Article ID: CBB117316646

Reconsidering “Brain mythology” (2021)

unapi

This essay attempts to reconstruct the historical origin of the term “brain mythology,” which is used very often today to summarize the status of brain anatomy around 1900. It asks whether this negative term can appropriately encapsulate that status, and tries to show that it came from a special direction of psychiatry that was generally very skeptical about somatic-oriented psychiatry. The reconstruction shows that “brain mythology” was formulated by pupils of Emil Kraepelin. This essay argues that their accusations, culminating in the accusation of “brain mythology,” can be traced back to reasons of principle related to the adoption of Wundt’s “heuristic principle of parallelism,” which Kraepelin incorporated into psychiatry. This principle suggests an independent psychic causality; for that reason alone, a strict localization of mental illness was excluded, and the value of somatic psychiatry was fundamentally questionable. This paper attempts to show that the term originated within the Wundt tradition and was also the result of skepticism about reductionism. This raises the question of whether it would not be better to describe the term, alongside objective criticism, more in the sense of a polemic between different schools of thought.

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Authors & Contributors
Hagner, Michael
Stone, James L.
Plebe, Alessio
Giosuè Baggio
Bassiri, Nima Rad
Vilensky, Joel A.
Concepts
Brain
Neurosciences
Neuroanatomy
Medicine
Brain localization
Psychology
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
20th century, late
20th century, early
21st century
18th century
Places
Germany
Amsterdam (Netherlands)
United States
Switzerland
France
Austria
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