Phrenology: Psychiatry’s First Big Mistake

     By the early 19th century phrenology had begun to have an influence on doctors of the mind and its core tenet is still embedded in today’s psychiatric thought. Phrenology itself was debunked as a pseudoscience by the mid 19th century and its practitioners were ridiculed as “bumpologists,” but its “the brain is the mind” postulate is still alive and well.

     Developed by German neuropsychologist Franz Josef Gall and his research associate, Johann Spurzheim, phrenology purported to show the correlation between the skull indentations caused by the underlying brain organs and a person’s specific personality and character traits. Gall had arrived at this hypothesis after a life of scientific observation of human skull types, both in society and in the Vienna Lunatic Asylum where he practiced.

     Prior to Gall’s theory, the causes of mental illness had been seen as spiritual or moral aberrations, and a person was treated accordingly, even if it was the body that was sometimes addressed. The early Greek practice of trepanation, for instance – drilling a hole in a person’s skull – was done not for its effect on the body, but to let the demons out which were causing the lunacy.

     Gall was the first influential physiologist who said that the physical organ of the brain itself was the mind. The individual personality traits a person possessed – from kindness to malice – were located in a specific area of the brain, and those organic locations determined the shape of the skull surrounding them.

     The term “phrenology” was coined in 1815 by British physician Thomas Foster, although some claim Spurzheim himself derived the word. Ironically, the word derives from the Greek word for mind (phrene) and study (ology) and not from any etymology about the brain. Just as “psyche” (Greek for mind or soul) formed the word “psychology” and originally meant the study of the mind or soul and psychiatry meant the healing of the mind or soul, phrenology too was a word that held no mention of the physical lump of matter that is the brain.

     Gall was the first to equate the mind with the physical brain, and it was that error in identification that eventually led to the psychiatric horrors of insulin coma therapy, electroshock, and lobotomies in the 20 th century in psychiatry’s cruel search for somehow destroying insanity by destroying the brain.

     Today psychiatry’s chemical imbalance theory justifies the mass drugging of Americans with antidepressants and is based on the same original mid-identification of the mind with the brain.

     Phrenology may have been quickly debunked by the middle of the 19th  century as a pseudoscience, but psychiatry is still running strong on that same faulty premise that those original “bumpologists” used.