Mark Solms and Sanneke de Haan on the Mind-Body Problem

‘the organic even in its lowest forms prefigures mind, and ... mind even on its highest reaches remains part of the organic’

Mark Solms is a neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst and the author of The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness (2021). Sanneke de Haan is a philosopher of psychiatry and the author of Enactive Psychiatry (2020).

Solms’s The Hidden Spring is definitely one of the more memorable books I’ve read this year, and there is a lot to unpack—and perhaps much to contest—in Solm’s account of consciousness. In this post I want to focus on Solms’s discussion of the relationship between physiology and psychology (which he offers in the context of Chalmers’s “hard problem” of consciousness). And I want to place Solms’s description next to Sanneke de Haan’s treatment of this issue from an enactive perspective. Both emphasize the physiological and psychological as dual aspects rather than two separate phenomena standing in opposition, and both appeal to self-organization as a principle, but in their own different ways. Solms adopts Karl Friston’s free-energy principle as his guide and thinks of the brain in terms of information processing, while de Haan thinks in terms of embedded, embodied, and enactive cognition. The deeper similarities and convergences are worth noting and examining (hopefully in the future); for now, this juxtaposition will do.