The Grand Challenge for Psychoanalysis – and Neuropsychoanalysis: Taking on the Game

As Ebbinghaus (1908) tells us in the opening words of his popular textbook of psychology, “psychology has a long past but only a short history.” In my opinion, there are three foundational moments in the history of psychology and, paradoxically, all three are moments of great advancement in biology. First, in the long past of psychology, psychology did not exist as such but was part of philosophy. It is extremely interesting to understand why it has been necessary, at one point of time in the sixteenth century, to invent this field and to create a signifier – namely “psychology” – separate from philosophy, which enabled the field to distinguish itself from philosophy (Mengal, 2000/2001). In this century of religious violence, bare corpses lay everywhere and progresses in anatomy are major. In 1540, the German religious reformer Philippe Melanchthon publishes a book which comments the De anima of Aristotle and he completes the Aristotelian text with a long treaty of anatomy (Mengal, 2000/2001). On the basis of this new knowledge, Melanchthon attributes functions to the body which were previously reserved for the soul. The brain becomes the principal organ of sensory functions and displaces the heart as the seat of emotional life and of thought. To the Aristotelian position that all living beings, whether plant, animal, or human, to varying degrees possess a soul which organizes the body, Melanchthon opposes a dualistic anthropology which divides the human in body and soul. The twodimensional “anthropologia” is articulated in “anatomia,” science of body, and “psychologia,” science of the soul. It is this new anthropology that is diffused into the world of the Reformation (Mengal, 2000/2001). The Dutch reformer Snellius (1594), for example, defines the body and the soul by their respective essential property: “The rational soul of man is the thought that, coupled with the body, completes man. (...) The physical things closer to natural bodies that move naturally, have an extension and for that reason occupy a space. (...) The faculty of the rational soul is the mind or will. Thought is the faculty of the soul to discourse and think about things which are and which are not.” (Snellius, 1594, pp. 26–27). It is as a philosopher that René Descartes proposes his dualist vision much in line with the reformist opinions. Descartes dissects animals and human cadavers and is familiar with the research on the flow of blood (Fuchs, 2001). He comes to the conclusion that the body is a complex device that is capable of moving without the soul, thus contradicting the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul. The metaphysical order, which states that the body exists by the soul, is broken. At the end of the seventeenth century, this way to present anthropology, science of man, in two parts, anatomy and psychology, is widespread, mainly in the medical literature (Mengal, 2000/2001). However, it is not before the middle of the nineteenth century that psychology, which is still widely regarded as a branch of philosophy, emancipates as an autonomous domain of science. Again, this is concomitant with a period of great advancement in biology. Indeed, the nineteenth century was also the period in which physiology, including neurophysiology, professionalizes and sees some of its most significant discoveries. Among its leaders are Charles Bell and François Magendie who independently discover the distinction between sensory and motor nerves in the spinal column, Johannes Müller who proposes the doctrine of specific nerve energies, Emil du Bois-Reymond who studies the electrical basis of muscle contraction, Pierre Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke who identify areas of the brain responsible for different aspects of language, as well as Gustav Fritsch, Eduard Hitzig, and David Ferrier who localize sensory and motor areas of the brain (e.g., see Brennan, 1998). One of the principal founders of experimental physiology, Hermann von Helmholtz, conducts studies of a wide range of topics including the natures of sound and color, and of our perceptions of them (Warren and Warren, 1968). In the 1860s, while he holds a position in Heidelberg, Helmholtz engages as an assistant a young M.D. named Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt employs the equipment of the physiology laboratory to address more complicated psychological questions than had not, until then, been investigated experimentally. In 1874 Wundt publishes his landmark textbook, Grundzüge der physiologische Psychologie (Principles of Physiological Psychology) (Wundt, 1874) and in 1879, he founds a laboratory specifically dedicated to original research in experimental psychology, the first laboratory of its kind in the world. Psychology as an autonomous domain of science is born. In other words, it is the confrontation with the amazing complexity of the body, respectively of the brain, which in the sixteenth and nineteenth century instigates the necessity to invoke, and then to settle, the discipline of psychology. What seems to happen in each of these moments is the recognition that what was previously ascribed to the soul or to the spirit, is in fact taken care of by the body. It is very paradoxical that it is precisely this recognition which, in turn, promotes psychology as an autonomous field. In the sixteenth century, the observation that anatomy in itself can explain how a body comes to move, for example, promotes the institution of a field, separate from anatomy, for the qualities of the soul which do not Translated by the author from the French translation (in Mengal, 2000/2001, p. 10): “L’âme raisonnable de l’homme est la pensée qui, conjuguée au corps, parachève l’homme. (...) Les choses physiques plus proches des corps naturels qui se meuvent naturellement, possèdent une étendue et à cause de cela occupent un lieu.” Original text (Snellius, 1594, pp. 26–27): “Animus hominis est mens quae corpori coniuncta hominem perficit. (...) Physica pressior in corporibus naturalibus, quae physice moventur, magnitudine sunt praedita, and propterea locum implent. (...) Rationalis animae facultas est mens aut voluntas. Mens est animae facultas de entibus and non entibus disserens and ratiocinans.”