Chandak Sengoopta
Passions of the Mind
Fugitive Minds: On Madness, Sleep and other Twilight Afflictions
By Antonia Melechi
William Heinemann 348pp £18.99
ALL MENTAL DISORDERS, declared the nineteenth-century psychiatrist Wilhelm Griesinger, are actually disorders of the brain. Griesinger's materialist faith was stronger than his evidence, but today his faith seems to have been fully justified. Armed with potent new drugs, clinical psychiatrists can now offer reasonably good treatments for many mental disorders, and few psychologists would think of investigating the remaining mysteries of the mind with tools other than neuroscientific. This biological revolution has also had its casualties. A hundred years ago, the great psychologist William James could investigate mysticism and the 'varieties of religious experience' in purely mental and cultural terms. The experimental psychologist of our time, however, must proceed very differently. 'By stimulating parts of the temporal lobe [of the brain], one Canadian neuroscientist', remarks Antonio Melechi in this book, 'claims to have located the centre of the "God Experience".' The science of the mind is now a division of neurobiology.
This rampant biologism, Melechi suggests, has impoverished psychology. 'The maps that brain science continues to generate, the diagnoses that modern-day medicine and pathology arrive at, should not', he asserts, 'be allowed the last word on any mental state, mystical or otherwise.'
One of his chief objectives is to show us how
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Interview with Iris Murdoch by John Haffenden via @Lit_Review
I love Helen Garner and this, by @chris_power in @Lit_Review, is excellent.
Yesterday was Fredric Jameson's 90th birthday.
This month's Archive newsletter includes Terry Eagleton on The Political Unconscious, and other pieces from our April 1983 issue.
Terry Eagleton - Supermarket of the Mind
Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson
literaryreview.co.uk