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A sea change has been taking place in the science of mental healthcare. Dismissed for years as a soft, unquantifiable substitute for real medicine, evidence is now piling up that therapy - psychoanalytic therapy in particular - is one of the most powerful treatments that we possess for illness of any kind. Vastly more effective than almost all psychiatric drugs, it is as reliable against a plethora of mental complaints as the HPV vaccine is at preventing cervical cancer. But why does it work so well? The answer may lie in another surprising development. The model of the human mind that is now emerging from the frontiers of neuroscience turns out (to the dismay of many scientists) to confirm much of what Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, conjectured more than a century ago. Could it be that therapy works because Freudian theory, with its underworlds of murky desire and unconscious fantasy, is largely true ? Long relegated to the status of pseudoscience, psychoanalysis could now be poised to resume its position as our master theory of the mind. Join the pioneering neuropsychologist Mark Solms on a revelatory inquiry into the essence of mental sickness and health. In this dazzling synthesis, Freud''s original vision, lightly revised in light of some astonishing new brain research, turns out to be just the thing to plug the void at the centre of contemporary psychiatry. What news could be more welcome, amid a mental health crisis, than that the cure has been in our possession all along - so long as we can commit to the treatment we really need.
