Trauma causes mental illness

This may seem obvious today, but Freud was the first to consider “the role of trauma» about why people develop mental illnesses.

Freud highlighted this in his theories about hysteria, a mental illness thought to cause anxiety, chest pain, fainting, and changes in libido in women. Freud believed that his hysterical patients suffered from “a disorder of the uterus.” Again, “ridiculous,” Solms says, but what was then called hysteria is actually real.

Solms says that “today we call it a functional neurological disorder” – a neurological disease causing muscle weakness, movement problems and seizures, but without an actual cause in the brain.. However, it is not a condition that only affects women.

“Not all patients with functional neurological disorders suffer from psychological trauma, but a very large percentage of them do, much more than in the healthy population,” says Solms.

Now, saying there is a link between mental illness and trauma is “as obvious as saying we breathe oxygen,” with data to back it up. Three quarters of people with chronic depression also have a history of childhood trauma.

Dreams depend on what motivates us

“When it comes to saying Freud is right about dreams, I really have to cite my own research,” Solms says. And for good reason: in his work as a neuroscientist, the professor was the first to determine which brain mechanisms are responsible for dreams, in 1997.

His results were closer to Freud’s theories than anyone could have imagined.

“Freud believed that the wishes, desires, and desires of the dreamer were the source of the things he dreams of,” Solms explains.

His own research found that dreaming involves the parts of the brain that also motivate different behaviors when we’re awake, meaning that “the brain mechanisms that lead to dreaming have positive motivation behind them,” says Solms.

The brain regions involved in dreaming, revealed by modern neuroscience, “are exactly those that would have been predicted on the basis of Freudian theory.”

Furthermore, Freud was also right: dreaming helps us stay asleep. Solms says: “Patients whose visual and spatial parts of the brain are damaged, and therefore cannot generate dream imagery, have terrible sleep. »

But the doctor wasn’t necessarily right about everything he proposed about dreams, especially when it came to some of his more outlandish theories, like repressed memories returning in dreams through different symbols. .

“Freud had all kinds of ideas about the symbolism of dreams. There is no neuroscience support for any of this.

Talking therapies can heal

A mention of Freud might conjure up the image of a distraught patient lying on a deck chair, revisiting memories of his mother.

In recent years, long psychoanalysis sessions have fallen out of fashion, with the NHS tending to prescribe shorter sessions of more “scientific” therapies such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

“But Aaron Beck, the pioneer of CBT, was a Freudian psychoanalyst,” says Solms, who also credits Freud with the idea that talking about your problems with a trained mental expert can help you resolve them.

“CBT is actually a development of the foundations of psychoanalysis and the whole idea of ​​talk therapy,” Solms explains. “The idea of ​​talking to people through a psychological approach to illness can be extremely therapeutic, and that is demonstrably and measurably true.”

Today, CBT is widely used in many countries around the world, “and it has similar response rates to medications prescribed today,” Solms says.