Abstract
According to Berrios, one of the fundamental and unresolved questions in psychiatry is the question of psychogenesis. The issue revolves around whether mental disorders may be the result of complex, interactive, semantically pregnant actions and, thus, psychogenetically caused. The psychogenesis debate has ontological and epistemological consequences but also clinical and organizational derivatives. This chapter deals with the historical epistemology of psychogenesis and explores two main convergences in the contextualization of this construct. The importance of this is not whether a known disease of the brain can “cause” people to behave in strange ways; it is whether every time a person behaves in a strange way the claim can be made that something is wrong with his/her brain. If that is not the case, psychiatry must have the tools to distinguish those mental disorders in which brain representation is causal and primary and the target for treatment, from those in which it is secondary and noncausal, and hence the treatment target lies on the semantic and symbolic network at the origin of that mental disorder.
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Notes
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Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, already dedicated one of his Essays to the ‘force of imagination’ and, while subscribing the ancient dictum Fortis imagination generat casum (a strong imagination produces the event), affirmed that ‘it may provoke fever and even death to those who let it act’ (de Montaigne 2003, ch. XXI, p. 139).
- 3.
At that time, the idea of a psychogenesis of a mental disorder came from a rather circular reasoning: The disorder was psychogenic as far as it was improved by psychotherapy, and this was effective because it was treating a psychogenic disorder (Lantéri-Laura 2000, p. 282).
- 4.
Freud S. Sobre la psicogénesis de un caso de homosexualidad femenina (1920). In Obras completas. Tomo VII, Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva, 1974, pp. 2545–60
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To Jaspers, subjective psychology (as opposed to the objective one) was made up of two different ways of understanding mental states: static understanding (which considers mental events in isolation and is concerned with phenomenology) and genetic understanding which, through empathy, apprehends meaningful connections between mental events. The latter would belong to the realm of meaningful (verstenhende) psychology, with names such as Janet or Freud as predecessors (Jaspers 1980, p. 352; Jaspers 1913/1974, p. 84).
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On the other hand, in development (Entwicklung) and reaction (Reaktion), there are meaningful connections between the content of pathological mental phenomena and personality that can be understood (Jaspers 1910/1977).
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Lacan prefers to use the terms psychogeny and psychogenic instead of the more used psychogenesis and psychogenetic for the sake of language economy (Lacan 1932/1987, p. 41, footnote 31).
- 9.
According to Jaspers, the impossibility of verstehen will lead to pathology, but in order to consider psychogeny, a superior understanding, a sort of überverstehen, has to be established. Lacan states that this can be facilitated by Freudian theory, which, according to Lantéri-Laura (1984a), will act as a sort of erklären (Teixeira 2012).
- 10.
Ey, in his comments on Lacan’s thesis (1932), does not seem to appreciate this distinction as he criticizes Lacan for defending two contradictory ideas: on the one hand, the process nature of paranoia (as exemplified by Aimée’s case) and, on the other, its dependence on personality (Casarotti 2018).
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Lacan’s final position on this question may be interpreted in a strong sense, as questioning psychology and psychiatry as scientific enterprises (but saving animal ethology), or in a weak sense, as suggesting a shift in psychiatry from the search of causes and aetiologies to that of risk factors or mechanisms involved (Teixeira 2012).
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Villagrán Moreno, J.M., Luque, R. (2020). Psychogenesis: Conceptual Analysis. In: Marková, I.S., Chen, E. (eds) Rethinking Psychopathology. Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43439-7_11
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