Freud was right about one thing

The Gray Area with Sean Illing - Vox

In this episode of The Gray Area with Sean Illing, neuropsychologist Mark Solms discusses the enduring relevance of Sigmund Freud's work, arg

Key takeaways

• Freud's foundational insight into the unconscious mind—once considered absurd—is now a cornerstone of cognitive science and neuroscience.
• The idea that mental processes operate unconsciously, influencing behavior without conscious awareness, is widely accepted today.

Main topics

• Freud's legacy in modern psychology
• The unconscious mind and its influence on behavior

Notable quotes

"The human mind cannot be fully understood as just a biological thing. And that our subjective experience of the world is a huge part of our mental health."

Conclusion

Despite being dismissed by many in modern psychology, Freud's core insights—especially regarding the unconscious and the

Transcript preview

Speaker 7 (0:04) The Speaker 5 (0:05) city moves fast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive. Speaker 7 (0:15) The new Speaker 5 (0:20) Honda City isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. Speaker 6 (0:29) When the world keeps shifting, we're there to help you act with confidence. At HSBC, we bring together the people, ideas, and capital that drive growth, backing your ambitions at every stage. So when you're preparing for the next generation, strengthening your portfolio, or you're entering new markets, we're there, bringing 160 years of experience to help you move forward. HSBC. Opening up a world of opportunity. Speaker 8 (0:58) Hey, it's me, Sean. If you're a close listener to the show, you've maybe noticed me mentioning that we just had a second kid. I'm pretty excited about that, of course, but it means that I'm going to take a bit of time off to be with my son. I'll be out for a while, but listen, twice a week, we will still continue to bring you the thoughtful, ideas-focused interviews you've come to know and love. You'll be hearing from some familiar Vox voices in the host chair while I'm out. Jacqueline Hill, who is the host of Vox's Explain It To Me podcast, and Miles Bryan, a reporter on Today Explained, and there will be a couple new guest hosts I'm excited for you to meet. And I'll also be popping in now and then with some conversations we're pre-recording before I take off, so you won't have to miss me too much. So stay put. I'll be back better than ever before you know it. There are certain ideas that sound ridiculous until you notice how much of your life already assumes they're true. Take Freud. Most of us hear that name and think of all the cliches. You know, the couch, the dreams, the mommy issues, the sex stuff. All the things that made psychoanalysis feel less like science and more like narrative nonfiction. And yet, Freud's language is everywhere. Repression, denial, projection, trauma, narcissism. Our whole folk psychology is essentially Freud's ideas. That doesn't mean Freud got everything right. He clearly didn't. But what did he get right? What did he get half right? And how do those insights map onto everything we've learned about the mind since? I'm Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area. Today's guest is Mark Solms. He's a neuropsychologist and the author of The Only Cure, Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing. Psalms argues that Freud was wrong about plenty, but correct about something very essential. Namely, that the human mind cannot be fully understood as just a biological thing. And that our subjective experience of the world is a huge part of our mental health. Which is why he thinks modern psychiatry has made a mistake by treating mental suffering too much like a chemical problem and not enough like a human one. Speaker 8 (3:44) There's a ton of nuance in that argument, and I wanted to explore it with Mark. Mark Psalms, welcome to the show. Speaker 2 (4:08) Thank you. Great to be here. Speaker 8 (4:10) You're a neuropsychologist. What is that exactly? How is it different from being just a psychologist or just a neuroscientist? Speaker 2 (4:19) Well, it's as the word suggests, it's somewhere halfway between neurology and psychology. Many neurological diseases present as psychological changes, cognitive and behavioral changes. So we are diagnosticians and assessors of the cognitive consequences of neurological disease. But then there's also a research aspect to it, trying to work out how mind and brain relate, which is not a shabby thing to do with your life. Speaker 8 (4:53) No, just a wee bit complicated. But I'm glad somebody's attempting it. Speaker 8 (4:59) We're here to talk about Freud. And Freud is such an interesting character in the history of ideas. It feels like no matter how much people want to leave him behind, it seems like we just cannot do it. His language is still everywhere. Even people who think Freud was a crank still talk like Freudians half the time. Why do you think that is? Why does his shadow loom so large? Speaker 2 (5:27) I think the main reason must be that he got there first. If you are the first person to map out a territory, then the foundational cartography is going to be yours. Everything else is added on top of that. Everything else becomes detail. When I say Freud was the first, obviously he wasn't the first psychologist. Speaker 2 (5:53) or the first psychiatrist. But what he was the first to do was to try to systematically describe and understand the mind as subjective being. In other words, not behavior, not language, not perception, not cognition, but subjectivity, what he called psychical reality, that part of reality that is subjectively experienced. Speaker 8 (6:21) But just to set the table a little bit more, give a little background on Freud. Did Freud think of himself as a scientist? Did he think of psychoanalysis as science? Speaker 2 (6:35) Absolutely. There's no question about it that Freud's self-concept was that he was doing science. His aspiration was to incorporate the subjective aspect of nature. into our general natural scientific worldview. So no doubt about it. Whether he succeeded or not, whether others agree or not, is a different matter. But in terms of his own opinion of what he was doing, Speaker 8 (7:04) unequivocally, Speaker 2 (7:04) he thought he was doing science. Speaker 8 (7:07) Do you think of him as a scientist? Proper? I Speaker 2 (7:11) do. I think that what I've just said, if that's what he was trying to do, it's a darn difficult thing. Science almost, by definition, excludes everything that's subjective. So to try to incorporate subjectivity into science is a slightly odd way of doing science. So there are three strokes against him. I do think that he succeeded in bringing that part of nature into our picture of science. I think that those of us who've built upon him, you know, have gone a good deal further in terms of actually persuading other natural scientists that we're doing science. And I think that the major reason why we've been able to go further is because... we have not been limited to purely subjective observations. We now have tools in the neurosciences which enable you to simultaneously make objective measurements and observations, physiological ones, while you're making the subjective ones. So you have a kind of a reality check that was completely lacking in Freud's day. Speaker 8 (8:26) You know, I find it interesting how Freud is viewed almost as a, certainly in America, it seems, a taboo topic. Within the field of psychology. So we had Paul Bloom on the show. He's been on the show a couple of times. I don't know if you know him. A very prominent psychologist. He was at Yale. I think he's at University of Toronto now. And he was telling us that at this point, you can get a psych degree in lots of departments here without even hearing Freud mentioned in a class. People think he was mostly wrong about everything. But even Bloom said he thought Freud was right about the most important thing. which is the significance of the unconscious. I take it you agree with that? Speaker 2 (9:08) Well, first of all, I agree that you can get a creditable degree in psychology and learn nothing about Freud. It's not only that he's sort of overlooked or forgotten, it's that he's positively airbrushed out. You know, Freud is a taboo subject. And secondly, yes, that Freud got the big picture right and that he laid the foundations for the modern science of the mind, absolutely. He's just not given credit for it for the reason that we've just discussed. The topic you mentioned, namely the unconscious, I mean, we have to remember that when Freud claimed in 1900 or thereabouts that large parts of our mental functioning go on unconsciously, it was considered absurd. You know, I mean, it was considered to be an oxymoron to speak of unconscious mental processes is like speaking about non-mental mental processes, you know. Mental and conscious were synonymous. So, you know, it was really out there, Freud's idea, that we have unconscious beliefs, unconscious memories, unconscious desires, etc. And nowadays, it is absolutely taken for granted. I mean, the mainstream of cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, we all know, not only that large portions of our mental functioning go on unconsciously, but the vast bulk of it goes on unconsciously. Consciousness is a very tiny, limited resource. So that's one outstanding example, to which I could add others, of foundational discoveries, foundational insights that Freud had into the nature and structure and functioning of the human mind. that we've all caught up with him. And I don't mean sort of followed in his footsteps and tested his theories and eventually reluctantly agreeing he was right. It was really a matter of independently, all over again, starting the whole thing from scratch, using entirely different methods, arriving at the same conclusions in very broad brush terms, and not even realizing that what we're discovering, you know... is rediscovering what Freud had discovered and claimed all those years ago. The unconscious is the outstanding example, but I could list many others, you know, like, for example, the importance of early childhood development and early childhood adversity. Again, these are things that are absolutely taken for granted in terms of... vulnerability to later psychopathology. There's no doubt about it. It's absolutely empirically proven. But nobody says, gosh, Freud was right. We owe him an apology. Same about the embodied nature of the mind, you know, this whole embodied cognition. Everybody speaks of embodied cognition. That was Freud's idea. Even the very notion of functionalism. This is attributed to Putnam decades later. It was Freud's idea. The multiple memory systems, Freud's idea, and so on and so forth. One could really list many such topics. Speaker 8 (12:30) What is the simplest way to understand how Freud thought the unconscious acted upon the Speaker 2 (12:37) conscious mind? I think there are two main things. One is that the easier part to digest. or swallow, as it were, is simply descriptively that there are processes which influence our behavior, which, in other words, things that have happened to us, to put it differently, things that we have learned, that we have no memory of having learned, we have no knowledge of having this knowledge, yet it influences what we do. That, I think, I mean, it's striking enough. especially to oneself. It's easier to believe in the abstract. Okay, minds work like that. But to recognize that I too am constantly subject to hidden forces acting within myself of which I'm unaware, it's still a little unnerving. But more uniquely Freudian still today is Freud's claim that unconscious mental processes function according to different rules. that there are different functional principles at work in the unconscious part of the mind, or at least in large parts of, because Freud didn't think that there was one monolithic unconscious, there were different components to it, as we believe today, different components to what we nowadays call a non-declarative memory. But Freud's claim that there are different rules, different principles, different laws governing that. those depths of the mind, I think that that's still a novelty for many people. Speaker 8 (14:18) Well, let's get back to the point about subjectivity and really Freud's methodology. I mean, the way you put it in the book is to say that Freud studied the mind from the vantage point of being in mind. This is a big point. So I do want to spend a little bit of time with it. What made this approach different? What makes it so useful as a researcher? Speaker 2 (14:40) Well, let me say to begin with that to me, following Freud, the most fundamental property of a mind is that it is something subjective. The mind is the being of the person. It's not a thing that you can see. You can only experience. You can only be. You can only experience a mind, and you can only experience your own mind. So, you know, this is really quite something. But for that very reason, it's an embarrassment to science. And so if you look at the history of psychology, academic psychology, experimental psychology through the 20th century, it's easy to forget. I lived through that era. behaviorism absolutely dominated academic psychology. Behaviorism literally excluded subjectivity, not only subjective data in the kind of epistemological or methodological sense, but ontologically. They denied that subjective states exist. Think about it, the very word psychology. the psyche was excluded from psychology. You know, we were only allowed to study externally observable, objective things, thereby, you know, airbrushing out the very essence of the mental. So it's really important that Freud understood that the mind is first and foremost something subjective. That means that he was actually studying the mind, not studying some indirect excrescence of or proxy for the mind. He was studying mental processes, you know, in the raw. And that leads to the next point, perhaps not very important, but certainly worth noticing, that it was a naturalistic lived mind that Freud was studying. And it took, you know, sort of... In a reasonably