Amad “shrink” high on cocaine, obsessed with sex, death and bizarre theories of the mind – that’s how many people remember Sigmund Freud, whose work has given us concepts like Freudian slips, the Oedipus complex and penis envy.
But Prof Mark Solms, of the University of Cape Town, has other ideas. “Freud is to the field of psychology and psychiatry what
Darwin was to genetics, or Newton to physics,” he says. “Before Freud there was really no understanding of the psychological aspects of mental disorders and distress.”
A neuroscientist by training, beginning his work in the 1980s, Solms was fascinated by consciousness, and especially by the parts of life that biology can’t explain, such as “feelings, and why we experience memories”. He says: “But I was told not to ask questions like that, and that it was bad for my career.”
Solms then went on to train as a psychoanalyst, a decision that he was told “was like an astronomer studying astrology”. “But I thought it was the right thing to do,” he says. “Both disciplines had a lot to learn from the other.”
Freud’s ideas are treated with scepticism as much today as they were then, almost fifty years later. Given his outlandish theories about sex and his unscientific methods, the doctor was discredited by later psychologists, Solms says. But there is still an awful lot that he “should be given credit for”.
