Word: soul
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...before achieving anywhere near an adequate, let alone a perfect, knowledge of what goes on inside our crania. For the time being, then, models of some of the more mysterious and difficult to explain aspects of human consciousness like that offered by Frattaroli in his “soul,” (another example would be Freud’s “id,” “ego,” and “superego,”) can serve quite a useful purpose in treating psychopathology—for they provide an abstract and working...
Frattaroli’s arguments, then, rest on the premise that most (if not all) mental illnesses usually attributed to the brain are at least in part disorders of the soul. And, because the soul is not chemical or physical, and indeed we can only know about it through our own conscious experience, it is necessary for psychiatrists to approach their work not only as if they are treating a concrete, physical entity with something concrete and physical amiss in it, but rather “by viewing brain chemistry as only one of several competing influences within the whole...
...symptoms disappear temporarily. But in order to “heal” mental disorders at their root rather than their branches, do we really need a concept as abstract—and as contradictory to the belief of most contemporary neuroscientists—as a completely immaterial soul...
...final analysis, though, a conception of the soul that is irreducible to physical properties seems naive. It seems that everywhere one looks, there has been a new discovery of how a brain function—a physical, chemical brain function—can account for a cognitive or bodily function that had previously seemed obscure. Frattaroli’s motives are for the best, to be sure. And right now, his concept of “healing the soul” may just be the best way of treating psychiatric patients. But it is difficult to imagine that the concept...
...mind] existed, it would at most provide an exact location of the processes of consciousness and would give us no help towards understanding them.” And yet, it seems that we may concede this point and still not abandon the expectation that a concept of the soul will eventually become irrelevant in psychiatry...