Sigmund Freud trained as a neurologist before he founded psychoanalysis, and he spent his early career trying to describe the mind in the language of nerve cells. In 1895 he abandoned the attempt, concluding that the science of his day was not ready for it. A century later a generation of researchers picked up the unfinished work, and the field they built is called neuropsychoanalysis.
The Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute has a direct connection to that project. Mark Solms, the neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst most closely identified with the field, is a member of our faculty and has taught here on the revision of Freud’s theory of the drives.
What Is Neuropsychoanalysis?
Neuropsychoanalysis is the interdisciplinary field that studies the relationship between the mind as psychoanalysis describes it from the inside and the brain as neuroscience describes it from the outside. It treats subjective experience and neural mechanism as two views of one organism rather than as rival explanations.
The method is largely clinical. Researchers study people whose brains have been altered by stroke, injury, or illness, and ask what happens to the functions psychoanalysis cares about: dreaming, memory, motivation, the capacity to feel and to want.
Freud’s Unfinished Neurological Project
Freud’s early manuscript, later published as the Project for a Scientific Psychology, tried to build a model of the mind out of neurons, quantities of excitation, and pathways of discharge. He never published it, turning instead to a purely psychological vocabulary. What survived was a set of testable assumptions about a physical organ: that mental life is driven by biological need, that the mind manages quantities of tension, and that most of its operations occur outside awareness.
Mark Solms and the Founding of the Field
Solms is a psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist who holds the Chair of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital. He is President of the South African Psychoanalytical Association, Research Chair of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and the founder of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society, the organization that gave the field its name and its journal.
He is also the editor of the Revised Standard Edition of Freud’s complete psychological works. The person arguing that Freud’s model can be tested against the brain is therefore also the person who has read the entire corpus most closely.
The Dreaming Discovery That Changed the Argument
For decades the standard objection to Freud’s dream theory was neurological. REM sleep is generated by cell groups in the brainstem, so dreaming looked like a mechanical byproduct of a sleep cycle, with no wishes and no meaning required. Solms tested that claim the way a clinician would, by finding patients in whom the two came apart.
He documented people with brainstem damage who lost REM sleep and went on dreaming, and people with damage to the deep frontal pathways carrying dopamine who stopped dreaming while their REM sleep continued. Dreaming turned out to depend not on the REM generator but on the motivational circuitry, the system that makes an animal seek and want. That does not confirm Freud in detail, but it puts wishing back near the center of the dream, which is where Freud’s account of dream formation had placed it.
Where Feeling Comes From
The second major line of work concerns affect. Solms argues, against the long assumption that consciousness is manufactured in the cortex, that the capacity to feel arises in ancient midbrain structures, and that raw affective states are the foundation on which cognition is built rather than a decoration added at the end.
This has consequences for how the drives are understood. Instead of two grand abstractions, the reading Solms favors treats basic emotion systems as the biological reality behind what Freud grouped under the life and death drives.
What Neuropsychoanalysis Does Not Claim
The field is often misrepresented in both directions. It does not claim that brain imaging can validate an interpretation, that psychoanalysis should be replaced by neuroscience, or that Freud was simply right. The claim is narrower: that a theory of mind ought to be answerable to what is known about the organ producing mind. This is part of why a depth-oriented approach to the mind keeps developing rather than remaining fixed in its founder’s century.
Why It Matters in the Consulting Room
For someone considering treatment, the practical import is confidence rather than technique. This research supports the claims that make depth-oriented therapy worth doing: that much of mental life is genuinely unconscious, that affect drives behavior more powerfully than reasoning, and that speaking freely with an attentive other can change how the system regulates itself. Our psychodynamic therapy for adults rests on those foundations.
Psychoanalytic Treatment in Chicago
The Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute Treatment Center offers psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy informed by the full scope of contemporary psychoanalytic thought, including the research tradition described here. At our downtown Chicago office at 8 S Michigan Avenue, experienced clinicians work with people who want to understand the sources of their own behavior, not simply manage its symptoms.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is neuropsychoanalysis in simple terms?
It is the study of how the mind described by psychoanalysis relates to the brain described by neuroscience. Rather than choosing between them, it treats inner experience and neural mechanism as two perspectives on one organism, often studying patients whose brain injuries have altered dreaming, memory, or motivation.
Who founded neuropsychoanalysis?
The field is most closely associated with Mark Solms, a psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist who founded the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society and its journal. He also edits the Revised Standard Edition of Freud’s complete works, and he serves on the faculty of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute.
Does neuroscience prove Freud was right?
No, and serious researchers in the field do not claim it does. Some Freudian proposals have held up, notably that mental life is largely unconscious and driven by affect, while others have been revised or discarded. The value lies in making psychoanalytic claims testable rather than in vindicating them.
How did the dream research change Freud’s theory?
Solms found patients who lost REM sleep yet kept dreaming, and others who lost dreaming while REM sleep continued. This showed that dreaming depends on the brain’s motivational circuitry rather than the REM generator, restoring wishing to a central place in how dreams form.
An Older Question, Answered Differently
Freud left his neurological manuscript in a drawer because the tools did not yet exist. The striking development of the last thirty years is not that his answers were confirmed, but that his questions turned out to be answerable at all. If you are curious about what a depth-oriented approach might open up in your own life, we invite you to reach out and book an appointment with our Treatment Center. Today, you are one step closer to growth and well-being.
