International Journal Advances in Social Science and Humanities
Available online at: www.ijassh.com
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Neurosciences Advances in Brazil: The Demise of Psychology?
Azambuja Marcos A*
1, Guareschi Neuza MF
21Department of Psychology, Centro Universitário Franciscano Unifra, Brazil.
2Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul-Brazil.
2Post-graduate Program of Psychology-UFRGS/Brazil.
*Corresponding Author: E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract
This work aims to present a discussion about the relations that are established between psychology and neuroscience to the production of the apparatus of brain nowadays. First, science is characterized on its search for an object of study that will allow full acknowledgement of the reality regarding that object, the same manner as in brain studies a way of ultimately explaining the subject and the world. Afterwards, the future of psychology is questioned, hence the fields of neuroscience start to dominate the comprehension of the humans soul. A
transformation on the clinical and the interiority vectors, remodeling the idea of the human ́s inner being and,
consequently, the psychological image of ourselves. To finish up, we situate the psychology of the 21 ́st century on
the context of somatic culture, questioning it ́s position since the beginning as science of the normal and the
adaptive.
Keywords: Clinic, Neuroscience, Psychology, Interiority.
Introduction
Where are We with Our Heads?
Will the turning point not be elsewhere, in the place where the brain is the “subject”, where it becomes a subject? It is the brain that thinks and not the man- the latter being a cerebral crystallization. We will speak of the brain as Cézanne spoke of the landscape: man absent from, but completely within the brain [1].
From the opening quotation above this paper develops its central question: from an object, the brain becomes the subject, the primal aspect to explain, understand and govern ourselves currently. However, this problem takes just the sufficient amount of strength to constitute this text only when it is merged with the following question: what are the courses that Psychology is taking nowadays? And is it possible that Psychology could end? Since the aim of this paper is to analyze the relations between neuroscience and psychology fields, specifically, trying to understand the effects of the sciences of the brain to the discipline of psychology, the rising of that question are possible when the enunciation of the mind rationality is superimposed by the cerebral rationality in science.
Where do we have to be with our heads to think of something so inopportune - the end of Psychology -when, as opposite evidence, we are witnessing a growth in the number of professionals on the several fields of work and the academic field? Such programmers have been increasingly created and attested by the publication of scientific production, by social acknowledgement and by the breaking of many preconceptions related with this profession.
This means that Psychology, as well as many fields of knowledge, is in a constant state of expansion and movement, although the speeds and the connections are reduced, to the point of inaction, towards the end of a life. On one hand, this does not seem to be the case of Psychology,
because status and social action have been
developing increasingly in the area. However, on the other hand, it is possible to perceive a reduction in the ways of thinking and knowing: conceivable reductionisms, which Psychology and
science may promote (when we use Psychology it
is to refer a general Field of studies, while
Before we explain precisely where our fear about the end of Psychology is, we would like to amplify a little bit more on the theme of reductionism and absolutism, showing portions of philosopher Henri Bergson‟s thought which have helped us in our inquiry.
Bergson is one of the intellectuals who put an end to the Cartesian age. Setting himself off the principles of modern philosophy, he starts from a contemporary line of thought that escapes and criticizes rationalism and its derivatives-positivism, idealism and associationism - as well as the scientificism from his time, which remains until today. For him, this kind of science tries to produce knowledge primarily from an ideal time or logical-mathematical time perspective, where it would be possible to apprehend reality, measuring it and generalizing it, as if reality had always been the same in the course of time. This is one of the most important alerts of Bergson: to take reality arrested in a space of time is to mortify it, it is like to detach knowledge from life.
In other words, time, or duration, is reduced to images of physical space or unities of the logical-mathematical space. The positive science, in its
natural analysis, seeks, ad infinitum, to
apprehend its object of study in the most variable perspectives so as to reach the ultimate translation or the representation of the object. However, an absolute is never fully reached, only a relative, because the analytical exercise always demands an exteriority. This means an expression, a translation or a symbolic representation; to sum it up: it demands a point of
view made from the object. If it is a point of view,
we are not talking anymore about the thing in itself: we are no longer in the thing, however we may talk about it and from it as a starting point, using representations that enable the object to be apprehended by comparison, analogy or similarity in relation to other objects. Yet, these representations do not belong to the nature of the object in study [2].
Hence, if we take the example of the Psychology that Bergson used to criticize in his time, we perceive there is an attempt towards the apprehension of consciousness states using space that is, using some parameter of exteriority
(positivism) to represent phenomena of
consciousness. In order to capture certain phenomena, we seek to align them in space, taking them off time so that we may measure them. We may, thus, distinguish one phenomenon from another, classifying them according to their intensity (psychophysical), recognizing forms of
association between some phenomena and others (associationism). Nevertheless, we are not operating on the nature of the studied object. We are solely acting on the differences of degrees of a certain object. It is by removing some phenomena of time and imprisoning them in space, or else, by investigating them in one already delimited space-time diagram that we may build certain truths about the individual. This is, thus, how a field of knowledge is created, by gaining the status of science: by developing a rationalism of a
mathematical order, by eternizing or
universalizing certain findings [3].
With regards to that, the challenge that Bergson [2] presents to philosophy is to stand back from the usual analytical exercise of science and, then
to try to get into duration, into time per se, in
order to be able to talk about the thing itself, within this reality, without any transcendental trick. Ultimately, some absolute must be reached. It is important to clarify that the notion of absolute for the philosopher is linked to what “is perfect in that it is perfectly what it is”.
This apprehension within the object could only happen by intuition; but looking from the outside, it becomes an object of analysis, which uses intelligence instead of intuition [4].
Now let us think about the opposite: what if the proposition made by Bergson to Philosophy could be made to science. Would it not be the dream of every science to erect a pure and absolute truth, to introduce a way of knowing that could surpass any metaphysics? It would be the dream of every science to create tools and procedures of knowledge capable of matching themselves so perfectly with the object of study, so that one
could finally say, full of certainty: this is it! The
intimate desire of science could be, maybe, to equalize or to overcome any mystery, to reach the
point where it is possible to say I know and I
know how to make knowledge.
Bergson challenged the philosophy and opened our eyes to what science is or else, to what it has always been science‟s challenge: a dive into the absolute. In order to reach deeper towards the problematic of this text, it is necessary to answer
this question: where are we with our heads? We
Aided by the study of the nervous system, of the molecular and biochemical compounds, and the different manifestations of this system - and from the starting point of all the technological
apparatus (dispositif) - the neurosciences have
been trying to understand, to explain and manipulate the performance of the „soul‟:
The neurosciences refer us to distinct themes, however interdependent, such as memory, cognition, consciousness (linked to knowledge) and behavior – elements that lead us towards discussions about the conception of the mind and, consequently, of its own disturbances. Before the
complexity of those connections, the
neurotechnologies and the practical-discursive conflicts provided by it reach towards to psychiatry, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, theology and other sciences, and reflect on social areas without clearly limited bonds, which go through medicine, education, familiar structure, religion and media [5].
In the words of Ortega and Vidal [6]: “We call „cerebral subject‟ the anthropological figure which incorporates the idea that the human being is essentially reducible to its own brain” (p. 257). Or as claimed by this sentence from Ortega and Bezerra [7]: “From an organ to a social actor, the human brain is increasingly perceived as something that defines us”. In fact, the arrival of this new anthropological figure is seen in the neurosciences advancement, in political and theological discussions, in the arts, in the media, ultimately, “(…) in discourses, in images and in practices that could be globally designated as „neuroculture‟” [6], “(…) a conglomerate of cultures of the „neuro‟” .
Finally, we get to the heart of the matter: the bold omen that originated from the intersection
between Psychology and the Neurosciences and
the production of a cerebral subject which scared
us. Of course we could not deduce the emergence of a cerebral subject in contemporary times only
by linking the two areas. It was the psy look that
has framed the problem in such a manner. The concern is in the movement that locates the whole Psychology in the body, or better, in the brain. There is a return, or in other words, a strong investment, into the biological, biologism over a psychism.
It is a premise here that the mind or the psyche is in the brain. It seems to be the thing of the moment: an effort to find the bases of the soul in a positive fact, palpable and real, which could erect the truth about the subject; ultimately, an
attempt to reach towards the essence of the human being, towards the thing itself, towards the absolute. And so, here arises the naïve perturbance about the end of Psychology: if the psyche really be found in the brain, why then must we have Psychology? Will we witness the death of this branch of knowledge? And if we do not believe in its own end, what could Psychology become?
Why
think
about
the
death
of
Psychology: unraveling the naivety of
the question
By glancing at the curriculum programme of Brazilian Psychology graduation course made in the previous decades, it is possible to see the influences of a Psychology essentially based in personhood psychological theories and techniques,
psychological evaluation tests and
psychodiagnosis techniques. There was a large emphasis on the Natural Sciences to explain the inner world, the subjectivity or the human soul, having clinical medicine as a headstone for those explanations. We are also following a change by fine and often imperceptible degrees in recent times, with the advances of the cognitive sciences and mostly the losing territory of the Freudian approach or the theories of the unconscious, which posed and still pose, in such areas, an opposition against this hegemonic logic of science.
Nevertheless, there is the introduction of a „neuroscientific psychoanalysis‟ [8, 9]. There is also the advance of a Social Psychology: it establishes another way of researching and intervening. It burdens these critics of the psychological practices themselves, and yet it remains - if it ever appears - in some peripheral area of the graduation programme, of the professional spectrum and of the scientific discourse. The Social Psychology referred here emerges from a critical perspective of thought in Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida, among others, without building a school or orthodoxy [10].
To examine and detail this verification carefully, it is necessary to mention a research made recently [11] about the curricula of six Psychology Courses at the district of Rio Grande do Sul-Brazil, related with the Brazilian health system (SUS) [12]. A vast number of disciplines are
clustered in what the research named Biomedics
axis, which shows the influence of modern
according to pre-conceived notions such as what is health and illness, what is normal and pathologic.
Another cluster is the Psychopathologic and
Psychological Evaluation axis, which deals with a scenery that qualifies the identity of the psychologist mainly as someone capable of working with tests and psychological evaluation, or better, with “methods and techniques that aim
at psychological diagnoses, professional
recruitment and orientation, pedagogic service and solving problems of adjustment.
Thus, it enters into the scientific realm by means of the logic of the Natural and Exact Sciences. Its intervention even goes through an individual level -identifying the profile, the personhood structure, what happens in the interiority – as well as on a collective level -adjusting the subject in the institutions which he is related to. To sum up, this axis deals with identification and regulation mechanisms of the subjects' government, essentially with the illness focus.
In this sense, the authors have pointed out the reinforcement of the dichotomy between the psyche and the external world in the Psychological field, when “the syllabuses are still facing a „psychological‟ subject comprehension, displaced from the context and from other ways of
discernment”. They have characterized
Psychology as a manufacturer of diagnoses of psychiatric disorders, which many times reduces the subject to an illness. Finally, the researchers also have questioned the ethical-political placement of the psychological practices, understanding that the relations of knowledge and power are connected to the way of making science and are directly linked with a political act.
The research of Guareschi et. al. [11] approaches yet a third axis of Social Psychology and Communitarian Psychology, which is not necessary to present for the intentions of this paper.
From these reflections, and considering the
context of this work, the notions of clinic and
interiority have revealed themselves crucial in the attempt to unveil the question about the end of Psychology [13]. Perhaps, if we ask the majority of the new psychologists and, certainly, many professionals in the area, they normally will answer that, most of the times, their colleagues choose clinical practice, and if they choose another sort of occupation, they will still keep the clinical eye. More than that, the view of those who have received the degree in Psychology, we dare say, focuses on Psychology as a professional exercise
on the interiority of the human being, on the soul or, better, on the subjectivity: they work on a psychological interiority. So, it would be interesting to analyze the vectors of what is clinical and interiority practices. However, advancing into it, a transition from the clinical
practices- since its emergence until the 18th
Century - to the medical clinical practices around
the 20th and 21th Centuries could be perceived.
This change has been described by Rose [14] and
named molecular biopolitics. It starts from a
molar level – on the scale of members, organs, issues, blood, hormones etc. to a molecular level -on the ground of molecular mechanisms, of functional protein proprieties, of a particular
formation of intracellular elements. The
contemporary techniques of visualization
associated with technologies of decomposition, manipulation, reproduction and so forth, of life in the molecular scope, have resized the idea of the human being's inner world and, consequently, the psychological image of ourselves.
It is the mind and body or the soul and body
problem that has been presented here, the way it was shown a long time ago. For a few years already, this dichotomy has been suffering changes to the point that it starts to become complicated to talk about an inner world. With the advent of neurosciences and with the development of the technologies of the body and brain scan, there is a process of the inner body colonization [15], which leads us towards what could be named as „demystification‟ of many productions of questions and truths related to the human soul and to the living beings along the centuries. It leads us to a movement of the unveiling of codes, of signs and of circuits through which the vital information of human beings flows -genetic or neural. Those new life sciences have been trying to access those „truths‟, translating them into digital information so as to be able to eventually manipulate it at will, correcting possible „deficiencies‟ and performing many „adjustments‟ [16].
We are under the impression that the
neurosciences have accomplished what
Psychology has never done before: accessing, showing and manipulating the soul. Psychology, which cannot have the same visibility as the human mind, has been trying to study it through
different exteriorities – from the same bergsonian
neurosciences show where the psyche is and how it works in the brain through scanner images, with bright-colors and motion. It is surprising that those images reproduced by the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), for example, could be taken into consideration as the exact visualization of the soul and not as another exteriority, another representation of the soul. Many neuroscientists admit the limitation of this technique, but the influence of the media, the industry of psychopharmacology and the enterprises involved in this business, for example, corroborate the idea that the human spirit will finally be understood in its completeness [14]. An example that alerts us to those mistakes is the
well known paper Voodoo correlations in social
neuroscience [17], written by a group of American researchers, which criticizes the high rate of correlation between the variables of emotional, or
personhood behaviour, and the cerebral
activation. Such a high association is not possible, because the RMI technique is unsatisfactory to obtain such detailed data. Researchers argue that even without this limitation, such data are still submitted to much manipulation.
Thus, in a certain way, we could say that we no longer could see a need for Psychology as a science or profession. All those who are interested in the human psyche should turn to the science of brain. The impossibility to fully accomplishing the mapping of the entire soul and to access it only through what people have shown in their behaviour, symbology, culture and history has came to an end through the deep study of the human biology. The whole lot of theories on the human being, all the manuals, all the psychological evaluation tests, all the technical apparatuses which had given support to the production of Psychology seemed to have become empty with this new knowledge, since the soul, now, has started to become visible and the mind – the last boundary of science – could be explained through a physiologic basis, through the brain and the nervous system. It might still mean a little more than that, like Francisco Mora Teruel
[18] tells us in his text Neurosciences: a new
perspective of human nature:
This new conception is not about the enlightenment of a new “neural” or “cybernetic” man, neither is it about a “spiritual” or “social” or “existential”, nor about any other philosophic or religious adjective. It is about the “man”, an unvarnished concept, which was born from a rooted intention on the noblest aspect of man: his power of knowledge of verification which is not merely speculative or emotional; a knowledge
which is reached with the scientific method, with constant refutation, with clearness, without damage, free from all the atavistic thought.
The brain sciences, the neurosciences and the new philosophers, in this case, have been organizing, in the last few years, fragments of a new scope of thought about the human nature which had converged not only to the empirical knowledge and to the scientific theories derived from almost all the fields of knowledge, but which is integrated in general theories of the universe.
This new concept determines man as “one”, not separated in dualism, a product from millions of years of evolution, consubstantial and a relative to our congeners, the animals. It goes from man to his brain, in a constant traffic of information; between his brain and his body, and between those and the environment which is around him.
Finally, the question about the death of Psychology emerges from a production of knowledges and powers which is gradually „killing‟ the notion of interiority and which is putting on view the experience of an
exteriorization or externalization of the
subjectivity [19, 20]. Why must we think that Psychology could end? Only because the culture of interiority which is profoundly empowered by Psychology seems to be reaching closer to its own end. Thanks to the deep focus that our contemporary society gives to the clinical medical care - thus approaching the biotechnologies - the internal and private model of our own construction disjoints from the exteriority of the body, the way an anchor of the identity of the subject formation might do.
The brain in the 21
stCentury and the
innumerable clues to the Psychology of
today!
There is no doubt that the new millennium has
the somatic culture as one of its main
Transplants, plastic surgeries, prostheses, cloning and other interventions of a simpler nature such as tattoos, piercings, etc, are an expression of how much our appearance conveys increasingly more of our essence in contemporary times. Besides that, we could mention bodybuilding, diet products and pharmacological interventions. Thus, it is possible to talk about an exteriorization of the subjectivity [20], or about a somatic personality [19], or else, a somatic individual [21]. The building of our own self becomes legitimized by the scientific discourse
which dictates the life quality of the body and of
the human species through researches‟ results validated by experiments. The patterns of beauty, health, longevity and good shape are the models for the development of personhood, something much different from the perspectives of that interior and intimate culture of the last few centuries.
However, the body has an ambiguity. Like the name of Francisco Ortega‟s book [20] puts it, it is an Uncertain Body, because, on the one hand, it is overestimated, such as a part of the real to which we turn to find some certainty in an era of fluidness and symbolic fragmentation. On the other hand, since it needs to come up with the contemporary anxieties of constant mutation, the body reveals itself obsolete: its limits could and must be overcome by the technologies of nature “improvement”. Hence, the body is at the same time an object of worship and abomination, and this high level of attention and control produces a bigger uncertainty about it (n/p).
This is the point where we dare ask a question. In the whole uncertainty of our body, would it not be the brain the only remaining place where we may deposit all our hopes of certainty? We are retrieving here the question put forth at the beginning of this work, when we asked, from the
bergsonian perspective, if the brain might not be the place of the absolute for science. It may be the place from where a representation could be
released, the place where one might talk about the
human being (and the world and life?) perfectly as it is. More than science, we are seeing a production which in the contemporary times has been called neuroculture. Due to this, the turning
point would not be elsewhere, but exactly where
the brain becomes a subject. “It is the brain that thinks and not the man – the latter being a cerebral crystallization. (…) man absent from, but completely within the brain” [1].
But how could man become absent from, yet completely within the brain? How could man
become only a materialization, only to materialize what the brain is? To answer those questions, we will need to think about the „death‟ of some bases of the subject so as to reach the point where the
brain is “a form in itself that does not refer to any
external point of view (…)” [1].
For us to think about this death, we can remember, for example, the time when Freud described three huge delusions of humankind which constitute the narcissistic wounds. The first one is Copernicus' proving that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe, but rather one of the many celestial bodies which move in the cosmic space. The second wound is Darwin's affirmation that man was not created in the likeness of God, but that he, simply, arose as one of the consequences of the species evolution process. The third one is felt when Freud himself discovers that neither are we the masters of ourselves, because our entire rationality is identified with what we usually call consciousness. However, this would only be the visible part of the iceberg: there is a huge submerged part which governs us and which, of course, we cannot control because it is our unconsciousness.
To think about the fall of the transcendental
subject as the death of God and man leads us, in
contemporary times, towards a subjective experience of a supposed chaos in relation to truth and morals. The western metaphysical tradition had as its basis the typically Cartesian faith in the disdain of the body and exaltation of the soul
[22] – what we called culture of interiority. One could think that by means of the criticism of this metaphysic and through a set of results - such as the end of both the universal parameters of truth and the great narratives; the speed, acceleration and fluidness of a world that does not allow the stability of determinate certainties - we end up searching the solution for the chaos in the „rising‟ of the brain. However, we will see that this new metaphysic works in a different way [23] shows a
fundamental contradiction of the
psychophysiologic parallel as a metaphysical hypothesis. It will not constitute a scientific rule like many people suppose..
Here, Ortega and Vidal [6] would ask: “How do we get to this point where somebody could say „you are your brain‟ and make this statement be self-evident” (p. 258)? We could go further when the
renowned Brazilian neuroscientist, Miguel
Nicolelis, utters, after the results of his research
came out, the following sentence: “The brain,
produces every second: electrical activity that
could now be used to generate motion. So maybe
the brain did not need the body anymore
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTVVYYxY9C s)”. In the same way, this sentence also deserves to be analyzed, because it could be important to ask how could somebody say that the brain may
not need the body anymore and make this
statement be self-evident?
Thus, it seems that only the brain has remained. It is as if the problem of body and soul, mind and brain, interiority and exteriority, the dualists and monists‟ positions could be solved solely by this organ. The brain becomes the principle of life and the organ of the self. By deciphering it, we could get to the ultimate secrets of the human being. However, this would not be possible without the changes in the clinical and in the interiority vectors.
In our point of view, it is as though science and, more specifically, the neurosciences could find, in the brain, the possibility of a metaphysical support. Like a return to metaphysics, but now in reverse, using something concrete, material, visible, empirical, palpable – everything from the starting point of the discourses which are produced about neuroscience.
About the brain, we could have the impression
that there is today, in a certain way, a disdain of
the body, because it is only useful for the regulation and maintenance of the good functioning of the brain, as it could be seen from
the neuroascetic practices from 19th Century [24]
and, which somehow, have been perpetuated in
our time. However there is also a disdain of the
soul, because it is being nullified by the brain
itself, which is no longer a support for the soul or the mind, but which becomes a subject in itself. At
the end, we have the exaltation of the brain, which
retains the positive and metaphysical
possibilities, of which the body and the soul had only a part. It is as if it had manufactured a “(…) theory of how the brain can produce everything that is around it, including itself” [25] (p. 179). More than a theory – Teixeira [25] takes the physics idea of the Theory of Everything (TOE) and applies to brain‟s theories –, what is produced are regimes of truth that constitute the subject in itself.
Finally, we would like to reintroduce the question about Psychology. What remains to it? Were the fields of knowledge of medicine, molecular biology, informatics not enough? Ultimately, were the techniques, practices and discourses from
neurosciences not enough to work with the theme of the human soul? If Psychology is still alive, what is its place?
To study and analyze the theme of the production of the cerebral subject, as well as Psychology and Neurosciences, we will follow Michel Foucault‟s [26] steps, indicated in his first class at the
beginning of his course The Birth of Biopolitics, in
1979. He says, literally, that his method -although
we are well aware of the controversies when we use this word under this thinker – is the inverse from any historicism: (…) “instead of deducing concrete phenomena from universals, or instead of starting with universals as an obligatory grid of intelligibility for certain concrete practices, I would like to start with these concrete practices and, as it were, pass these universals through the grid of these practices” (p. 03). Assuming the inexistence of the universals which are understood as absolute truths, he asks the question about what could be made of history. At last, we could start to look at what is considered
as an evidence through a perspective of the
problem and, this way, execute a process of
denaturalization upon those crystallized
universals [27].
Here he is not saying that history has been rejected; what is proposed is a much different thing, precisely because we know that the ontology of the human being is historical. And because this history is inscribed in the various subjectivities modes it is necessary to understand the subjective experience as a production of practices and techniques which are developed in history, and not the contrary, as the experience
producing those apparatus [28]. Thus, the
practices which are developed around the production of the cerebral subject are taken as a way of thinking about this history that unified and became the truth of the brain, of its relations with Psychology and the Neurosciences and, going a little bit further, of ourselves.
In this manner, thinking about the brain as an
apparatus seems interesting. Hence, it would be
the study of a weft which is established between
the elements of a heterogeneous set “(…) that
covers discourses, institutions, architectural
organizations, regulatory decisions, laws,
administrative measures, scientific statements,
philosophic, moral and philanthropic
propositions” [29] (p. 244). This formation has
been constituted in reference to a historical
urgency, creating a new rationality, which is
entangled in a strategic game of control and
relations of strength between knowledge and powers.
The conceptual field of subjectivation created by
Foucault [29] is a perspective which affirms that the subjectivity is engendered by nets and social force fields. Therefore, the subject is understood not as an essence or nature, but as a way of production, something that acts in the manner of a fundamental figure of relations and its
complexity. The practices around the apparatus of
the brain will be delineated by the way that individuals and collectivities are constituted as subjects in one regime and historical formation, as well as by the modes of producing resistance, both of which escape from the constituted types of knowledge and powers.
It is important to say that, unlike some thinkers, we do not want to alert that nature has been „contaminated`, nor is our evolution – or destiny – lost. Nor do we want to put ourselves in the place of those who consider that interventions on human beings are violations of our human nature, when they talk of a post-human or trans-humanist future. We would rather put ourselves in a position closer to that of Nikolas Rose [14], who takes the elements of an emergent life form as an analyzer, where types of judgments are included, as well as evaluations, fears, hopes, speculations and meditations about our present.
From this short contextualization, we can understand what would be the passage from universals to practices or else, from evidence to problematisation proposals. What we used to recognize as an invariant category, is now pointing to its own inventive character, that is, an idea that changes in many social formations, according to the types of knowledge and powers
generated by it. For example, categories like body
and mind, interiority and exteriority, and others, are gaining other contours in Western thought, be it through biotechnologies or through the incredible interactions between living beings and machines, be it through all the range of practices, techniques and rationalities. Finally, the analysis and the discussion of the problems in this research, from Foucault‟s perspective are, before anything else, permeated by the very question about the contingencies which have made us be what we are, from the desubjection of historical knowledge [30]. Originating in the apparatus of the brain, we are interested in analyzing how Psychology is engendered in this strategic game. We want to think how it is inserted, to what it is summoned, what it puts aside, how it is situated, which are the arguments and justifications for the
importance of the brain to the comprehension of the human soul in its own practices.
In Brazil, the evaluation of the Personal Improvement and Higher Level Coordination (CAPES) – CAPES Foundation is affiliated with the Ministry of Education of Brazil and develops a fundamental role in the expansion and consolidation of post-graduated programs (stricto sensu) – MA and PhD in the whole Brazilian territory (http://www.capes.gov.br/index.php) -has assigned the maximum score to the following post-graduate programmes: Psychobiolgy at USP/Ribeirão, Psychology of Development at
UFRGS/Porto Alegre and Experimental
Psychology at USP/São Paulo. All of them have, as a basic characteristic, the presence of research at the experimental level and a focus on the
psychological and physiologic interaction
(http://www.capes.gov.br). Besides that, The Thesis CAPES Award, in 2008, in the field of Psychology was given to the thesis entitled
Developmental traumatology: the impact of childhood neglect on memory of adults, by Rodrigo Grassi-Oliveira [31], concluded in the
post-graduation programme in Psychology at
PUCRS/Brazil. Both the evaluation and the very field of Psychology are situated in the vast area of Human Sciences. It never seems quite clear to me how much the sciences of men - at least in the case of Psychology - need a man's physiology to be able to explain him. According to Foucault [32], “No doubt, on the level of appearances, modernity begins when the human being begins to exist within his organism, inside the shell of his head, inside the armature of his limbs, and in the whole structure of his physiology” (p. 317). Considering those points, it could be said that Psychology, at least in Brazil, as a science that is evaluated by
some “research instigation bodies”, i.e.,
governmental agencies, has, at its zenith, the reference of empirical and experimental research, which is articulated with medicine, molecular biology and neurosciences.
is, the manner the subject experiences themselves in this field of forces [33]. We would like to use the awarded work of Grassi-Oliveira [31] with the intention to exercise this research process that we wish to develop here.
The aim of his research is “to investigate the effects of history of childhood neglect on memory performance of females with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). Moreover, this work tries to search for associations between memory performance and neurobiological and psychosocial variables”. The current thesis has three studies: one theoretical (literature review), named
Psychobiology of Childhood Maltreatment: Effects
of Allostatic Load? and two empirical, Low
Plasma Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor and Childhood Physical Neglect Are Associated with
Memory Impairment in Major Depression and Gist
Memory Impairment in Depressed Women with Childhood Emotional Neglect Reduce False
Recognition. Keywords are: memory, childhood
abuse, childhood neglect, BDNF, depression, early life stress and psychobiology. A piece of data which seems extremely significant is the fact that the
word Psychology is not employed during the whole
text. It appears once on the registration page in
the sub-area Cognitive Psychology and one more
time in the specific area of Psychobiology. Area and subareas which were registered the thesis on the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) – “an agency linked to the Ministry of Science and Technology (MCT), dedicated to the promotion of scientific and technological research and to the formation of human resources for research in the country. Its history is directly linked to the scientific and
technological development of Brazil”
(www.cnpq.br). Only the prefixes psy, or psycho,
associated with other words which are applied in other fields of knowledge figure in the text, as we will see in the following paragraphs.
Using clinical practice and interiority as analysis vectors, and understanding the transitions from a molar to a molecular clinic as well as the brain's derived interiority transitions, we could set up the following scenery: the areas that are linked in Grassi-Oliveira's research are psychopathology,
psychiatry, neuroscience, neurobiology,
neuropsychology and psychobiology.
The instruments of research are the memory test, the test of words and the plasmatic level of Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF). The study starts with the idea that “„biological scars‟ come from psychological damages”, as though there was a symmetry between them and, therefore, it could
be recognized as basis that is supposedly more concrete for the psychological process. The psychology which has been produced in that thesis, within the transitions of clinic and interiority, seems to be located in the ambit of
memory, based on the evaluation of
“neuropsychologic and psychosocial committed patterns” (p. 16), using tests of memory, of IQ, of words and psychiatry diagnosis. However, this is still a clinical practice that does not reach the molecular level. So, this psychology seems to „choose‟ the place of those who identify the trauma using those tests techniques. Like Rose [34] says, “the test is a form of materialization of the mind, it is part of a bigger change on individualization, starting from a gaze focused on the body to a gaze focused on an inner space”. After that, this psychology seeks, in the interaction with other fields, its legitimacy on organic bases, since “(…) its supposes that childhood neglect situations also
exert toxic effects in the neurodevelopment and
are connected with neuropsychological damage
pattern”.
The psychology that is produced in this research space is not unknown to me, because it keeps aligned with the objectivity logic and the classical science of positivism, both of which has been kept since they originated. Besides, Psychology is a science of the norm and of the adaptedness [35]. As Filho and Trisotto [36] comment about
Foucault‟s book, The Order of Things:
From this point of view – archeology – psychology emerges arrested on the positivist epistemological imperatives, as a threshold knowledge, without its own territory, developing in the interstices of biology with the human and social sciences, borrowing methods from others sciences. It is also characterized as a knowledge that circulates around the pair “function x norm”, reaffirming its vocation as “a psychology of the normal”, which deals with “problems of adjustment” .
individuals, but rather as the one that regulates the subject of norm for other areas so that they may intervene.
It seems there is no news on Psychology and on its
way of operating. Maybe it still remains a social
science as it was in 20th century, like Rose [34] understands it: a discipline which, besides its
treatments‟ techniques, has psychologized, with
its knowledge and practices, the various professions, the ways of people, groups and
institutions that perceive and relate with each other. And as this author considers, if Psychology one day is substituted by Neurobiology, it necessarily will have to take this space (as the social science) that Psychology has once occupied.
Funding
This research received a specific grant from Capes Foundation, Ministry of Education of Brazil and CNPq Foundation, Ministry of Science of Brazil.
Acknowledgements
The authors wishes to thank Rodrigo Garcia
Garay (Public Translator, Bachelor in
Translation Studies and Master Student of
Languages at UFRGS, Brazil) for helpful translation on this article.
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