The Conscious Id – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst reads Mark Solms

Many psychoanalysts talk lovingly of the first time they read Freud.  They say things like, "He really helped me understand myself," or "For the first time I felt like someone understood psychology;” for me, not so much.  I found Freud to be a difficult and dense read.  His models of the mind were too simplistic in text books and too complicated for me to understand when I read Freud himself.  And, while some of his cases were lovely, many times his explanations were tough to follow.  But the clinicians who loved Freud really seemed to understand people and to be helpful to them.  And, over time, I learned a language - not necessarily Freud’s language, but a dialect related to the language he coined - one that helped me better understand the people that I was working with and how to be helpful to them.  And I kept banging away at Freud, giving the old man another chance, trying to understand what he was saying.  I read a lot of Freud in my psychoanalytic training proper, but I can't say that I got it all of the time - or even much of the time.  I am teaching Freud now, and I'm beginning to get him, but it ain't easy.  So, imagine my surprise when I read a paper and said - "Oh, of course.  So that's how the mind works."  It's not a paper by Freud, but one by a South African neuropsychologist named Mark Solms.  I recommend it - here is the link, but I think it would have been largely impenetrable to me, so I offer the following as an interpretation - and therefore recognize that it will overly condense, simplify or distort the paper - so please, feel free to check the facts.  I am also aware, now having written it, that this may be as dense and impenetrable as the paper, and for that I apologize ahead of time.

Now there are two funny things about Solms’ paper.  First of all, Solms claims to be turning Freud on his head, but I experience him as straightening Freud out.  The second is that this paper is a really dry, really technical paper (OK, it has some cool color pictures of the brain, but you know what I mean), and yet it seems, at least to me, to be incredibly applicable to day to day life - to be burning into my thoughts these days as I try to puzzle this or that problem of human living.  I feel like one of those psychoanalysts I have envied who found Freud speaking to them; ironic that I am getting that experience out of this very dry paper.  It is also ironic that I find this lively because Solms is, I think, completing some of Freud's work, or at least intending to update it based on our current neuropsychological understanding.  Freud was originally a neurologist, he abandoned neurology for a particular psychology that he invented because his neurological descriptions were not up to the task of explaining the phenomena he ran into, so he translated his neurological understanding into a more psychologically based one - though he never gave up hope that his model of the mind could become a neurologically supported one.

So how does Solms claim to turn Freud on his head?   Well, first of all, he claims that the id - Freud's cauldron of drives, uncivilized wishes, and forgotten/repressed material - is not unconscious at all, but intimately related to consciousness and, indeed, central to our primary conscious experience. He also states that we are pretty much constantly at least capable of being aware of the stuff that Freud claimed was deeply unconscious (though I think he means by this the immediate derivatives of drives - feelings – not necessarily the contents (memories) and functions (defenses) of the unconscious) though he does not clarify this, which confuses the paper.  In any case, Solms locates the id deep within the brain - in the brainstem and the structures near it like the ventricular system - in the systems that are responsible for waking and sleep and for our feeling states.  In fact, Solms claims that the function of the mind is not primarily to think - to be cognitive - but instead to feel.  Why did we choose this course of action?  We chose it because it felt right.  We leaned in one direction, and checked out how it felt.  If we felt uncomfortable, we may have asked for more information.  Getting it, we may have leaned further, or leaned in the other direction and, when it felt like we were in a comfortable place (or we felt like there was no time left) we acted.  And the cognitive parts of the brain, the stuff that Solms equates with Freud's ego, provide the needed information.  It informs our feelings (and restrains them – so we don’t act too impulsively), but also justifies them, creating a plausible rational narrative for our affectively based actions and, Solms believes, the ego is thus subservient to feelings on both ends - the feelings search the ego for what they need to have a better feeling for something and, once the decision has been made, using the ego to provide support for the feeling based decisions.  So Solms feels that he has turned Freud on his head.

Now, I’m going to quibble with Solms' idea that he has turned Freud on his head with a technical point about Freud’s model in this paragraph. Solms seems to assume that because something is unconscious, it must be part of Freud’s id.  Solms seems to have forgotten that, for Freud, most of the mind, including most of the ego, is unconscious.  Our conscious selves are really small – not just small but largely inconsequential or irrelevant in most of our psychological functioning.  The real bang, for Freud, is in the unconscious.  And I think that Solms is elevating a very small part of that unconscious, but one that Freud put deep inside the most unconscious part of his model the id, the drives – the part of ourselves that wants this now and wants it anyway, into something that we have conscious access to rather than being unconscious.  I think he means by this something like what happens when I walk by an unlocked car and see something in it that I could use – a CD that I want but don’t have – I have an impulse to open the door, grab the CD and keep on going.  This is part of what seems so right about this article.  Solms is maintaining that a lot of what Freud sees as having been defended against is just kind of continually running across the front page.  So I think that Solms may be confusing consciousness with the ego. I think he is extending the range of consciousness more than upending the ego and id.

The major thesis of the first part of the paper is that there are two self-representations in the brain.  One – which is located in the cerebral cortex – is the one that locates us in space.  It is the part of ourselves that feels where we are and that directs us to move in space.  This is connected with the sensations that come to us from the outside world.  This is the self that Solms equates with Freud’s ego.  I think there is some sense to that.  He then contrasts this with another sense of self, the sense of self that arises from within – the feeling states – the urges that drive us and that give texture and continuity to our lives.  This is the stuff he locates in the brainstem and other “lower” brain centers.  These brain centers he claims are actually in charge of our consciousness because they do such things as determine our wake sleep cycles, and they operate to do that even when there is no cerebral cortex.  OK, they determine wake and sleep, but I think he makes a bit of leap when he states that they therefore are the site of the primary consciousness and the “higher” ego consciousness is subservient to it.  This could be the case, but does not follow necessarily.

So, Solms maintains, the cerebral cortex, or ego, is called in to access procedures for handling particular situations – it is what he believes is the aptly named working memory that is our conscious functioning – and it figures out what, procedurally, to do at a given moment.  We access relevant chunks of information and manipulate them in order to come up with a procedure and the intention of this is to come up with a procedure that is a routine so that we can just do that routine and NOT have to consciously work at a problem.  OK, I am dealing with x situation – I need the x solution box and need to plug in the subroutine that will solve it.  I don’t need to figure out how to do this.  The point of our minds is to avoid being conscious as much as possible so that we can function efficiently and, I suppose, have RAM (or working memory) open to be used for novel situations which require actual problem solving.  This is largely a restatement of what Freud has said, but also what cognitive psychologists have been saying about why so much of our processing is unconscious.  Solms is taking the position that his “new” part of this is that it involves the ego as an unconscious piece, but I think Freud actually beat him to the punch on that in The Ego and the Id.

What I think is remarkable about the distinction that Solms makes between “higher” ego functions and “lower” ego functions is something that is actually implicit in one of Freud’s models of the mind that Solms recreates in one of his color illustrations.  This model is from Chapter 7 of the interpretation of dreams and is a model that Freud used to describe how dreams function.  I think of it (perhaps wrongly, I have not yet heard others call it this) as a kaleidoscopic model of the mind.  Freud creates this model to explain two features of dreams – that dreams are visual and that they are never in the location that we would expect them to be.  And what Freud comes up with, I think, is brilliant.  It is a model where we look at an image that is on top of another image that is on top of another image so that we can simultaneously see multiple things that are coming to bear on a particular issue and so that we can also obscure some things that are occurring because they can be covered by other images.  What is it that we are observing?  We are observing the things that have occurred during the past day – and the things that have been associatively called up by them – how those things have been fit into our memories – our reworking of what has occurred at previous moments in our personal history and how those are related to what has happened more recently.

While Solms does not apply his model to dreams, this is one of many places that I think it could well prove quite fruitful.  For instance; what if the function of dreams is partly a consolidation of memories – not just as they occurred but as an active integration of them into the existing components of our perspective on the world?  Here we have been applying, from our data banks, the material that we use to make decisions and move forward in the world.  Then, at night, we replay our experience – Freud calls it regression because we reverse the direction of the movement of materials, and move them backwards – from the memory out to the sensory system where we watch them being played back, but on unfamiliar ground – the ground of the old memories that are called up by what we have observed and engaged in during the day.  This might help us both build more efficient means of staying unconscious – help us fine tune our procedures; but it also might help us realize when those procedures have failed us – and these might be the dreams we remember or the moments in dreams when we awake and need to think of a new way of handling things – our processes are not capable of handling the situations – or we realize the negative consequences of handling situations in the ways that we have – they feel bad to us – and our brainstem says to us, in effect, there is something dangerous going on that we need to react to.

Solms does talk about psychopathology.  In this model, psychopathology – neurosis – happens when the automatic processes of the ego are put in place prematurely – before there has been a chance to adequately test them.  This largely happens because we are anxious about a situation and act before we have enough information.  Once the solution gets put in place however, because it is unconscious and because it works at some level, it becomes automatic.  Dreams and psychoanalysis become ways to rework these compromise or failed but nominally functional solutions.

So you may have lost track of why I think this paper is so exciting.  Let me try to review with some bullet points:

• Solms clarifies that the drives, if not directly conscious, are much closer to consciousness than Freud maintains.  The ego, instead of being a driver, is actually a largely unconscious consultant to the lower parts of the brain that are both driving us, and central to our conscious experience.
•  This means that our minds are primarily feeling organs rather than thinking ones.  Thought is an afterthought, as it were.  This “feels” to me more consistent with my experience than that thought is primary.
• This models preserves and enhances something specifically psychoanalytic – that there are multiple layers to our experience and that these can be understood singularly, but also in terms of how they interact.  It essentially explains that there are multiple systems functioning simultaneously that can be accessed and understood as separate entities and as integrated systems.
•  It is complementary to theories of how dreams work – that this may be the basis for new thinking about the adaptive function of dreaming – and why it is neuropsychologically so important to our functioning.  That dreaming might be similar to the cleaning out a fountain pen that occurs by drawing ink in from a reservoir after having had it run out onto the page.

But I think the primary reason that I am so excited about this paper is that, as much as psychoanalysis has evolved in the past 100 years – we have self-psychological models, object relations models, intersubjective models, new and better models of psychological development – we still rely on Freud’s models of the mind – his metapsychological models.  This paper revisits them from a neuropsychological perspective, finds them more serviceable than I think we would have expected, and updates them in ways that make them even more relevant, including in ways that may help us better understand how the relational models work within the individual.  As Kurt Lewin noted, there is nothing more practical than a good theory.  Freud’s theory has been very practical.  Tweaking it in ways that make it more closely mirror reality can only make it even more useful.

I also posted on a talk about psychoanalytic education that Mark Solms gave in 2019 and another at the 2020 convention.  Please also see a complementary post about Antonio Damasio's book, The Strange Order of Things.  I have also written about Solms (2022) book The Hidden Spring.

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