Neuroanatomy of Social Behaviour: An Evolutionary and Psychoanalytic Perspective

Neuroanatomy of Social Behaviour

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Understanding how the brain subserves, and has evolved for, seemingly complex social behaviour requires an evolutionarily and psychoanalytically informed framework - a framework that sets itself apart from cognitivism and speculations about conscious agency or a "self" as an actor. Any position that does not fully discard the idea that conscious phenomena can cause behaviour or that we have free will , hinders advances toward an evolutionarily feasible theory of brain mechanisms of social behaviour.

Accordingly, a key concern of the book is to seek clarification of the relationship between consciousness, behaviour, and brain. This theme, as well as themes concerned with the constituent elements of human social behaviour and personality - such as aggression, avoidance, anxiety, and reward seeking - run through the book, being incorporated into the discussion of the various brain structures and regulatory mechanisms.

Psychoanalysis not only emphasizes the primacy of the unconscious in social behaviour, it also allows us to relate all forms of social behavior, and its variations into the extremes of psychopathology, to the expression of a few behaviour mechanisms that are deeply rooted in the evolution of defensive and reward-seeking behaviours of vertebrates. Advances in biological psychiatry and behavioural neuroscience, reviewed here, illustrate the functioning under "extreme conditions" of a system that balances and intertwines defensive, aggressive, and reward-seeking motivational processes - processes that lie hidden in the interpersonal and cultural fabric of the social world that surrounds us.

He has provided this, not in general terms, but at the detailed level of neural networks and neurotransmitter systems. His readers will be eternally grateful for the highly impressive compendium of relevant neuroscientific findings, integrated with psychoanalytic theory. This is a monumental, masterful achievementby an extremely able scientific mind.

This is not for the faint of heart. A year-old woman loses the use of her legs, suddenly becoming paralysed from the waist down.

In another case, a woman feels an overwhelming compulsion to close her eyes, until eventually she cannot open them at all. After numerous tests, nothing physically wrong was found with these patients, so what caused their symptoms? Conditions like these used to be diagnosed as hysteria.

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You might think our understanding has advanced since Freud, or, rather more fashionably, that Freud was just wrong. The term hysteria was dropped when the influence of a psychodynamic theory of mental ill health, with its concepts of unconscious mental forces affecting behaviour, fell out of favour in psychiatry. What is more surprising is that cases like this are typical of those routinely seen by neurologists today. She seemed indifferent to her sudden paralysis.

The nurses thought she was putting it on. On interviewing Ely, he eventually discovered that she had been raped by someone she knew. She evidently knew this, but had pushed its significance out of her conscious awareness to protect herself. She found that talking her experiences through repeatedly was cathartic — her pent up feelings were released. Two days later, she was able to leave the hospital, unaided.

Her husband was on remand for child abuse, but she refused to think this might be an important factor in her illness. While psychological knowledge is often applied to the assessment and treatment of mental health problems, it is also directed towards understanding and solving problems in several spheres of human activity.

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By many accounts psychology ultimately aims to benefit society. Many do scientific research on a wide range of topics related to mental processes and behavior, and typically work in university psychology departments or teach in other academic settings e. Some are employed in industrial and organizational settings, or in other areas [7] such as human development and aging, sports, health, and the media, as well as in forensic investigation and other aspects of law. In , William James defined psychology as "the science of mental life, both of its phenomena and their conditions".

This definition enjoyed widespread currency for decades. However, this meaning was contested, notably by radical behaviorists such as John B. Watson , who in his manifesto defined the discipline of psychology as the acquisition of information useful to the control of behavior. Also since James defined it, the term more strongly connotes techniques of scientific experimentation. The ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, China, India, and Persia all engaged in the philosophical study of psychology.

In Ancient Egypt the Ebers Papyrus mentioned depression and thought disorders. In China, psychological understanding grew from the philosophical works of Laozi and Confucius , and later from the doctrines of Buddhism. This body of knowledge involves insights drawn from introspection and observation, as well as techniques for focused thinking and acting.

Mental Illness, Philosophy of | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

It frames the universe as a division of, and interaction between, physical reality and mental reality, with an emphasis on purifying the mind in order to increase virtue and power. An ancient text known as The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine identifies the brain as the nexus of wisdom and sensation, includes theories of personality based on yin—yang balance, and analyzes mental disorder in terms of physiological and social disequilibria. Chinese scholarship focused on the brain advanced in the Qing Dynasty with the work of Western-educated Fang Yizhi — , Liu Zhi — , and Wang Qingren — Wang Qingren emphasized the importance of the brain as the center of the nervous system, linked mental disorder with brain diseases, investigated the causes of dreams and insomnia , and advanced a theory of hemispheric lateralization in brain function.

Distinctions in types of awareness appear in the ancient thought of India, influenced by Hinduism. A central idea of the Upanishads is the distinction between a person's transient mundane self and their eternal unchanging soul. Divergent Hindu doctrines, and Buddhism, have challenged this hierarchy of selves, but have all emphasized the importance of reaching higher awareness.

Yoga is a range of techniques used in pursuit of this goal. However, Indian doctrines influenced Western thinking via the Theosophical Society , a New Age group which became popular among Euro-American intellectuals. Psychology was a popular topic in Enlightenment Europe. In Germany, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — applied his principles of calculus to the mind, arguing that mental activity took place on an indivisible continuum—most notably, that among an infinity of human perceptions and desires, the difference between conscious and unconscious awareness is only a matter of degree.

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Christian Wolff identified psychology as its own science, writing Psychologia empirica in and Psychologia rationalis in This notion advanced further under Immanuel Kant , who established the idea of anthropology , with psychology as an important subdivision. However, Kant explicitly and notoriously rejected the idea of experimental psychology , writing that "the empirical doctrine of the soul can also never approach chemistry even as a systematic art of analysis or experimental doctrine, for in it the manifold of inner observation can be separated only by mere division in thought, and cannot then be held separate and recombined at will but still less does another thinking subject suffer himself to be experimented upon to suit our purpose , and even observation by itself already changes and displaces the state of the observed object.

However, this discipline did not yet embrace experimentation. Gustav Fechner began conducting psychophysics research in Leipzig in the s, articulating the principle Weber—Fechner law that human perception of a stimulus varies logarithmically according to its intensity.

Wundt, in turn, came to Leipzig University, establishing the psychological laboratory which brought experimental psychology to the world. Wundt focused on breaking down mental processes into the most basic components, motivated in part by an analogy to recent advances in chemistry, and its successful investigation of the elements and structure of material. Stanley Hall who studied with Wundt, formed a psychology lab at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, which became internationally influential.

Hall, in turn, trained Yujiro Motora , who brought experimental psychology, emphasizing psychophysics, to the Imperial University of Tokyo. Catell, who also studied with eugenicist Francis Galton , went on to found the Psychological Corporation. Wittmer focused on mental testing of children; Scott, on selection of employees.

Another student of Wundt, Edward Titchener , created the psychology program at Cornell University and advanced a doctrine of " structuralist " psychology. Structuralism sought to analyze and classify different aspects of the mind, primarily through the method of introspection. In , James wrote an influential book, The Principles of Psychology , which expanded on the realm of structuralism, memorably described the human " stream of consciousness ", and interested many American students in the emerging discipline.

A different strain of experimentalism, with more connection to physiology, emerged in South America, under the leadership of Horacio G. This approach is based upon the idea that individuals experience things as unified wholes. Rather than breaking down thoughts and behavior into smaller elements, as in structuralism, the Gestaltists maintained that whole of experience is important, and differs from the sum of its parts.

Other 19th-century contributors to the field include the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus , a pioneer in the experimental study of memory, who developed quantitative models of learning and forgetting at the University of Berlin , [35] and the Russian-Soviet physiologist Ivan Pavlov , who discovered in dogs a learning process that was later termed " classical conditioning " and applied to human beings. The first meeting of the International Congress of Psychology sponsored by the International Union of Psychological Science took place in Paris, in August , amidst the World's Fair celebrating the centennial of the French Revolution.

William James was one of three Americans among the four hundred attendees. The International Congress continued to be held, at different locations in Europe, with wider international participation. American psychology gained status during World War I, during which a standing committee headed by Robert Yerkes administered mental tests " Army Alpha " and " Army Beta " to almost 1.

University of Michigan psychologist Dorwin Cartwright reported that university researchers began large-scale propaganda research in —, and "the last few months of the war saw a social psychologist become chiefly responsible for determining the week-by-week-propaganda policy for the United States Government. In Germany after World War I, psychology held institutional power through the military, and subsequently expanded along with the rest of the military under the Third Reich. Freudian psychoanalysts were expelled and persecuted under the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazi Party , and all psychologists had to distance themselves from Freud and Adler.

This psychotherapy aimed to align suitable Germans with the overall goals of the Reich; as described by one physician: "Despite the importance of analysis, spiritual guidance and the active cooperation of the patient represent the best way to overcome individual mental problems and to subordinate them to the requirements of the Volk and the Gemeinschaft. Alexander Mitscherlich founded a prominent applied psychoanalysis journal called Psyche and with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation established the first clinical psychosomatic medicine division at Heidelberg University.

In , psychology was integrated into the required studies of medical students.

Neuroanatomy of Social Behaviour: An Evolutionary and Psychoanalytic Perspective

After the Russian Revolution , psychology was heavily promoted by the Bolsheviks as a way to engineer the "New Man" of socialism. Thus, university psychology departments trained large numbers of students, for whom positions were made available at schools, workplaces, cultural institutions, and in the military.

An especial focus was pedology , the study of child development, regarding which Lev Vygotsky became a prominent writer.

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