Eighteenth to Mid-Nineteenth Century 317brain and nervous system to account for psychopathology.
Accumulating evidence of human psychological and physi-
cal variability also produced a shift in emphasis to neurolog-
ical causes of insanity. Such evidence, it was argued, could
not be attributed solely to different experiences in basically
similar human beings. The variety and extremes of mental
disorder exceeded the apparent explanatory capacity of the
associationist psychology.
These changes led to development of the brain pathology
model of psychopathology, which held that psychopathology
represents, not unfortunate psychological processes learned
by the individual in the social milieu, but malfunction and
morbidity of the central nervous system variously caused
by hereditary faults, disease, malnutrition, toxins, and stress.
For example, Moseley (1838) stated that “... disease in the
organ of the brain and not in the mind is the cause of nervous
complaints and insanity is now admitted.” He believed that
the brain could be affected by environmental and psycholog-
ical factors as well as by toxic agents (e.g., if not exercised,
the brain, like other organs, becomes relaxed and sinks into a
condition of incompetency). The predisposing causes of
insanity that he lists are similar to the causes of melancholy
suggested by Robert Burton in the seventeenth century. An
extreme of this view was to trace all psychopathology to
hypothetical lesions in the brain. Writing some 40 years after
Moseley, Henry Maudsley, whose major works appeared
between 1867 and 1879, believed all psychopathology was
caused by brain disease.
Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), whose major work was
published between 1822 and 1825, opposed the prevailing
view that the mind is a unitary thinking thing. He asserted
that it consists of interacting separate psychological faculties,
each with a separate locus in the brain, one of each in the two
cerebral hemispheres (a theory he called organology). He
agreed with the view that each side of the brain can serve as
a complete organ, one side providing a backup for the other.
He held that derangement of thinking and behavior are
caused by disease of particular parts of the brain, notably
gross under- or overdevelopment of particular cerebral or-
gans, or to an imbalance between cerebral organs. Gall main-
tained that all humans are vulnerable to malfunction of the
brain that can result in insanity, although some people have
a greater constitutional disposition to insanity than others
(Gall, 1825/1835, Vol. 1, p. 281).
Phrenology
Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776–1832) had begun to col-
laborate with Gall in 1800, but Gall later severed their rela-
tionship because of his objections to modifications that
Spurzheim began introducing in Gall’s theory. Spurzheim
called his variantphrenology,a term that Gall never used
(Clark & Jacyna, 1987, p. 222). Phrenology attracted numer-
ous adherents in both England and the United States, includ-
ing influential philosophers and physicians specializing
in psychiatry. Isaac Ray (1807–1881), an American physi-
cian and well-received writer on forensic psychiatry, was
for some years an advocate of phrenology. Spurzheim’s
phrenology was used to rationalize discrimination and pre-
judice on the basis of presumed biological racial and class
differences. Victor Hilts (1982) points out that, although Gall
did not use hereditarian arguments, phrenologists such as
Spurzheim began to promote the social policy of eugenics
well before the appearance of the social Darwinists. They
popularized hereditarian ideas in the conviction that social
progress depends on the improvement of human biological
endowment through selective breeding, and warned of the
possibility of racial degeneration if this were not accepted as
a moral duty.Brain Hemisphere TheoriesDiscovery of the brain’s division into two hemispheres
led to an interpretation of psychopathology as caused by a
breakdown in the activity integration between the two
hemispheres. Esquirol (1838) attributed impairment to the
duality of the brain, whose two hemispheres, “if not equally
activated, do not act simultaneously.” Benjamin Rush (1745–
1813) speculated that the mind, like vision, is a double
organ, which could account for cases of somnambulism in
which patients seemed to experience two independent states
of consciousness. And the French neurologist, Marie
François Xavier Bichat, explained that the brain has two
hemispheres because the organism must interact with the
external world in a unified way with both sides of the body
(Harrington, 1987).
In 1844, during the autopsy of an apparently normal man,
Arthur Ladbroke Wigan reported that the man possessed only
one cerebral hemisphere, evidence that a person requires only
one to function normally. Wigan concluded that “... each
cerebrum is a distinct and perfect whole,” capable of inde-
pendent thought and volition, and suggested that the healthy
brain synchronizes the actions of the two hemispheres, with
one of the two dominant and controlling the volitions of the
other. He speculated that in mental disease “one cerebrum
becomes sufficiently aggravated to defy the control of the
other,” and then the two hemispheres act independently, their
separate wills conflicting, and their separate thoughts being
confused. For such cases, Wigan (1844) suggested that
“a well-managed education” might serve to “establish and
confirm the power of concentrating the energies of both
brains on the same subject at the same time.”