Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [10]
Hippocrates used the same theory to explain mental health and illness. If the four humors were in proper balance, consciousness and thought would function well, but if any humor was either in excess or short supply, mental illness of one kind or another would result. As he wrote:
Men ought to know that from the brain, and the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, grief, and tears… These things that we suffer all come from the brain when it is not healthy but becomes abnormally hot, cold, moist, or dry… Madness comes from its moistness. When the brain is abnormally moist, of necessity it moves, and when it moves, neither sight nor hearing is still, but we see or hear now one thing and now another, and the tongue speaks in accordance with the things seen and heard on any occasion. But when the brain is still, a man is intelligent.
The corruption of the brain is caused not only by phlegm but by bile. You may distinguish them thus: those who are mad through phlegm are quiet, and neither shout nor make a disturbance; those maddened through bile are noisy, evil-doing, and restless…The patient suffers from causeless distress and anguish when the brain is chilled and contracted contrary to custom; these effects are caused by phlegm, and it is these very effects that cause loss of memory.6
Later, followers of Hippocrates extended his humoral theory to account for differences in temperament. Galen, in the second century A.D., said that a phlegmatic person suffers from an excess of phlegm, a choleric one from an excess of yellow bile, a melancholic one from an excess of black bile, and a sanguine one from an excess of blood. That doctrine persisted in Western psychology until the eighteenth century and remains embedded in our daily speech—we call people “phlegmatic,” “bilious,” and so on—if not our psychology.
Although the humoral theory of personality and of mental illness now seems as benighted as the belief that the earth is the center of the universe, its premise—that there is a biological basis to, or at least a biological component in, personality traits and mental health or illness—has lately been confirmed beyond all question. A vast amount of recent research by cognitive neuroscientists has identified many of the substances produced by brain cells and shown how these enable thought processes to take place, and myriad other studies have shown that foreign substances such as drugs or toxins distort or interfere with those processes. Hippocrates was close to the mark after all.
One can only marvel at the psychological musings of Hippocrates and the pre-Socratic psychophilosophers. Quite without laboratories, methodology, or empirical evidence—indeed, without anything but open minds and intense curiosity—they recognized and enunciated a number of the salient issues and devised certain of the theories that have remained central in psychology from their time to our own.
The “Midwife of Thought”: Socrates
We now come upon a man unlike the shadowy figures we just met, a real and vivid person whose appearance, personal habits, and thoughts are thoroughly documented: Socrates (469–399), the leading philosopher of his time and the proponent of a theory of knowledge that directly contradicted perception-based theory. We know a good deal about him as a person because two of his pupils—Plato and the historian-soldier Xenophon—set down detailed recollections of him. Unfortunately, Socrates himself wrote nothing, and his ideas come to us chiefly through Plato’s dialogues, where much of what he says is probably Plato’s own thinking put in Socrates’ mouth for dramatic reasons. Nonetheless, Socrates’ contributions