Though neurological brain scans are much more accurate than phrenology charts, they raise some of the same ethical issues that were discussed in the nineteenth century. Some people argue that any attempt to reduce a human being to chemical reactions is inherently debasing, robbing people of free will and encouraging society to limit their freedom and personal choices. Others point to brain scans like the one reproduced here—which contrasts a healthy brain and one suffering from severe depression—and argue that brain-scan science has the potential to treat people suffering from a variety of mental and personality disorders.
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Phrenology Chart from How to Read Character: A New Illustrated Hand-Book of Phrenology and Physiognomy for Students and Examiners, with a Descriptive Chart by Samuel Wells, 1891. Bettman / Corbis
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PET scan of a deoxyglucose study that compares a normal human brain to a brain of someone suffering from depression. Science Source
See p. C-2 in the color insert for a full-color reproduction of this image.
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
How would you describe the categories of behavior in the phrenology chart? What kinds of assumptions are embedded into the categories that the chart uses for personality traits? How would changing words like "acquisitiveness" and "firmness" to "industriousness" and "stubbornness" change the meaning of the chart?
Why do you think that the creator of the phrenology chart drew pictures to illustrate each of the personality traits? What kinds of assumptions are contained in the pictures?
What assumptions are embedded in the brain-scan chart? Does the category of "depression" seem to be the same kind of character trait illustrated in the phrenology chart?
How might the information in either the phrenology chart or the brain scan be used to prevent certain kinds of behaviors or treat various diseases?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Is there room in either the phrenology chart or the brain scan for the kind of "swerve" that Lucretius (p. 292) believes can introduce randomness in an otherwise deterministic system?
One of the biggest complaints about modern brain science is that it rejects free will and presents human behavior as completely mechanistic. How might a cognitive psychologist such as Daniel Kahneman (p. 134) respond to this charge?
Is either phrenology or brain-scan technology compatible with Locke's (p. 100) notion of the mind as a tabula rasa, or "blank slate"? Why or why not?
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
Write a paper examining the assumptions and value judgments behind both the phrenological chart and the brain scan. Explore the unspoken assumptions about the way that each image presents evidence and makes arguments.
Conduct independent research into both phrenology and brain-scan technology and write a research paper answering the question, "Is modern neuroscience a new phrenology?"
carl jung
from The Red Book
[date unknown]
CARL GUSTAV JUNG (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and early disciple of Sigmund Freud. Jung met Freud early in 1906, as he was beginning his career, and the two began a dynamic professional relationship that lasted until 1913, when Jung broke with Freud over increasingly pronounced differences in their views of the mind. Jung resigned from his position as the head of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Jung felt that Freud assigned far too much prominence to sexual conflicts in the personality development of pre-adolescent children. He also felt that Freud's view of the unconscious was too limited to explain things like dreams, visions, and religious experiences.
Jung went on to develop the psychological theory for which he is best known: the "collective unconscious." Freud saw the mind as a tabula rasa or "blank slate," that contained no preexisting structures, memories, or images. Jung, on the other hand, believed that the human mind retained traces of memories and images acquired by members of our species over hundreds of thousands of years and passed down through many generations. Jung first called these "primordial images," but later employed the term "archetype." Today, the term "Jungian archetype" is used to describe a pattern or image that triggers powerful associations in nearly all human minds.
For Jung archetypal images were the basis for dreams, but also for myths, religions, and literature. To understand archetypes, Jung paid special attention to the images that were common across a wide variety of cultures. Snakes, he found, represented both evil and divinity in cultures around the world. And he also found that often wise old men would help young seekers. Jung's ideas have been enormously influential in both psychology and contemporary culture. A number of the most popular books and films in history—Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter—employ a variety of Jungian archetypes as they construct the adventures of their heroes.
The image in this chapter comes from Jung's Liber Novus, or "New Book," which is usually referred to as The Red Book. The Red Book consists of Jung's own elaborate calligraphy and drawings of various archetypal figures. Jung worked on The Red Book between 1914 and 1930, but he never submitted it for publication. After he died, his heirs kept it in a vault and allowed only a very few people to see it. It was not published until 2009, after the British scholar Sonu Shamdasani convinced the family to allow him to create a facsimile edition that would reproduce the work exactly as Jung had intended for it to be experienced.
The main figure in this image is Philemon, a character from Greek and Roman mythology (not to be confused with the recipient of Paul's Letter to Philemon in the New Testament), who Jung first saw in a dream in 1913 and who would become for him a symbol of wisdom and understanding as he worked out his theories of the mind. In his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung explains his first dream of Philemon:
His figure first appeared to me in the following dream. There was a blue sky, like the sea, covered not by clouds but by flat brown clods of earth. It looked as if the clods were breaking apart and the blue water of the sea was becoming visible between them. But the water was the blue sky. Suddenly there appeared from the right a winged being sailing across the sky. . . . He held a bunch of four keys, one of which he clutched as if he were about to open a lock. He had the wings of the kingfisher with its characteristic colors. Since I did not understand this dream image, I painted it in order to impress it upon my memory.
carl jung
Selection from The Red Book, date unknown (tempera on paper).
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