Bart Marius
The Love-Hate Relationship of Mind and Body
HUMOUR S, MAGNETISM AND PERCEPTRONIUM
Madness has fascinated people for centuries, but a theory has yet to be found that can explain it entirely. Where is madness located? What causes it? How can we deal with it? There have been various approaches to understanding psychological disorders through the course of time, and there has always been some kind of substance, channel or organ involved, be it blood, bile and phlegm, or spiritus, nerves, electrical charges, hormones and neurotransmitters, which in turn spread through the body along channels, tubes and net works, and it all flows back and forth between the stomach, the bowels, the heart, the sexual organs and the brain. And then there is the soul, the mind, the ego, id, superego, consciousness and the subconscious. But madness has to be located somewhere, surely? In the course of history we have evolved from the extremely holistic view of Hippocratic medicine to psychiatry and psy chology, which have separated themselves from neurology and philosophy, only to return to a holistic view via neuroscience and pharmaceutical knowledge. Where does madness begin and end then? Let’s begin with what seems like a beginning. We all have a body and we all have a mind. Or not entirely. When a newsreader reports that ‘the body of [the victim] has been found’, a certain distinction is conspicuous. It seems like the body and the victim are two separate things: the victim possesses a body. If we browse the literature, however, it quickly becomes apparent that such a distinction was not always self-evident. The two have a lot more in common than a relationship based on ownership. We do not have enough space here to explain the mind-body problem in its entirety or to list all the different approaches to the subject, how ever, so just a few prominent figures in the history of psychiatry will be addressed and their thinking about it placed in context.
H U M O U R S , M A G N E T I S M A N D P E R C E P T R O N I U M — 67
