Overview
Hallucinations, convulsions, mental confusion, loss of energy, unbearable thoughts – mental disorders pose as many enigmas for physicians as for philosophers. Where does the disorder come from? What does it reveal about the nature of the mind, the structure of the soul, and its relation to the body? Who can remedy it, and how? This book shows how these questions, still relevant today, were formulated in the second century CE and what answers were given to them.
Following the guiding thread of psychopathology, it offers a journey through the writings of Galen of Pergamum and provides the keys to studying in depth his conception of the human being as a living and thinking entity. A prolific and polemical writer endowed with vast and precise erudition, Galen developed a singular body of thought. At the crossroads of several intellectual traditions, it is marked as much by certainties as by hesitations, and at times by tensions that can be disconcerting to us. The soul is one such delicate subject. By approaching it through the lens of disease, this book seeks to show how the philosopher’s theses and the physician’s explanations, followed step by step, combine into a complex and nuanced argument. Galen’s theoretical approach, the question of whether a medical category of mental disorder exists, its symptomatology, its etiology, and finally its treatment are thus presented and discussed. A crucial issue in the history and epistemology of medicine, the question of mental disorders sheds new light on the thought of the physician from Pergamum – at once as cautious as it is emphatic or peremptory, and wholly invested in the demands of care.
Contributor Biography
Julien Devinant
Julien Devinant, a former student of the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm) and agrégé in philosophy, holds doctorates in ancient philosophy and Greek philology (Paris-Sorbonne and Humboldt University, Berlin). His work in epistemology and the history of ideas focuses on Greek and Roman medicine, in particular psychology, physiology, and pathology.
Table of contents
Acknowledgments
Note
Introduction
PART 1. THEORETICAL APPROACH: THE QUESTION OF GALENIC MATERIALISM
Chapter 1. The Thesis of Quod animi facultates: Contextualization
Chapter 2. Materialism and Instrumentalism
Chapter 3. Galenic Agnosticism Concerning the Nature of the Soul
PART 2. MENTAL DISORDER AS A MEDICAL OBJECT
Chapter 1. The Question of Medical Interventionism
Chapter 2. A Psychopathology?
Chapter 3. Galenic Avoidance
Chapter 4. The Words to Say It
PART 3. THE UNITY OF MENTAL DISORDERS
Chapter 1. Hidden Affections, Affections of the Encephalon
Chapter 2. “Psychic” Affections
1 – Psychic and Somatic
2 – Psychic and Natural
PART 4. UNDERSTANDING MENTAL DISORDERS
Chapter 1. Symptomatology
Chapter 2. Etiology
1 – Qualities and Humors
2 – Modes and Temporality
PART 5. THE MANAGEMENT OF MENTAL DISORDERS
Chapter 1. Therapeutic Measures and Technical Conjecture
Chapter 2. At the Patient’s Bedside
1 – The Criterion of Mental Suffering
2 – Assessing the Psychological Dimension of Disorders
3 – Qualifying a Mental State as Pathological
Conclusion
Bibliography
List of Cited Sources (Abbreviations)
Sources
Studies
Index locorum
Index nominum et rerum