaming kept pointing him towards a deeper question: what is consciousness actually made of? His answer, developed over decades, is that it is built from feeling. For Mark, feelings such as hunger, pain, fear and loss aren’t just background noise; they are the most basic form of consciousness, registering moment by moment how well our needs are being met.

That question eventually led him to found neuropsychoanalysis—the field dedicated to bringing psychoanalytic and neuroscientific thinking into direct dialogue—and to establish its journal, Neuropsychoanalysis, as its institutional home. Freud has been central throughout. Mark spent more than three decades editing and translating the 24-volume Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, finally published in 2024. This year he followed it with a new book of his own, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing.

In conversation, we will explore:

• How his childhood experiences first led Mark to questions about personality, the self and the relationship between brain and mind
• How neuropsychoanalysis developed and why he believes psychoanalysis and neuroscience need to be brought into conversation together
• Which of Freud’s ideas still stand up in the light of modern neuroscience and which need revising
• What Mark’s research on dreaming, affect and consciousness tells us about consciousness and the feeling brain
• What is the difference between thinking and feeling, and why Mark argues affect—not thought—is the elemental form of consciousness, telling us how well our biological needs are being met
• What happens to Freud’s unconscious if consciousness itself is redefined as feeling rather than thinking
• What actually brings about change in psychotherapy—and what part insight plays, if any
• Can an artificial system ever genuinely feel or be conscious?

Mark’s guests

In his Legacy Interview, Mark will be joined by Lois Oppenheim, a long-standing colleague whose work spans psychoanalysis, literature and neuropsychoanalysis; Andrea Clarici, a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist whose clinical work brings neurological and psychoanalytic perspectives together; and John Dall’Aglio, a clinical psychology researcher and author of a forthcoming introduction to Mark’s work, who will reflect on how a younger generation is taking these ideas forward. Together, they will bring different perspectives on Mark as a teacher, clinician and thinker, and on the development and clinical relevance of his work.

“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

Interviewed by Jane O’Rourke

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 Clinical Masterclass is an opportunity to take neuropsychoanalysis into the consulting room. Mark will consider what contemporary neuroscience can add to Freud’s central clinical ideas, focusing on feeling, unconscious processes and how psychotherapy brings about change.

Mark will divide the Masterclass into three parts

Part 1: How feelings work and what they mean

Mark will begin with one of the central ideas in his work: that feeling is fundamental to consciousness. For Mark, feelings tell us how well or badly our underlying needs are being met. What might anxiety, anger, sadness or shame tell us about the needs and motivations beneath them, and how might this change the way we listen to what a patient is communicating?

Part 2: The unconscious, repression and defence

Mark will explore what becomes inaccessible to consciousness, why this happens and what it means clinically. He will consider what contemporary neuroscience can add to Freud’s thinking about the unconscious, repression and defence, including the difference between mental processes that simply operate outside awareness and those that cannot be consciously thought or felt. He will also look at resistance, and at what neuroscience suggests about why patients avoid certain material.

Part 3: Clinical technique and the therapeutic action of psychotherapy

The final part turns to what makes therapy therapeutic. If important parts of mental life are inaccessible to consciousness, what happens when something previously unconscious becomes available to awareness? What part does feeling play, why can patterns persist even when a patient consciously wants to change, and why is insight sometimes not enough?

Mark will consider what his work means for clinical technique, including how established ways of feeling, expecting and responding can begin to shift in therapy.

No specialist knowledge of neuroscience or neuropsychoanalysis is required.

“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