Sigmund Freud is often dismissed as an outdated thinker, but a leading neuroscientist argues that many of his core insights anticipated modern brain science by decades. Mark Solms, who trained both as a neuroscientist and a psychoanalyst, makes the case in his new book, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing, that Freud should be updated rather than discarded.
Solms, who has spent 40 years testing psychoanalytic theory with the tools of contemporary neuroscience, points out that Freud began his career as a neuroscientist. In the 1880s, Freud contributed to the discovery of neurons, and in the 1890s he was the first to interpret the synapse—the junction between neurons—as the site where memories are formed. In 1895, he formulated the idea that neurons that fire together wire together, a concept now known as Hebb’s law, named after Donald Hebb, who described it decades later. Freud also published a breakthrough book in 1891 on the brain mechanisms of language, showing that language arises from a distributed functional system rather than a single region.
Many of Freud’s once-controversial ideas are now mainstream. His introduction of functionalism—the view that mental processes are functional systems—predated the attribution of this concept to philosopher Hilary Putnam in the 1950s. Freud also proposed in 1896 that memory is not a single system but is divided into multiple systems, which he labeled conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Modern cognitive neuroscience similarly distinguishes short-term memory, declarative long-term memory, and non-declarative long-term memory. The very idea of unconscious mental processes, which was once considered an oxymoron, is now widely accepted.
Freud also anticipated predictive processing, a leading framework in neuroscience developed by Karl Friston, which describes how the brain constantly predicts and tries to repeat satisfying experiences while avoiding harmful ones. Solms notes that Friston acknowledges this debt to Freud. Similarly, Freud emphasized embodied cognition—the idea that the mind works on behalf of the whole organism, a concept often presented as a recent development. He also pioneered the idea of critical periods in development, such as infantile amnesia, which occurs because the cortical memory systems are not yet mature in early childhood. His claim that adverse childhood experiences can lay the groundwork for later psychopathology is now supported by research on how early trauma increases vulnerability to depression.
Freud’s approach also foreshadowed the modern focus on subjective experience. By asking what it is like to be a particular brain, he anticipated what philosopher David Chalmers later called the “hard problem of consciousness,” now a central challenge in neuroscience.
Perhaps most practically, Solms highlights the effectiveness of the talking cure. In medicine, treatment effectiveness is measured by effect size: 0.2 is mildly effective, 0.4 moderately effective, and 0.8 highly effective. Psychiatric medications average around 0.4, while talk therapy achieves between 0.7 and 0.8, placing it in the highly effective range. Solms argues that this evidence supports the value of psychoanalysis as a medical treatment, not just a historical curiosity.
Solms, who is the science director of the American Psychoanalytic Association, sees his work as part of a broader effort to bring psychoanalysis into dialogue with modern neuroscience. Rather than rejecting Freud wholesale, he believes the task is to correct and refine his theories using contemporary scientific evidence. The result, he suggests, is a more accurate understanding of the mind that honors Freud’s original insights while moving beyond their limitations.