Psyche, Brain and Body in Peter Kramer's Against Depression
Joshua Connor, MA, PhD Candidate, University of Chicago
We have, in the words of the psychiatrist David Healy, entered the 'antidepressant era'. When the first antidepressants arrived in the 1950's, the prospect of healing the psyche directly through the soma helped to reorganize psychiatric medicine around the abnormal brain. By the 1990's (proclaimed 'The Decade of the Brain' by President George H.W. Bush), the arrival of Prozac and other Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) had extended the reach of the antidepressant beyond clinical borders and increasingly into the ambiguous terrain of ordinary sadness and anxiety. Though many psychiatrists, anthropologists, bioethicists and journalists have begun taking stock of the fundamental ethical and spiritual questions -- including what it means to have or be a brain or body-- raised by this situation, it has strangely received little commentary from the perspective of theology and religious studies.
My paper contends that certain aspects of neuropsychiatric medicine and antidepressant culture can only be grasped with religion in view. I argue that, inasmuch as therapies tend to assume theories about their object, at least one dominant strain of thinking about the antidepressant assumes a way of construing the relationship between psyche, brain and body that has a theological history as well as profound spiritual implications.
The paper makes this argument in three sections. The first section discusses the historical frame. I draw on work by the historian of science Fernando Vidal and the sociologist Alain Ehrenberg to argue that the neuropsychiatric concept of mood has roots in an early modern legacy of dualism and 'possessive individualism': as the embodied soul became mind, and the mind was pictured as the owner of a passive body, an imaginative schema emerged in the 17th century that in the 19th and early 20th century was transposed on to the distinction between brain and body, as well as reason and mood. This modernist grammar tends to oscillate, paradoxically, between a reductive concept of the psyche and what Vidal calls a historical pattern of 'disincarnation'. The second section approaches Peter Kramer's Against Depression within this historical frame. Kramer argues that depression should be understood as a neurological disease and that psychiatric medicine has a moral duty to eradicate it. I explore the way in which Kramer's critique of the romantic interpretation of depression assumes the Enlightenment image of the possessive individual and thus deploys a problematic set of metaphors to grasp the role of the brain and the character of mood. Finally, the third section gestures at ways in which a revived notion of the embodied soul might open up new possibilities for understanding the therapeutic meaning of antidepressants.
We have, in the words of the psychiatrist David Healy, entered the 'antidepressant era'. When the first antidepressants arrived in the 1950's, the prospect of healing the psyche directly through the soma helped to reorganize psychiatric medicine around the abnormal brain. By the 1990's (proclaimed 'The Decade of the Brain' by President George H.W. Bush), the arrival of Prozac and other Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) had extended the reach of the antidepressant beyond clinical borders and increasingly into the ambiguous terrain of ordinary sadness and anxiety. Though many psychiatrists, anthropologists, bioethicists and journalists have begun taking stock of the fundamental ethical and spiritual questions -- including what it means to have or be a brain or body-- raised by this situation, it has strangely received little commentary from the perspective of theology and religious studies.
My paper contends that certain aspects of neuropsychiatric medicine and antidepressant culture can only be grasped with religion in view. I argue that, inasmuch as therapies tend to assume theories about their object, at least one dominant strain of thinking about the antidepressant assumes a way of construing the relationship between psyche, brain and body that has a theological history as well as profound spiritual implications.
The paper makes this argument in three sections. The first section discusses the historical frame. I draw on work by the historian of science Fernando Vidal and the sociologist Alain Ehrenberg to argue that the neuropsychiatric concept of mood has roots in an early modern legacy of dualism and 'possessive individualism': as the embodied soul became mind, and the mind was pictured as the owner of a passive body, an imaginative schema emerged in the 17th century that in the 19th and early 20th century was transposed on to the distinction between brain and body, as well as reason and mood. This modernist grammar tends to oscillate, paradoxically, between a reductive concept of the psyche and what Vidal calls a historical pattern of 'disincarnation'. The second section approaches Peter Kramer's Against Depression within this historical frame. Kramer argues that depression should be understood as a neurological disease and that psychiatric medicine has a moral duty to eradicate it. I explore the way in which Kramer's critique of the romantic interpretation of depression assumes the Enlightenment image of the possessive individual and thus deploys a problematic set of metaphors to grasp the role of the brain and the character of mood. Finally, the third section gestures at ways in which a revived notion of the embodied soul might open up new possibilities for understanding the therapeutic meaning of antidepressants.