G E Berrios
Biographic Data
| ID | 3439732 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G E Berrios |
| GIVEN NAMES | G E |
| FAMILY NAME | Berrios |
| SIGNATURE | BERRIOS G E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 55 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 55 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
‘My insanity in the year 1783’, by C.S. Andresen (1801)
The literature of the past has included self-reports by the mentally ill since before Roy Porter reminded us that their views and experiences constitute an important document for historians of psyc
David Hartley’s views on Madness
The psychiatric aspects of David Hartley’s writings have received less attention than the rest of his work. This Classic Text deals with Section VI of his Observations on Man ..., namely, the ‘Imperfections of the rational Faculty’. Hartley defines madness as an imperfection of reason that can be temporary or enduring. He makes use of his model of mental functioning to differentiate between eight clinical categories of madness, each representing …
J.H. Pons on ‘Sympathetic insanity’
The ancient concept of ‘sympathy’ originally referred to a putative affinity or force that linked all natural objects together. This notion was later used to explain the manner in which human beings related and felt for each other. A large literature exists on both the physical and psychological definitions of sympathy. Until the nineteenth century the conceptual apparatus of medicine preserved the view that the organs of the human body had a sym…
Forbes Winslow and his Journal
During the 19th century, there were few periodicals dedicated to the inchoate discipline of alienism (now called ‘psychiatry’). Given the newness of alienism and the idiosyncratic structure of the British publishing industry at the time, for a private individual to start a new specialized journal was a major enterprise. Against all odds, Forbes Winslow managed to publish his journal from 1848 to 1860, and during this period the scholarly nature o…
Retrospective diagnosis and its vicissitudes
Convergences that are no more
The study of psychiatric disorders that are no more is as important to the historian of psychiatry as that of those considered as ‘current’, ‘true’ and ‘scientific’. Indeed, within each historical period this latter status is conferred upon ongoing mental and physical disorders. As an example, a historical vignette is offered of ‘Bulimia’, a popular disorder during the 18th century but since disappeared. It is suggested that mental symptoms, synd…
The work of John Hughlings Jackson
After returning to Spain from a research period in London on a Wellcome Trust scholarship, José Maria López Piñero 1 published in 1973 a short book entitled John Hughlings Jackson (1835—1911), Evolucionismo y Neurología (Madrid, Editorial Moneda). Written from the perspective of the classical German medical historiography that the author had imbibed from Werner Leibbrand and Annemarie Wettley, this work truly added to Jacksonian scholarship. Neit…
Classic Text No. 79
The history of the philosophies of psychiatry is yet to be written. Insight into material essential to this endeavour is provided by Classic Text No. 79 which translates an excerpt from the work of Prosper Despine (1812—92), one of the most distinguished alienist-philosophers of the second half of the 19th century. In his De la Folie ..., Despine discusses, inter alia , issues concerning the referent, definition and aetiology of ‘madness’. His ar…
Classic Text No. 76
The word asthenia has been used to name descriptive and explanatory concepts, hypothetical functional states, symptoms, syndromes and diseases; and on occasions it has been considered a synonym of adynamia, aboulia, feeling of fatigue, weakness, and lack of energy; for a time it was even the official antonym of `sthenia'. Because at its core it refers to the (hypothetical) want of some driving element, asthenia has from the start been parasitical…
The clinico-diagnostic perspective in psychopathology
Karl Kahlbaum (1828—99) introduced the concept of time into European psychiatric nosology. In 1863 he first expressed the view that disease definition should take into account the course of the disease, the extension to which psychological functions were compromised, the relevance of the period of life when the mental disorder first appeared, and its primary or secondary nature. Via E. Kraepelin these ideas have moulded the way in which mental di…
‘Mind in general’ by Sir Alexander Crichton
The history of the ‘philosophies of psychiatry’ can be defined as the contextualized study of past theoretical views on the nature, understanding and management of madness and related notions. The application of an hermeneutic apparatus to past psychiatric narratives gives rise to the history of psychiatry; its application to current narrative gives origin to the philosophy of psychiatry. If the latter employs off-the-shelf, ready-made, external …
Classifying Madness
Journal Article Classifying Madness: A Philosophical Examination of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder Get access G. E. Berrios G. E. Berrios University of Cambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medicine, Volume 19, Issue 1, April 2006, Pages 153–155, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkj012 Published: 01 April 2006
On the fantastic apparitions of vision by Johannes Müller
The history of the construction of the concept of hallucination remains biased in favour of the French contribution. Important to this history are the first 30 years of the nineteenth century for it was then that it was decided that hallucinations were: (1) primary disorders of perception; (2) the same class of phenomena, regardless of the sense modality in which they occurred; (3) generated by stimulation of brain regions related to perception a…
Phthisical Insanity
The history of the relationship between tuberculosis and insanity has been neglected. This is surprising, for during the nineteenth century it was subject to an important medical and cultural debate and gave rise to a style of analysis which has been used ever since to study the clinical phenomenon of ‘disease-coexistence’ (rebaptized ‘comorbidity’ during the 1970s). Triggered by a perceived increase in the prevalence of tuberculosis and insanity…
Excerpt from Medicinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele
Hermann Lotze (1817–81) is a neglected figure in the history of psychiatry although it has been claimed that his early views were influential, for example, on the young Griesinger. Trained as a physician, psychologist and philosopher he saw better than many the impending epistemological crisis that was to affect disciplines such as psychology and medical psychology as they were being taken over by the natural sciences. The problem he endeavoured …
Of Mania
Classic Text No. 57 is meant to illustrate the way in which the old, pre-1800 clinical notion of mania was transformed into its current counterpart. In Classical times, the term ‘mania’ had been used to refer to three orders of objects: medical (as featured in this introduction and in the Classic text), theological (two Greek deities) (Smith, 1870) and epistemological. In regard to the last, a mania of ‘divine’ origin is mentioned by Plato in the…
Our Knowledge of Anancasm (Psychic Compulsive States)
Erotomania
Four historical convergences are identified in the history of erotomania. According to the first, which lasted from Classical times to the early eighteenth century, erotomania was a 'general disease caused by unrequited love'. According to the second, erotomania was a disease of 'excessive physical love (nymphomania)'; this view remained active well into the nineteenth century. The third convergence focuses on the view that erotomania is a form o…
Ewald Hecker (1843-1909)
On Heboidophrenia
About the Limits of Psychiatric Knowledge
The Factors of Insanities
Leçons cliniques sur les maladies mentales et nerveuses by J. Séglas
Depressive states in old age
Les Érotomanes. Étude médico-légale
No prominent works on this page.
What is Phenomenology? A Review
The significance of symptom complexes in psychiatry
Traditionally, the core of a Terminological Knowledge Representation System (TKRS) consists of a so-called TBox, where concepts are introduced, and an ABox, where facts about individuals are stated in terms of these concepts. This design has a drawback because in most applications the TBox has to meet two functions at a time: on the one hand, similar to a database schema, framelike structures with typing information are introduced through primiti…
Psychological concepts and psychiatric symptomatology in some ancient Chinese medical texts
Phenomenology, psychopathology and Jaspers
The notion of unitary psychosis
'Unitary psychosis' is the collective name for a set of disparate doctrines whose common denominator is the view that there is only one form of psychosis and that its diverse clinical presentations can be explained in terms of endogenous and exogenous factors. This paper examines the history of these doctrines since the eighteenth century in the work of their main sponsors and extricates their conceptual assumptions. It is shown that the nature o…
Historiography of mental systems and diseases
On the relationship between senile cerebral atrophy and aphasia
Introduction
The anhedonias
Background. The term and concept of 'anhedonia' refer to a group of clinical phenomena whose common denominator is the complaint of a putative incapacity to 'experience pleasure'. Linked to disorders such as schizophrenia and depression, anhedonia remains difficult to define and measure. Method. This paper explores the historical frames in which anhedonia was originally constructed; and is fully based on primary sources. It makes use of the 'conc…
Will and its disorders
Objective: to resuscitate the old clinical category of 'disorder of the will'. Method: a detailed conceptual study is presented of the origins and history of the will as a mental function, and of its disorders as they were first described during the nineteenth century. An account is also offered of the historical changes that led to the decline of the will, and to the dispersion of important clinical phenomena such as aboulia, obsession and impul…
Lad Haskovec and akathisia
Philippe Chaslin and descriptive psychopathology
Un cas de dépersonnalisation
A case of depersonalization
The Authors reply
Die Gruppirung der psychischen Krankheiten… Part III
Introduction to 'On the pathology of the consciousness of the self'
On the pathology of the consciousness of the self A study of general psychopathology
The origins of psychosurgery
The concepts and techniques involved in the origins of psychosurgery during the late nineteenth century are analysed, particularly in the work of Claye Shaw and Gottlieb Burckhardt. It is shown that their views and therapeutic behaviour were guided by scientific, ethical and social warrants not dissimilar from those of today. The debate that followed their work can thus be considered as a trial run to that elicited by the work of Moniz. This pape…
On the symptomatology of left-sided temporal lobe atrophy
Depersonalization
As with other clinical phenomena, the historical analysis of the term, concepts and behaviours involved in the construction of 'depersonalization' should provide researchers with an essential frame for its empirical study, Before the term was coined in 1898, and under a variety of names, behaviours typical of 'depersonalization' were reported by Esquirol, Zeller, Billod, and Griesinger. The word dépersonnalisation derived from a usage in Amiel's …
The scientific origins of electroconvulsive therapy
Charles Blondel and La Conscience morbide
Folie à deux - a mad family
Jaspers, Kurt Schneider and the Heidelberg school of psychiatry
The psychiatric tradition of Heidelberg goes back to Kraepelin. Its psychopathological orientation was established by Jaspers and developed by K. Schneider. The relationship between these two men is explored through an analysis of their correspondence, which lasted for more than fifty years
Psychology (52 works) · Psychoanalysis (31 works) · Psychiatry (27 works) · History (26 works) · Mental Health and Psychiatry (24 works) · Medicine (21 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Neurology and Historical Studies (14 works) · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices (8 works)