Abstract
Historian Ellenberger (1970) has identified in the history of psychiatry and brain science “the trend that consists in describing and understanding psychological and psychopathological phenomena in terms of real or hypothetical brain structures”, a trend he called a “brain mythology”. The rise of neuroscience in the last two decades has certainly given it a new significance. It is clear that neuroscience is extending its territory toward psychosocial, moral and cultural attitudes. The neuroscientific question “how does the human brain work?” has become more and more inseparable from the question “what does it mean to be human?” We may observe how contemporary neuroscience participates in the embodiment of the mind in the brain. Vidal (2009) calls “brainhood” the idea that “the brain is necessarily the location of the modern self”. This historical and epistemological situation generates conflicting claims and controversies, which are the evidence of the tensed relationship among neuroscience, social sciences and humanities today. Firstly, there is a tension between the neural and the social bases of the human mind (i.e. its competences, behaviours and attitudes) and there is a tension between individual identities and generic categories of people supposed to share neural configurations. These controversies are closely linked to the development of brain imaging as a possibility to visualize individual brain processes and construct cerebral types by subtracting and averaging imaging data (Posner and Raichle, 1994). They are also part of the history of understanding what being human means and of the conflict between “free will” and “biological shaping”. This conflict has been recently revived by the rise of neuroscience and by some social and political controversies related to the concepts of identity and personhood. In this short article, I would like to suggest that a more specific historical contextualization of these tensions and conflicts may help us to better understand the contemporary epistemological debate between neuroscience and social sciences.
Highlights
Historian Ellenberger (1970) has identified in the history of psychiatry and brain science “the trend that consists in describing and understanding psychological and psychopathological phenomena in terms of real or hypothetical brain structures”, a trend he called a “brain mythology”
Gall (1825) disagreed with Pinel: “After he has painted after nature, and in vivid colours, the highest degree of imbecility, after reporting on the smallness of the heads of these idiots, in brief, after he has found the truth, Mr Pinel does not yet have the courage to seize it.”. Their disagreement is reminiscent of the tensions between psychiatry and neuroscience, and more generally of the controversies about the location of identity and the nature of its determinations
Neuroscience, social sciences and humanities need to consider that disciplines do not exist per se, but are contingent and limited ways of knowing reality and understanding real life problems
Summary
Historian Ellenberger (1970) has identified in the history of psychiatry and brain science “the trend that consists in describing and understanding psychological and psychopathological phenomena in terms of real or hypothetical brain structures”, a trend he called a “brain mythology”. From an epistemological point of view, these theories share a general structure with contemporary theories, including brain imaging in neuroscience These theories are characterized firstly by a general conception of nature and of the human being; secondly, by a hypothesis of influence; thirdly, by the attempt to develop a practical technique that enables to read the signs that define individual uniqueness. These premodern theories on human characters help us to understand the history of identity embodiment as a series of debates about its location and its determinations (in the skin, the face, the organs, and so forth). In his famous Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale (Pinel, 1809), he argued that except for “idiotism” it was impossible to link mental alienation with the shape of the skull or brain injuries, and stated that “The head of the insane is approaching, in this point of view, well-formed heads”
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