5 things Freud got right about your brain
Below, Mark Solms shares five key insights from his new book, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing . Mark is a neuroscientist who took the unusual step of also training as a psychoanalyst. For 40 years, he has used the tools of modern neuroscience to test and refine psychoanalytic theory. A pioneering figure in neuropsychoanalysis, his research uncovered key brain…
1. Freud was ahead of his time in neuroscience, publishing over 200 works and contributing significantly to the discovery of neurons and understanding of synapses. He also formulated the concept of neurons wiring together, known as Hebb's law, and discovered the vestibular-cochlear nerve, which is now recognized in medical education.
2. Many of Freud's controversial findings, such as functionalism, multiple memory systems, and the existence of unconscious mental processes, are now widely accepted in cognitive neuroscience. The concept of multiple memory systems, with its three divisions of conscious, preconscious, and unconscious memory, closely aligns with the current cognitive neuroscience model.
3. Freud's ideas about the talking cure have proven highly effective, boasting an effect size between 0.7 and 0.8 in randomized controlled studies. This places psychotherapy in the highly effective range, comparable to psychiatric medications which have an effect size of around 0.4.
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