Abstract

REJON ALTABLE, Carlos. Humors, entrails, spirits: premodern soul and modern subjectivity. Rev. Asoc. Esp. Neuropsiq. [online]. 2016, vol.36, n.130, pp.479-497. ISSN 2340-2733.

Premodern medicine deals with madness since its very beginning. Nevertheless, it couldn't furnish nascent psychiatry with a solid concept of mental illness. Psychiatry remains enmeshed in the conundrums of modern subjectivity in which it was born. This text addresses the reconstruction of some basic concepts of premodern medicine to show how they deal through metaphors with some features of human ontological structure which are key to understand mental illness: splitting, individuation, mediation and confluence in a process of appropriation/desappropriation of the world and of the subject itself. This process may be called life. Their reelaboration is the pending task of contemporary psychiatry.

Keywords : history of medicine; history of psychiatry; mental illness; subjectivity.

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