The New Adventures of Old Freud

Dr. Mark Solms

Source: Rowman & Littlefield / Used with Permission

This summer, The Revised Standard Edition (RSE) of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud was published on behalf of Rowman & Littlefield and commissioned by the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Edited by translator and neuropsychologist Dr. Mark Solms, the 24-volume set was completed over a 30-year period, updating and revising the translation of James Strachey from more than 50 years ago. Included in the RSE are 56 new notes, essays, letters, and lectures, some of which had not previously been translated into English.

Dr. Mark Solms is a South African psychoanalyst and the director of neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital. Dr. Solms is also known for his discovery of the brain mechanisms of dreaming, his use of psychoanalytic methods in contemporary neuroscience, and as the founding editor of the journal Neuropsychoanalysis.

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History is replete with examples of those who were initially revered for their seminal achievements but then devalued in subsequent generations when their words and actions, revisited, were deemed out-of-step with contemporary sensibilities. So it is with Thomas Jefferson, a founding father of America, as well as Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis.

But what if new evidence emerged, adding greater nuance to these singular figures, perhaps even partially vindicating them? Those who care about truth would likely want to be made aware of such evidence. As such, I am delighted to present highlights of my interview with Dr. Mark Solms, whose Revised Standard Edition (RSE) of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud was published earlier this summer.

Dr. Solms’ opus is worthy of our attention, not only because he corrects some mistakes in James Strachey’s previous translation (e.g., changing Strachey’s translation of the German word “trieb” to mean “drive” instead of “instinct”) but also because he adds dozens of new writings to the corpus of Freud’s collected works, including letters, lectures, case studies, manuscripts, and neuroscience publications, that were previously unknown to most Freud scholars.

In our interview, Dr. Solms offered numerous revelations about Freud—e.g., how his early research in neuroscience influenced his later psychoanalytic theories; how his ambivalence about his Jewish identity shaped his views on religion; and his belief that Americans were rather ignorant. However, it’s his translation of Freud’s newly-discovered writings about women and homosexuality that have the most potential to change people’s views of him.

Freud’s views on women—especially regarding his theory of penis envy, his tendencies toward phallocentrism, and his Victorian view of women’s sexuality—were criticized even by members of his inner circle, like Karen Horney and Alfred Adler. However, when second-wave feminists of the mid-20th century, like Simone de Beauvoir and Nancy Chodorow, began challenging Freud and his theories of sexuality more stridently, it led to both his theories and his methods being marginalized in mental health and academic circles.

Sigmund and Anna Freud

Source: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

Freud’s legacy around women has always been complicated. On the one hand, at a time when women were discouraged from joining the workforce, much less becoming professionals, Freud was supportive of women becoming psychoanalysts, including Karen Horney and his own daughter, Anna.

However, a thorough reading of Freud’s work, including his case studies on hysteria, underscores the fact that Freud did not view women as empowered individuals with much agency. Together, these two sides of Freud formed the dialectical lens through which he has been viewed for the past century.

As such, Solms’s reports on Freud’s defense of women (as well as “homosexuals”) in the RSE are notable and add greater dimension to a man who had previously been reduced to a two-dimensional caricature. In one such correspondence, previously untranslated into English, Solms notes that when the Austrian government was considering a law in favor of marriage reform, Freud made “a strident defense of women’s rights” when he was asked for his recommendations on the law. Regarding this and other newly translated writings, Dr. Solms told me that he’s come to view Freud as more enlightened on social issues than he previously thought.

Freudian Psychology Essential Reads

On Kissing and Other Perversions

The Birth of Psychoanalysis, and the Erasure of a Life

In a similar vein, though Freud didn’t necessarily have a reputation as being homophobic, his penchant for discussing homosexuality in clinical terms—frequently calling it an “inversion,” as well as “an unfortunate trait,” an “abnormal tendency,” and the result of an incomplete resolution of the Oedipal Complex (de Kuyper, 1993)—is perhaps why he is viewed unfavorably by some in the LGBTQ+ community. But Freud also offered well-known defenses of “homosexuals,” including his frequent citing of Plato, Michelangelo, and Leonardo Da Vinci—all of whom he believed to be gay—as among the greatest men in history.

In the RSE, Dr. Solms’ provides even more evidence to support the notion that, on both a personal and professional level, Freud had much more positive views of gay individuals than previously thought. Dr. Solms offered newly translated evidence—internal correspondence between Freud and the Committee on International Psychoanalysis—demonstrating his full support for “homosexuals” being trained as psychoanalysts, even though the committee itself didn’t allow this until the late 1980s!

In another newly translated writing, Freud refused to provide psychoanalysis as a form of conversion therapy to the son of an American woman who wrote to him asking him to do so. In his response, Freud declines because of his belief that it is not an illness to be “homosexual.” Solms also provided evidence that Freud defended a professor who was found guilty of moral insanity, primarily due to his engaging in gay sex. In his defense, Freud noted that there is nothing pathological or criminal about gay sex.

In light of the new evidence about Freud’s views—on women and homosexuality—how should we view him today? Like many who have reverence for Freud’s achievements but wince at some of his archaic words and perspectives, Dr. Solms reminds us that while “from a modern standpoint [it is easy to view Freud as] homophobic, sexist, misogynist, classist, racist even… we have to recognize that Freud was a man of his time.” He would even go so far as to say that Freud was “enlightened, relative to his compatriots and his peers at the time.”

Is it possible that, when evaluated against the peers of his era, we might consider Freud an “enlightened” progressive, even though by today’s standards, his words might be considered “homophobic,” “sexist,” “misogynist,” “classist,” and “racist”? And if we were willing to acknowledge that these opposing views of Freud are equally valid, what about Thomas Jefferson or anyone else in history whose reputation has swung back and forth on the pendulum of cultural critique?

Followers of this blog and those who have read my article on facts vs. truth know that I routinely argue that opposing perspectives of the same thing—be it an object, a person, or an event—can each be true. To understand this, however, we need to avoid what Freud and others would call “splitting,” which involves the reduction of things into black-and-white binaries, and instead commit to inspecting things in three-dimensional space, from multiple points of view.

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Part 2 of this article series will cover other topics discussed in my interview with Dr. Mark Solms, including Freud’s neuroscience writings and his ambivalence about his Jewish heritage, as well as Dr. Solms’ research in a field he helped found: neuropsychoanalysis.