Cite as: Noga Arikha, ‘Humoural Bodies and Balanced Minds’, lecture presented at the conference Situating Mental Illness: Between Scientific Certainty and Personal Narrative, ICI Berlin, 29 April 2011, part 1, video recording, mp4, 26:17 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e110429-1>
Lecture
29 Apr 2011

Humoural Bodies and Balanced Minds

By Noga Arikha

Humoural theory provides a historical continuity to the definitions of mind and mental illness. Where do we stand today on this continuum, equipped as we are with modern tools to complete the naturalist picture of the mind? Mind and body used to be interconnected. Where does the body stand now that the brain is the mind? To answer such questions, we can look back not only into our history, but also out towards Indian metaphysics of mind, which overlap in surprising ways with the Greek classical heritage.

Noga Arikha is a historian of ideas, particularly interested in the relation between mind and body, and in tracing the genealogy of the concepts that pertain to it. Though she began her studies by focusing on early modern Europe, her interests encompass a wide range of periods and cultures, and her work straddles a multiplicity of disciplines, from philosophy, the cognitive and mind sciences, and anthropology, to the histories of science, psychology, medicine, art, and food. She endeavours to bridge the divide between the ‘two cultures’ – the sciences and the humanities – and to bring to a general audience accessible accounts that analyses the origins of our deepest concerns about our embodied selves. She is the author of Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (Ecco, Harper) and more recently with Marcello Simonetta of Napoleon and the Rebel: A story of Brotherhood, Passion and Power on the relationship between Napoleon and his beloved brother Lucien (June 2011, Palgrave McMillan).

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

Organized by

Giovanni Frazzetto
An ICI Berlin event in collaboration with the European Neuroscience and Society Network (formerly European Science Foundation)

Video in English

Part 1

Format: mp4
Length: 00:26:17
First published on: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/noga-arikha/
Rights: © ICI Berlin

Part of the Conference

Situating Mental Illness: Between Scientific Certainty and Personal Narrative

Contemporary neuroscience reduces mental illness to brain-based operations, instantiating a division between biology and culture, mechanism and context, brain and biography. This has the effect of marginalising a richer, inner-subjective complex of individual meaning, personal history and narrative. This meeting surveys recent significant shifts in biological psychiatry methods for the assessment of mental illness and questions their validity and limitations.
It also explores nuances and interstices between the regard of psychiatric disorders as neurochemical flaws or experiential conditions, the cultural history of psychopathologies and how brain-based accounts of mental illness circulate in the public domain and are incorporated in culture.

The meeting unfolds into three main sessions:

1. Tensions of Diagnosis
The current neuroscience set of co-circulating methods including diagnostic categories, behaviour rating scales, animal models and biological markers implies a superimposition of subjective symptoms, neurochemical markers and objective endophenotypology.  What are the advantages and limitations to the introduction of biological measures in DSM-V? What are their repercussions for epidemiology, criteria of inclusion in trials and treatment? The scope of this session is to illustrate difficulties conciliating validity/reliability of measurements with respect for heterogeneity in disease manifestation, both at the biological and phenomenological level and to bring emerging evidence from clinical, epidemiological and biological research, as well as sociological analysis.

2. Voices from Within
The second session will be specifically devoted to exploring nuances and interstices between psychiatric disorder as neurochemical flaws and experiential condition, which have gone lost in favour of measurability, and thus standardization.
Attention will be given to the role of narratives and personal accounts in illustrating differences in severity and sequence of symptoms as well as values and motivations among patients behind biological interpretation of illness, and pharmaceutical treatment.

3. Neurotransmitters and Psychopathology in History and Culture
In the final session, we will explore the history of certain psychopathologies and how brain-based accounts of mental illness circulate in the public domain and are incorporated in culture. What ideas and representations of ‘illness’ do biological interpretations let circulate in culture? How are they welcomed, endorsed or resisted by the general public? What scientific or commonsensical ideas do we live by to describe and explain illness, and what is their valence?

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

With

Lisa Appignanesi
Noga Arikha
Lisa Blackman
Laura Bossi
Felicity Callard
Trudy Dehue
John Forrester
Allen Frances

Organized by

Giovanni Frazzetto
An ICI Berlin event