Why neuroscience keeps rediscovering Freud | Mark Solms

From the creator

Sigmund Freud is often dismissed today as a pseudoscientist. But what if the basic architecture of the mind that Freud sketched out in the 1890s turns out to match what modern neuroscience is discovering all over again, just under different names? In this talk, neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms makes the case that Freud was, in broad strokes, one of the first functional neuroscientists. Long before he became known for psychoanalysis, Freud spent two decades mapping the nervous system, and Solms argues that this early work laid the foundation for ideas we now treat as cutting-edge: functionalism, multiple memory systems, the unconscious mind, critical periods of development, and even the "predictive processing" models at the frontier of theoretical neuroscience today. But Solms doesn't let Freud off the hook. He also walks through where Freud got it badly wrong, including what he calls one of psychoanalysis' biggest errors: the claim that all pleasure is fundamentally sexual. Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/tdidbgt9EJ0 Mark Solms is a neuroscientist and psychoanalyst whose work includes discovering the brain mechanisms of dreaming. He is the translator of the Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (2024) and Science Director of the American Psychoanalytic Association. His book, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing, is available here: https://geni.us/Fd1g9VF This talk was filmed at the

Published 2026-08-21 · Watch on YouTube ↗
Availability and playback restrictions are controlled by the original channel.