An Interview With Mark Solms

In Global Perspectives, we bring you interviews with psychoanalysts from around the world in an effort to explore the influence of culture, politics and socio-economic aspects of the country and what effect they have on training, theory development, clinical technique and psychoanalytic practice in general.

Keywords: Apartheid, dreams, Freud, neuro-psychoanalysis, South African politics, trauma.

As I drove into the Solms Delta Winery, where I was to interview Dr. Mark Solms on his family farm in the Franschhoek region in South Africa, I was immediately in awe of the beauty surrounding me. The wine country in Franschhoek is a magical setting filled with beautiful mountains as the backdrop to the hills, valleys and lush green lawns and flowers as far as the eye can see. And this place was no exception. Being early for my appointment, I had time, with my husband Michael, to walk around a bit and get a sense of the place that the Solms family has owned and operated for the past 325 years.

The farm is anchored by the main house and several outbuildings, all built in the elegant Cape Dutch style. These buildings, built on the backs of slaves from pre-colonial days, are characterised by their white stucco walls, tall stained glass windows and covered by thick, neatly groomed thatched roofs. In addition to the house, barns and wine making facilities, Mr. Solms has created a museum that explains the farm’s history from 1740 to the present, with an unflinching emphasis on the slave heritage which was vital to the farms’ inception and existence. The museum houses a treasury of artifacts as well as pictures of many of the original people that inhabited the farm.

We found ourselves walking down trails that led to various places for peaceful reflection, such as a pond with a footbridge and a forest of bamboo. By the time I made my way back to the house, I felt like an old friend. I approached the house, walked through the courtyard--careful not to step on the sleeping dog--and entered into the kitchen, where Mark greeted me warmly. The room was also filled with historical artifacts, including a row of empty, aged wine bottles displayed on the mantle. These, I was informed, were from special times in Mark’s life, where evenings with friends and colleagues were complimented by great wines. He noted that they were kept as mementos and a warm reminder of time well spent on this farm.

All of this gave me a real sense of the history of this farm before even sitting down at the long wood farm table, with fresh mugs of coffee to begin my conversation with Dr. Solms.

Jill Choder-Goldman (JCG): Mark, it’s so wonderful to be here on your farm in the Franschhoek Wine country in South Africa, which your family has owned since I believe 2001?

Mark Solms (MS): That's right, but the place has been in existence for 325 years. It was first established as a farm in 1690, but there were already settlers living here before that.

JCG: In one of your TED Talks, you spoke very emotionally about owning land in South Africa and turning neuropsychoanalysis into wine. I wondered what you meant by that?

MS: Well, it was a play on the phrase "turning water into wine," about how my professional, scientific education helped me to tackle the social ills that come with owning wine farmland like this, in South Africa. This farm was granted to my predecessor in title in 1690, and the granting of these farms is really where the trouble began. Because, while there were good reasons for the Dutch government to settle farms, they basically wanted a station for their ships, a sort of halfway house on their way to and from the East; they needed fresh produce and they needed wine. Wine kept better than water on ships on those long trips. It is also profoundly true that the Dutch settlements were a catastrophe for the local inhabitants. This valley was the hunting grounds for the first people from this area called the bushmen, also known as the Sand. They were hunter-gatherers, so that was pretty much the end of the hunting-gathering economy. And the valley was also the nomadic grazing grounds for pasture-led people called the Kway-Kway. They moved seasonally with their cattle and their sheep through these parts. So they, too, in 1690, came down the valley with their sheep and their cattle only to be told you can’t graze here, this land belongs to me. Neither of those groups of people had any conception of private ownership of land. It was like What do you mean it belongs to you? And they said I’ll show you what it means to belong to me. So, there was a genocide here. The bushmen and the Kway-Kway were killed in droves, and it was literally the annihilation of a people, not only the economy and their culture. The few who remained became farm workers, and other slaves were brought from the East. So this farm was literally built on the back of crimes against humanity.

JCG: You spoke very emotionally about what learning that meant to you. You had to face all of that, take a real look into the shame and your complicity into this piece of how those people were treated.

MS: Well, it’s one thing to say, “This house we’re sitting in now was built by slaves; these walls, the ceiling, every brick and rock that goes into the fabric of this building was put there by slaves.” And it’s another thing to know what that means. It means people were brought here against their will, they were paid nothing and they were compelled to work. But what makes it ten times worse, Jill, is that their descendants are still here. And they still live on this farm, and they still work for me. The current social fabric of this farm is a direct product of that history, and we’re still living that history. They are here living on my land in little houses that belong to me, with jobs which I choose to give them or not, so they own nothing.

JCG: But I recall you speaking about the need to change all of that, and more importantly why you needed to change that.

MS: Exactly, because of the dire conditions I wanted to give them a piece of all of this, something that they would be able to say was theirs. But, I’m sorry to say, it’s not common for white landowners to say, ”I want to make it possible for the historically disadvantaged people on the farms to also become landowners.” So because I did that, I attracted quite a bit of attention. We ended up getting their good will, and we worked with the government to improve the landholdings of the farm workers. The government in a sense took over the role that we had played, in terms of servicing the debt of the farmworkers. We’re now described as a fifty-fifty farm, although it’s not strictly speaking fifty. The farm workers have forty-five, and the government itself took five percent.

JCG: I was wondering, is there any way in which you have applied this whole experience to your clinical work?

MS: Well, I thought you were going to ask that question the other way around, because that is the way in which it happened: I applied what I knew from my clinical work to the experience of taking on this farm. When I first came back here in 2001, I had very naïve ideas about what I would do. I was thrilled to come back to South Africa, and excited by the prospect of becoming the custodian of one of these historic farms, where, as I said, the trouble began, and I thought if I could fix one farm . . . You know, fix your own backyard. I wasn’t taking on the problems of the country as a whole, but I was aware that these farms were symbolically very important, because when we say the place was colonised, what we literally mean is these farms were taken. This was the beginning of the taking of the land, and because I was mindful of that I thought that if we could fix this farm we’d symbolically make a contribution to rectify the past. This was naïve for various reasons, not least of them being that I thought that in doing this I was going to somehow remove the sins of the fathers, that this was going to fix it, which in psychoanalysis is a manic reparation. It’s really not so easy to just wish away 320 years of horror stories. They are inside of us. But it was also naïve in the sense that I thought I was being such a good guy.

When I first took over ownership in 2001 I met with the families that came with the farm, which sadly is literally what happens. People come with the land, and they’re “your” people, as it were, as in feudal times. I met with them and discussed how we could change this farm. You know, what did they feel was most pressingly in need of reform, and how could we align this farm with the values of the new democratic South Africa? But it was just impossible to have a conversation with them; they didn’t understand what I was talking about. Nobody had ever asked them for their opinions, let alone their opinions about how to run things, and they were actually quite unsettled by it because they were just told what to do. They were just uncomfortable and wanted to get the hell out of my house.

JCG: They didn’t know what to make of you, and weren’t able to trust that anyone would ask them for their participation.

MS: Not able to trust and they were scared, they were despondent, they were also without the conceptual framework within which such a discussion could take place: without any sense of their own agency.

JCG: Right.

MS: So I started to introduce reforms of my own— you know, basic things like fixing up their accommodations and giving them basic, decent employment contracts. I mean, there were no contracts. People just did what they were taught. And when they then realised that I meant what I said about changing this place, they came to the conclusion I was an idiot!

JCG: Really?

MS: Really, yeah, because they started coming late to work, leaving early, stealing things.

JCG: They couldn’t take in your generosity.

MS: So then I felt annoyed. I thought, bloody hell, you know that phrase, “no good deed goes unpunished.” So this was the result of my generosity, and my sense of trying to make things better--they’re just going to take advantage of me. So within a matter of weeks, or months at the most, I found myself pushed back into my proper place. You know: I am the farmer; I’m cross; we don’t like each other, the workers and me; we’re at loggerheads. I thought, these people are not grateful, or these people are thieves, or these people are lazy, all of which are the standard things you hear from white farmers. I had become my own worst nightmare almost overnight. I had thought, I’m the landowner, but I’m going to do it differently, and then one-two-three, oh no you’re not!

JCG: It sounds like they were used to such strong boundaries and to what their roles were that they didn’t know how to behave without them.

MS: Yes, but more important than that is the weight of history: you can’t just say “now we’re on the same side.” We’re not on the same side. We’re talking about how my clinical work influenced what I did here, so I’ll tell you the first thing that it did. I relied upon my psychoanalytical experience and knowledge to realise this was bad; this was a horrible situation, and I just need to stick with it. You know there’s an apocryphal story of, I think it was Bruno Bettelheim, who was supposed to have said to a candidate, Don’t just do something, stand there! So I relied upon that bit of psychoanalytic wisdom: Don’t defensively, impulsively do something because you can’t stand the feeling. If you don’t understand the feeling, then better to do nothing, and just stick with it.

JCG: So that’s what you did?

MS: I did initially, and that also entailed a sort of countertransference reflection, thinking well what is this feeling? And that’s what I just described to you. The feeling was, I have become a farmer, I have been pushed into a role, which was “you are not on our side.” Somebody abuses somebody here and if you're not going to abuse us, we're going to abuse you.

JC: Wow, Mark, that’s an incredible story!

MS: And so I started to realise that the first thing is not to impulsively, concretely enact something, but rather just sitting with it and letting it be the ugly thing that it is, until you start to see what the nature of the thing is. And that's when I started to realise what was being repeated was this abusive, mistrustful pattern that has characterised this piece of land for 320 years. You can’t just say it's gone; it's not gone. So that's when I had the idea that we needed to take a history. That's what was needed. You need to understand where something comes from; that's general medical wisdom, that you take a history to make a diagnosis. But in a way, in psychoanalysis, the taking of history is the treatment itself. You could say psychoanalysis is just a very big history-taking. And I hasten to point out that when I say I had the idea to take a history I didn’t mean I must take their history. I'm not their doctor and they the patient. The patient is the relationship between landowners and tenant-workers. So we needed professional help, and that's when I brought in archaeologists and historians to take our history. We dug the history of this place up. Literally, but in a way you could say it was like analysis of the transference in that it wasn't an intellectual exercise of learning about oh so once upon a time there were settlers who stole the land, and once upon a time there were settlers who brought slaves here. It was lived. So here on this piece of land we found, fifty meters from my front door, a settlement site where bushmen lived 6,000 years ago. This had the most incredible sort of mutative impact. For example, one of the farm workers, who was involved in that excavation who's a bushmen descendent himself, holding these beautiful stone tools, looked me in the eye and said to me, “You see, professor, my people were here before yours.” You know, it was like a personal discovery of this fact, an actual personal realisation.

That discovery carries with it implicit questions like just explain to me again how come I work for you? And why do you own the land? So I think to see it like an analysis of transference is not such a stretch, actually. They were concretely going through the history, seeing the physical evidence of this farm having been taken from their ancestors, and those of slave ancestors, and to see the physical evidence of who their ancestors were, and where were they brought from and the conditions under which they were compelled to work here, and what happened to them. You know, we went through detailed stories from the records of the slave protector’s office in which the slaves' point of view is only recorded when there were legal proceedings, and it's just one nightmare after another.

JCG: It sounds like such a difficult evolution.

MS: And I will say one more thing about all of this. You remember I was trying to tell you why I thought your question should be asked the other way around. Since going through the process on this farm using those psychoanalytical tools, I have seen all around me in this country opportunities for what we learned on this farm to be applied to psychoanalysis. There’s a special role for psychoanalysis in South Africa. And it's a little different from other places.

JCG: Tell me, what is that special role, for psychoanalysis here in South Africa?

MS: What we did on this farm is a little bit like what Archbishop Tutu did on a national scale at the time of the transition. He was in charge of a thing called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). And that was a deeply psychoanalytical project. The idea of the TRC was that rather than have Nuremberg Trials here, to punish the perpetrators of apartheid, there would be a forum, in which the perpetrators had to confess fully to the victims of those crimes and what they had done while those victims were literally present in the room. If the commission felt it was a full and frank admission, with an opportunity for the victims to question the perpetrators, they would be given amnesty. But if they sought to hide what they'd done they were subject to criminal proceedings. So there was an opportunity, to have to look them in the eye and to confess what they had done. And it led to very moving episodes of forgiveness and remorse. That was a massive cathartic process that the country went through.

One of the roles that psychoanalysis has to play in this country is to try to continue that sort of process for ordinary people. Every one of us who lived through the apartheid years, on either side of the racial divide, was deeply affected by it. The ways we related to each other, the ways in which we subtly or not so subtly took advantage of our privileged position and the ways in which we were subtly humiliated and degraded on an everyday landscape--this needs to be confronted in the analytic setting very specifically.

JCG: Do you feel that the wounds from apartheid are still raw; do they still come into the room very often with your patients?

MS: Massive. Remember that we all went through it here; we think it's normal. An example of this is that I had a psychoanalytical psychotherapy here in South Africa, and the psychiatrist who treated me was a fellow white South African. And I went through my personal history, as one does. When I went through that very same history with my British analyst, he would stop me and say You did what!? Explain that again!? Because it was all so bizarre, the way we lived here. Only with an outsider's point of view did you suddenly realise that you were sick, that it was weird, that it had consequences.

So looking at our ordinary clinical work self-consciously, asking: in what way is apartheid part of this? In what way is apartheid trauma being repeated here? That's a very subtle and very pervasive thing, but there are more direct, obvious examples, such as black analyst/white patient or white analyst/black patient.

Anywhere in the world psychoanalysis suffers from being a relatively elite treatment and profession. And we're not exempt from that here in South Africa, but it does have a special meaning here, which is actually a twofold meaning. One is that wealth in South Africa pretty much goes with whiteness, and poverty goes with blackness, so if you have an elite treatment and an elite profession they will pretty much all be white. What I mean is that elitism in South Africa is racialised. You can't offer something for the privileged without it having a meaning and relation to our apartheid past.

The other implicit thing is that not only is it elitist, it's also European. You must remember that the colonising of this country was the Europeanising of this country. So psychoanalysis can easily be experienced as some sort of colonial imposition. So those are some of the ways in which psychoanalysis has a special status here.

JCG: Have there been ways to address this issue?

MS: We've made all sorts of efforts to try to address it, but we don’t have a proper national health insurance and we only have free health care for the indigent. In the hospital I work in, my patients are all poor, but there's also a private healthcare system and there's a gigantic gap between the two. And again, it's racialised. So all my patients in the hospital are black, and all the private patients are white.

JCG: Are you saying that mental health is thought of as a luxury?

MS: It's all too easy in a country like ours to think of only what is needed; that physical health counts for much more than mental health. But we have a very sick society, and it's expressed in all sorts of ways. We have out-of-control crime and substance abuse, [and] domestic violence, abuse of women and children, are second to none. I mean, you've never seen anything like it: kids, two, three, four being raped left, right, and center. It's just sick, very, very sick.

JCG: Oh my, and…these are the patients you see in the hospital?

MS: Yes, of course. So our pitch to the ministry of health is that we need to build into this national health insurance scheme some sort of very basic psychotherapeutic services, and some sort of psychological-mindedness, for example with young mothers: Just having somebody visit them in their house and see how they're coping, and talking to them about their relationship to the baby.

JCG: But it sounds like basic necessities and more social work-oriented.

MS: Yes, but there was nothing even like that in the plan. It was all just take two aspirin and see me in the morning. That's just one example. So we've engaged with the government, showing them the sort of things that we were doing ourselves, in terms of not-for-profit. We've gotten serious, and our psychoanalytical society applies psychoanalytical ideas in various ways, in various communities. We don't sit in our ivory towers waiting for people to come and ask for supervision and so on. We offer supervision in the state hospitals, to the psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers dealing with these overwhelming problems. We offer them supervision, showing them psychoanalytical ways of thinking, not only about the patients, but also about themselves and their institutions, and how they are functioning; because they are all overwhelmed, they're burnt out. And actually, interestingly, when we spoke to the minister of health about the role of psychoanalysis, he said well what about us, in government!? We need your help, too!

JCG: Mark, can we switch gears for a moment. I know your brother suffered a brain injury when he was six, and I wondered if that had anything to do with your interest in becoming first a neuroscientist and then a neuropsychoanalyst?

MS: Yes, it had everything to do with that. I was four and a half and the whole thing was traumatic. He survived, but he wasn’t the same person. Around two years or so after his accident, I remember a particular scene . . . the scene was having to put my school uniform on, having to tie my shoelaces, and just not being able to do it and thinking, I can't do this, which is a sign of how depressed I was. My brother's accident, I think in a highly childish way, brought to my awareness that we are this body-soul thing, you know? Where's my brother gone? Something happened to his head and he's not there anymore, so that means we are our heads. What's going to happen to me someday when my head goes?

He was no longer in the same developmental phase, he no longer had the same cognitive capacity…. he was no longer even my brother. It was a complete, really disorienting experience, because he looked the same, but he was gone. And more importantly, it had a massive impact on my whole family. My parents were devastated, they were guilty. Every time I achieved something, it was cause for both pleasure and pain, because my achievements showed up my older brother. And it caused me confusion. I didn't know: was it good to do well, or was it bad to do well? And things weren't spoken about. Everything was just confusing. And I felt both guilty and aggrieved. It was just a mess and I became clinically depressed as a kid. So my success was my brother's failure; my happiness was my brother's bane. And I think, and all of this entirely unconsciously, I think that what I hit upon was the perfect solution, because if I could do well in a field that helps people like my brother, then it's okay, then I'm not being egocentric and heartless. So I could do well and do good in the eyes of my parents and of my brother.

JCG: And were there any other influences in your life that guided you into the field?

MS: My brother’s situation was also the origin of my interest in the mental side of the brain. How can it be that that organ is the person? And, therefore, it was the origin of my interest in psychoanalysis, because when I came into the field in the early 1980's, behavioral neuroscience’s, conception of the mind was very rudimentary. If you were driven, as I was, unconsciously, to try to understand how can it be that my brother is his brain, which means we all are our brains, which means our beloved selves are our brains . . . you know, how does that happen? So I was frustrated enough to train in psychoanalysis.

You know, in my field, it's all diagnostics. Most of these things you can do nothing about it: This is that disease, this one's gonna die in six months, this one's gonna die in three years, this is how they're gonna die, but there's not much you can do. So I became much more concerned with what can we do, psychologically, because brain patients generally are not seen as minds, they're seen as brains. Psychiatric patients are minds; neurologic patients are bodies. And so I think the personal history you referred to informed my emphasis on that side of things in the profession as well.

JCG: Are there challenges to psychoanalytic training in South Africa today, and what is the path usually taken?

MS: The single biggest challenge is that we can't ignore our racialised past, which boils down to the fact that white people by and large are wealthier than black people in this country, and psychoanalytic training and psychoanalytic treatment is expensive; that's our single biggest challenge. Our second biggest challenge is that there is pent-up interest in psychoanalysis in South Africa. Psychoanalysis has always been a topic of great interest in South Africa, and in fact we have produced many psychoanalysts, but they were all trained in the UK. Influential thinkers in British psychoanalysis like Joseph Sandler, Edna O'Shaughnessy, Michael Feldman, and Irma Brennan Pick were all South Africans.

JCG: And you also were trained in the UK?

MS: Yes, I trained in the UK., but the difference between me and the rest of the names I've mentioned is that I came back. And the reason I came back is because apartheid ended. So those colleagues went to England, trained in analysis, escaped apartheid but stayed there. In 2001, I came back with my wife, who's also an analyst.

JCG: I believe you coined the term Neuropsychoanalysis, in 1999 [Solms & Turnbull, 2011] as an attempt to integrate neurological insights into the structure and function of the brain with psychoanalysis’ attentive observation of subjectivity, right?

MS: Mm hm. But the attempt to link these two fields has not been unequivocally welcomed by everyone in psychoanalysis, and what they don't seem to realise, or what they have no reason to know, is that I wasn't trying to bring neuroscience into psychoanalysis: I was trying to bring psychoanalysis into neuroscience. That's what motivated me to train in psychoanalysis. I wanted to bring the proper stuff of the mind into neuroscience. I wanted to enrich our conception of the mental, of what we mean by the mind. The mind is not only information processing, it's lived experience, it's relationships, it's feelings.

JCG: So psychoanalysis had concepts and language for dealing with the real, lived life of the mind that you wanted to bring into neuroscience?

MS: Yes, but then when I trained in psychoanalysis I couldn't help but see two things. One was that many of our theoretical notions are without solid, empirical foundations. You know, we say we think it works like this and some other school of psychoanalysis says, oh really, well we think it works like that, and each sort of becomes a school of wisdom. It's not like science. So how then do we decide between completing all the claims in psychoanalysis, and how do we verify these claims? I'm not a naive reductionist sort of positivist, but I was aware that [psychoanalysis] was really seriously at risk of becoming just like a religion, where everybody just says I believe this, and I'm a charismatic leader, and everyone just follows you.

The other thing that I was aware of was that neuroscience does have methods that can help. Some of these questions can be addressed scientifically. They couldn't in 1900, but they can now. I became immersed in Freud, and I realised that that’s what Freud was saying. He said that the clinical method's all we've got, but one day it won't be like that, one day biology or neuroscience will assist us in answering these questions. So to me it wasn't an anti-psychoanalytical thing to do. I trained in psychoanalysis because I wanted to contribute to neuroscience, and then I realised that psychoanalysis can do with some help from the neurosciences. Later I realised that this was very much in the spirit of what Freud had envisaged.

JCG: We must talk about your fascination with Freud, because it's clear from all of your writings that you use Freud's idea that mental life is unavoidably connected to the body and therefore to biology, as well. This is an important aspect of neuropsychoanalysis, right?

MS: Absolutely. Patients with neurological disorders or so-called chemical imbalances also need to be understood psychologically because it’s amazing how neurological patients are utterly neglected by psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, because they’re relegated to the realm of physical medicine. It just doesn’t make sense to say that because the brain is disordered in this patient, it’s the body that’s disordered and therefore we don’t treat them. I believe part of the goal of neuropsychoanalysis is to try to bring to bear on neurological disorders a psychoanalytical approach, because these patients need it: their minds are shattered, their lives are upside down and they can certainly benefit from psychoanalysis the same way that any other human soul can.

JCG: To what extent did these considerations impact your decision to take on the editing of the revised edition of the complete work of Sigmund Freud, and the complete neuroscientific works of Sigmund Freud?

MS: I was and remain a neuroscientist who became interested in psychoanalysis, and then trained in psychoanalysis. And therefore I've followed the same path that Freud did. Freud started out as a neuroscientist and then developed psychoanalysis, and so I thought, if I'm trying to reverse-engineer psychoanalysis back into neuroscience, then it would be very useful to understand how psychoanalysis emerged from neuroscience. I was therefore interested in Freud's pre-analytic work. Freud wrote a paper in 1895 called “The Project for Scientific Psychology” which describes all of his basic concepts about the mind in neuroscientific language, so I wanted to see how did he get to that model as a neuroscientist; what came before that? I wanted to read his neuroscientific papers.

While I was in Vienna looking through all the papers. I came across little things by Freud that were of psychological interest, little papers that Strachey had missed. Nothing great, but you know, some interesting little bits and pieces. So I published those in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. I had perhaps published five or six Freud translations when, in the late 1980's, the Institute of Psychoanalysis decided they wanted to revise his psychological works. So they formed a committee, and asked me: will you translate this paper, will you translate that paper, will you revise this translation? And I said yes, yes, yes. And then the person they had editing the standard edition revision, whose name was Albert Dixon, died. So then the committee asked if I would take over.

JC: And now you’ve been working on this for something like 20 years, right?

MS: Yes, for a very long time.

JCG: Is there a neuroscientific perspective in this translation?

MS: In the clinical papers there's nothing much to change from a neuroscientific point of view. In the metapsychological papers, Strachey got things a bit wrong because he didn't see them as a neuroscientist like Freud did. But most of all, Strachey made some fundamental mistakes in the way he translated [the early neuroscientific papers] because he just didn't have the knowledge of that field. So basically it varies from type of paper to type of paper as to whether there was a neuroscientific bent in the translation.

JCG: I know Freud and neuroscience are a very good match, but I'm wondering if you look at any Relational theorists when you think along the lines of neuroscience?

MS: I've had that question put to me not only by relational theorists but by all other schools of psychoanalysis. They all say, what's this obsession with Freud? Why aren't you working in Kleinian, or Lacanian theory? And the point that I make to them is: Psychoanalysis is such a pluralistic exercise; there are so many different theorists. The task that we're trying to perform is relating psychoanalysis as a whole to neuroscience. You need to do it in two stages. First you need to relate a hybrid version of all the schools of psychoanalysis to neuroscience. Then, once you have a forged version, a correlational, once we've got basic psychoanalytic concepts related to basic neuroscientific concepts, we can relate that to all of the different schools.

Take the phenomena of intersubjectivity. Remember what I said to you earlier about the brain being first and foremost something subjective you can study? I meant, two brains relating to each other is two subjectivities relating to each other, which bring about certain phenomena in the subjective sphere that wouldn't be there if there weren't two brains relating to each other. That's the stuff that relational theory deals with. But there must then be neural correlates of those things. There must be some way in which the two brains are relating from an objective point of view. For example, there's a thing called hyperscanning where you can scan in real time PET imaging of a mother's and a baby 's brain, and you can see how what's going on in this brain affects what's going on in that brain. That's f**king interesting!

That’s what neuropsychoanalysis is all about: finding the objective correlates of the subjective states of feeling.

JCG: Mark, can you elaborate on that idea of the neural correlates?

MS: Psychoanalysis is the discipline that takes most seriously the nature of subjectivity, and the study of subjectivity, and the attempt to elucidate the governing laws of subjectivity. Psychoanalysis is making claims about the structure and the organisation and the development center of the mind in health and in disease. Freud spoke of memory systems and perceptual systems and drives; neuroscientists are speaking about the same things. They're talking about the same part of nature, ultimately, so if the methods and techniques available to neuroscientists can help us to make progress with our theoretical claims in psychoanalysis, then so much the better.

My original intention was to correlate, to try to find if there is such a thing as, for example, an ego, an id, repression, and defense mechanisms, a superego, and cathexis, and libido. If all of these things exist, as psychoanalysts believe they do, they must have neural correlates. If there is such a thing as wish fulfilment in dreams, then let's see the brain mechanisms of dreaming.

During that phase, there were many clinicians who said, “What's the point of all of this? It doesn't change anything that we do, so we’re still gonna do the same thing. You'll be able to explain it all in brain terms, but that doesn't help. We're still gonna do what we do.” Or conversely, they would ask, “Well, tell us what must we do differently now that you've got a brain mechanism for all of this?” The clinicians wanted a sort of take-home message as to either how this would change clinical work, or they wanted to be able to dismiss it. It’s about the brain, and I don't treat the brain. I'm glad you're interested in all that, but it's irrelevant.

So I said, well, it will become relevant because once you know the neural correlates you then have the possibility of doing normal science. You can ask, well, if this is, the perceptual system, and that is the preconscious system, and Freud says there is a regression from the preconscious to the perceptual system in dreams, does that actually happen? Freud says dreams protect sleep, so let’s see: Now that we’ve found the brain mechanisms of dreaming, if you change this thing does that wake the patient up, or doesn’t it?

That’s the crude, sort of popular mechanics of what you can do with neuroscience tools; you can do experiments, and with them it then becomes possible to improve psychoanalysis’ model of the mind. Don’t forget, what we do in psychoanalysis rests upon a model of the mind, and to the extent that our model of the mind is erroneous, we might not know the right thing to do.

What we’re trying to do is better understand how the mind works. That must have implications ultimately for our clinical work, but I can’t tell what those implications will be because I’m not there yet.

JCG: I want to ask you about your interest in the content of dreams. You designed a very interesting study in which you psychoanalysed a population of patients with a genetic disorder called Urbach-Wiethe, which results in the calcification of their amygdalas, and a notable lack of fear. Can you talk about that study a bit?

MS: I have to say, sadly, that I have not psychoanalysed those patients. I have studied them, not on the couch, but in a research project in which I collected dream reports from them and from matched controls--in other words, from people in the same ethnic and class and geographical background, closely matched on everything except without Urbach-Wiethe disease. And then I compared their dreams to see what the dreams of patients with no amygdala are like compared to those of patients with an amygdala. The first finding was they do indeed dream [it was not previously known whether one could dream without an amygdala]. Secondly, their dreams are different from the controls’. They're different, if I can put it crudely, in that they have childlike dreams--dreams which are typical of young children as opposed to adults. The typical feature of children’s’ dreams is that they are simple wish fulfilments, and that's what [the subjects’] dreams are like. They are simple, they're wish-fulfiling, and they are shorter. There's no bizarreness, no distortion, no weird symbolism, no nothing, it's just like Anna Freud’s dream "Stwabewwies." "Stwabewwis pudding omelet."

I'll give you some examples of these Urbach-Wiethe patients' dreams. One woman's husband is unemployed so she dreams: I dreamt my husband got a job; I was so happy. Another one, the patient's daughter is handicapped, has a physical disability: I dreamt my daughter could walk again; I was so happy. If you think about what this means psychoanalytically, I’m not sure I know yet. Early psychoanalysts understood the difference between adults’ and children’s dreams as being that children have not yet developed a superego and censorship. So it's just, I want something, and I dream it; I have it. So you might say, well, perhaps the amygdala plays some role in superego functioning or in the censoring function; this makes a kind of sense because the amygdala is known to have a function in forming emotional judgments and learning about fear.

But that's as far as we can go at this point. All I can tell you is that Urbach-Wiethe patients’ dreams are short, simple happy dreams. And they have very few nightmares. The dreams seem like transparent wish fulfilments, and that's all we can say for sure.

JCG: Since we're almost out of time, Mark, I would like to ask you one last question. You know in our country we're facing overwhelming distress over our current presidential fiasco, which is bothering patients and analysts alike. In your country you've had to deal with sociopolitical issues that are far worse than this. You talked about this a little bit in the beginning, but the question I have is: Do you deal with these challenges in psychoanalytic terms here, now, today? We discussed how apartheid is still in the room, but it's very difficult to make sense of what is happening to us as a country and how to live with it.

MS: I'll tell you one thing that may be helpful to American psychoanalysts or psychologically-minded American people in terms of how to make sense of Trump and what's going on in your country. I'd like to start by drawing a distinction between two ways of applying psychoanalysis to these questions. The first is using psychoanalysis as a kind of tool for political commentary (psycho-biography, group phenomena), applying psychoanalytical theoretical concepts by saying: Well you know, narcissism, and we all know how that works and where it comes from and what it's a defense against. I'm not saying this is unhelpful, but it certainly won't be particularly welcome by some of your compatriots, your president perhaps included.

But there's another approach, the one I have found very helpful, and I'll tell you about it by way of example. We had in South Africa a terrible event a few years ago that was called the Marikana Massacre. Marikana was a platinum mine in the north of our country where the workers went on strike, and it culminated in their being shot at by the police, and a good many miners were killed. That was particularly traumatic, to have your police force mowing down protesting workers. For us it has a special resonance because that's what the old apartheid police did to black workers protesting against our old regime. How could this happen again, was the question. How come now, all these years into our democracy, the police are shooting these people? It was a great blow to the nation.

We always want to have somebody to blame. We want to say the police are bad, and the workers were their victims. Or we could say the workers were bad and the police had to contain them, or we could say the mining magnate was bad, we have to excommunicate him. That's our psychological need, we need to split, and we need to know who's right and who's wrong, and who's good and who's bad, but the truth of the matter is you can't. It's not such a simple story.

So, I was asked to convene a public meeting as a psychoanalyst to look at the Marikana tragedy and to use a psychoanalytical lens to understand how psychoanalysis could help in that situation. And against this whole background of what I said to you, this is the form that the meeting took: I as the chair of the meeting said, "Given everything I've just summarised for you, and given this, and given our psychological wish to say who's right and who's wrong in this thing, and given that it's not so possible to do that, I think the best way that we can think psychoanalytically about the Marikana tragedy is, how did I personally contribute to it? What did I do that somehow led to this tragedy? What can I do differently?"

All of us are wanting to find something outside of ourselves that's bad, you know, that's caused this monster called Trump. Some version of, I'm good and I'm not part of that. But it's better to think, how am I a part of it? In what way am I too, racist and xenophobic? In what way did I cause the narcissistic injury of these white working class people? In what way do I think myself superior to them? Psychoanalytically the most helpful thing to do is not to apply your psychoanalytical x-ray eyes onto Trump, but rather look inwards and try and understand what you can find that helps you to understand why he and those voters feel the way that they do.

JCG: I agree with you, but I think it's also a feeling of being, as with the Marikanas, out of control. You feel you have no power to change anything.

MS: You are out of control. But I think that means that the more the Left, or the Democrats, or the progressives in the States throw rocks at Trump and his followers, the more, if anything, they strengthen their bond. Remember that Freud said, "Psychoanalysis is a cure by love." So this is why I'm saying, just as with our patients, throwing interpretations at [Trump supporters] doesn't get us anywhere If you can feel and understand them, then you can begin to help because you can say things that you know that they can bear, and that includes knowing that we're all in the same boat. I think that's a better approach. If we want, as psychoanalysts, to add something to the public debate in the United States, I don't think it must be making diagnoses of Trump. I think it must be trying to help people to understand how he and his voters feel, because in the end he is not a different species from you and me. You know, we all have narcissism, and we all have anxieties of that kind, and we all have ambitions. Let's look inwards and see how can we solve this together, rather than demonising “them” and “their” worldview.

JCG: Well, I think this conversation is for a whole other interview, but is there anything else, Mark, that you would like to share with the psychoanalytic community in the United States today?

MS: I think we've covered a lot.

JCG: I think we certainly have! And I want to thank you for your words, your wisdom and your history of this magical place.

Contributors

Mark Solms, PhD, is Director of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town. He is Director of Training of the South African Psychoanalytical Association, Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and Honorary Member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. He is Research Chair of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Director of the Science Department of the American Psychoanalytic Association and Co-Chair of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society. He was awarded the Sigourney Prize in 2012. He has published more than 350 papers in both neuroscientific and psychoanalytic journals, and five books, including The Brain and the Inner World (2002), which was a bestseller translated into 12 languages. His selected writings were recently published as The Feeling Brain (2015). He is the editor of the forthcoming (2017) Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (24 volumes) and the Complete Neuroscientific Works of Sigmund Freud (four volumes). He can be reached at Department of Neuropsychology, University of Cape Town, Private Bag, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa; e-mail: mark.solms@uct.ac.za.

Jill Choder-Goldman, LCSW, has been a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist in private practice since 2004, after graduating New York University and The National Institute for the Psychotherapies, where she trained in social work and psychoanalysis. She sees individuals, couples, and groups, and is also a supervisor to analytic candidates in training and the Interview Editor for the journal Psychoanalytic Perspectives. Her writing includes interviews with psychoanalysts from around the world, which explore how political, cultural, and socioeconomics affect their understanding and practice of psychoanalysis. She also interviewed the novelist A.M. Homes for a special issue, Arts on the Couch, and was the Guest Editor for a recent issue on “What Makes a Good Supervisor.”