The Only Cure

'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

Dismissed for years as a soft, unquantifiable substitute for real medicine, evidence is now piling up that therapy - psychoanalytic therapy in particular - is one of the most powerful treatments that we possess for illness of any kind. Vastly more effective than almost all psychiatric drugs, it is as reliable against a plethora of mental complaints as the HPV vaccine is at preventing cervical cancer. But why does it work so well?

The model of the human mind that is now emerging from the frontiers of neuroscience turns out (to the dismay of many scientists) to confirm much of what Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, conjectured more than a century ago. Could it be that therapy works because Freudian theory, with its underworlds of murky desire and unconscious fantasy, is largely true? Long relegated to the status of pseudoscience, psychoanalysis could now be poised to resume its position as our master theory of the mind.

Join the pioneering neuropsychologist Mark Solms on a revelatory inquiry into the essence of mental sickness and health. In this dazzling synthesis, Freud's original vision turns out to be just the thing to plug the void at the centre of contemporary psychiatry. What news could be more welcome, amid a mental health crisis, than that the cure has been in our possession all along - so long as we can commit to the treatment we really need?

Nobody bewitched by these mysteries can afford to ignore the solution proposed by Mark Solms . . . fascinating, wide-ranging and heartfelt -- OLIVER BURKEMAN GUARDIAN
Convincing . . . As with all returns of the repressed, Solms's exhumation of psychoanalysis is sure to be unnerving, especially for those who want to deny Freud's lessons about the workings of desire WASHINGTON POST
One of the worthiest efforts to come out of neuroscience in recent memory WIRED
Intriguing . . . If he is correct, the implications are substantial -- ANIL SETH TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
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

Mark Solms is a neuropsychologist known for his discovery of the brain mechanisms of dreaming and for his use of psychoanalytic methods in contemporary neuroscience. He is the author of The Hidden Spring (2021), the translator of The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (2024), and research chair of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He lives in Cape Town.

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