The Impact of neurosciences in the psychosomatic field

This research is concerned with the development of current practices in the psychosomatic field that are influenced by the neurosciences. We intend to pursue research into how the understanding and treatment of the classically psychosomatic conditions, which were earlier understood from a holistic and psychogenetic perspective, are being transformed by the conviction that the human being can be defined primarily in terms of his or her brain.

The Psychosomatic field deals, briefly speaking, with diseases which symptoms don’t have an evident organic cause. One of the most important areas of the psychosomatic field is Psychosomatic Medicine, which has been developed since 1930, even though the term psychosomatic was created in 1818, by Johann Christian Heinroth, in his work Störungen des Seelenlebens (Disorders of the soul, 1818). The psychosomatic field has always been an area of knowledge that overlaps other fields: psychoanalysis, psychiatry, reflexology, psychophysiology, psychoendocrinology, psychoneuroimmunology, and nowadays, specifically since the second half of the 20th century, it has received neurosciences influences.

We aim to investigate the impacts of the advances on neurosciences during the second half of the 20th century upon the current researches of psychosomatic field. As a specific objective we intend to analyse the utilization of brain imagery techniques on research, diagnosis and understanding of psychosomatic illnesses. In order to do that, we shall examine some periodic publications concerned with the psychosomatic field from 1950’s to 1990’s.

The current so-called strong neuroscientific trend, concerning mental and psychosomatic disorders emphasizes one side of the problematic mind-body relationship, that is, the body, and more specifically, the brain. The brain imagery techniques and molecular biology have contributed to this process, because the brain and its functioning were never so investigated as nowadays by means of positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT). The strong program presumes that everything that needs to be known can be discovered by means of probing more deeply into the brain and understanding its functioning.

One of our hypothesis is that the strong neuroscientific enthusiasts would like to surpass the separation between lesional and funtional diseases - which has been settled during the 19th century - aiming to end the limits between being brain diseased or psychosomatically ill. Thus, knowing the neurochemical brain functioning is supposed to be quite enough to understand psychosomatic processes. In this context, it’s not surprising that many psychosomatic conditions have been understood barely as biophysiological abnormalities or neurotransmitter dysregulation. This assumption is widespread in society nowadays and it brings about many influences on the comprehension of somatization disorders, and other clinical entities as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and irritable bowel syndrome. Dismiss the limits between what is lesional and what is functional may lead us to a biologically reductionistic comprehension of diseases, in which the very psychosomatic features can be overlooked.

The objective of building a materialistic explanation to mental and psychosomatic disorders has contributed to and it was grounded on the historical development of “brainhood” and the cerebral subject. Consistent with Vidal (2005), in the industrialized western world, since the second half of the 20th century, the cerebral subject has been the most influential anthropological figure, having far-reaching consequences on decisions in private lives and public policy. The brainhood is the condition of being a brain, and the belief that the brain has the defining property of human beings. In other words, as Hagner (1987) and Changeux (1985) have once pointed out, the brain emerged as the organ of the soul, and as Vidal (2005) and Ehrenberg (2004) state, as the only organ indispensable for the existence of a human self and for defining individuality.