The Only Cure

Mark Solms sets out the clinical case for psychoanalysis as psychiatry's master theory, drawing on his work as editor of the Revised Standard Edition of Freud and as a founder of neuropsychoanalysis. He argues that affective neuroscience, and in particular the study of how feeling arises in the brainstem, corroborates Freud's account of unconscious conflict, repression, and the return of what has been buried. From this he presses a sharp claim: that medication suppresses symptoms while the analytic relationship reaches their subjective causes, and so does the durable work of recovery.

Solms builds the argument through case material and brain science rather than doctrine, and he is candid about where Freud was wrong, revising the metapsychology in light of twenty-first-century evidence on affect, memory, and consciousness. For the practising clinician the book supplies a mechanistic vocabulary for what containment and interpretation accomplish, and a defence of long-form treatment against the pharmacological default. Pegasus Books published it in August 2026.