The Neuroscientific Freud

Service Description

A close reading of Freud’s neuroscientific writings with Professor Mark Solms. Ten live online Sunday sessions, 19:00–21:00 Israel time (17:00–19:00 UK), from 21 March 2027 to 30 January 2028. Before he became the father of psychoanalysis, Freud was a neuroscientist. Psychoanalysis did not replace that early work — it grew out of it. Between the late 1870s and 1900, Freud worked as a neuroanatomist and clinical neurologist, and he produced a substantial body of research on the brain. He never abandoned the aim of connecting brain anatomy and physiology with mental life. Knowing that the science of his day could not yet reveal the organization of the mental apparatus through studies of the living brain, he turned to studying the mind in its own terms — through the method of free association — but he predicted that future science would provide the missing physical perspective and thereby bridge the two. Building that bridge is the project of neuropsychoanalysis. In this new, multi-year series of seminars, Mark Solms — editor and translator of Freud’s (forthcoming) complete neuroscientific works in four volumes — will, for the first time, lead a close reading of these extensive writings, which remain largely unknown to psychoanalysts and neuroscientists alike. These seminars are open to clinicians, scientists and scholars around the world. AMONG THE MANY TEXTS THAT WE WILL READ: ‘The Structure of the Elements of the Nervous System’ (1882) — Freud’s contributions to the discovery of the neuron. ‘On Coca’ (1884) — Freud’s early research on cocaine, its promise and its dangers. ‘Conceptualizing the Aphasias’ (1891) — a rejection of rigid localizationism in favour of dynamic functional systems. The infantile cerebral palsies (1891–1897) — three books that made Freud a leading authority in paediatric neurology. Psychiatric case studies (1880s) — unpublished case reports of patients with a wide variety of psychiatric disorders. Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) — a neuronal model of mental dynamics that provided the foundations of metapsychology. The Zoom link will be emailed to registered participants before each meeting. Course access: 24 months from purchase.