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By Root 1213 0

since for many centuries it misled physicians and others as to the causes of personality patterns and psychological disorders. He did, however, recognize and correctly describe one kind of physical symptom produced by the emotions. He noticed one day that a female patient’s pulse speeded up when someone happened to mention the name of a male dancer. Galen arranged to have someone enter the room during her next visit and talk about the performance of a different male dancer, and to repeat the experiment on another day with another dancer’s name. In neither case did the patient’s pulse accelerate. On the fourth day someone mentioned the first dancer’s name again, her pulse became rapid, and Galen confidently diagnosed her ailment as love sickness, adding that doctors seem not to realize how bodily health can be affected by the suffering of the psyche.16 Unfortunately, he went no further with the thought, which was not pursued until the advent of psychosomatic medicine in our own century.

Plotinus

The Egyptian Plotinus (205–270) made a wholly different kind of contribution to psychology. By his time, Roman civilization was decadent, corrupt, and violence-ridden. In that atmosphere, many troubled people were attracted to Plotinus’s Neoplatonism, which combined the ethics of Stoicism with the mystical and unworldly components of Plato’s beliefs, including the most nonscientific and spiritual components of his psychology.

Plotinus, after studying Greek philosophy in Alexandria, came to Rome in 244, where, although a pagan, he lived like a Christian saint amid the city’s luxuries. Regarding the body as the prison of the soul— his biographer and disciple, Porphyry, says Plotinus was actually ashamed that his soul had a body—he took no care of himself physically, was unconcerned about dress and hygienic matters, ate the simplest foods, avoided sexual activity, and refused to sit for his portrait on the grounds that his body was the least important part of him. Despite these austerities, he was a popular lecturer and much sought out for his advice on sundry matters by well-to-do Romans.

Like Plato, whom he revered—usually alluding to him simply as “He”—Plotinus considered the evidence of the senses inferior to that of reasoning. He believed that the highest wisdom, the ultimate access to truth, came when the soul temporarily slipped free of the flesh in a trancelike state and perceived the world beyond. He himself, he wrote, had had a number of such experiences.

Many times it has happened. Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvelous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the highest order; acquiring identity with the divine, stationing within It* by having attained that activity; poised above whatever in the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the Soul ever enter into my body, the Soul which even within the body is the highest thing it has shown itself to be.17

This is hard to follow, to say the least. What Plotinus is saying here and elsewhere is that a tripartite real world exists above the material, physical one. It is made up of One (It); of Spirit or the intellect or mind, a kind of reflection or image of the One; and of Soul, which can look upward toward Spirit or downward toward nature and the world of sense.18

What has this to do with psychology? Little and much.

Little, because Plotinus is not interested in the study of mental functions; he does not say a great deal about psychology except for taking issue with the psychology of Democritus and other atomists.

Much, because the Neoplatonic view of the relation between body and soul, soul and mind, would become part of Christian doctrine and would shape and constrain psychological inquiry until the rebirth of science fourteen centuries later.

Moreover, the way in which Plotinus arrived at his conceptions