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  • Title: [Plato's conceptions of disorders of the soul (Ta peri psuchên nosêmata). Timaeus as the beginning of a dynamic and ethic psychopathology].
    Author: Godderis J.
    Journal: Verh K Acad Geneeskd Belg; 1998; 60(4):295-342; discussion 343-5. PubMed ID: 9883080.
    Abstract:
    This contribution to the study of the evolution of fundamental concepts in psychiatry, and in particular of the interpretative models of mental disease, focuses on Plato's conceptions concerning the "disorders of the soul". Plato's "psychopathological" work suggests the decline of an hereditary conglomeration of interpretative arrangements of the irrational phenomena related to mental disease which, corresponding to the social needs of that time, had been united by the belief in myth and its therapeutic value. These archaic religious conceptions have most certainly been reversed by Plato, especially in his Timaeus, one of the three most influential of his dialogues. In a notable passage in this cosmological dialogue (86b ff.) Plato treats of those diseases of the soul which are caused by things physical, whether this be a "defective bodily constitution" or "faulty education". The diseases of the soul are thus no longer considered having a divine origin. Mental diseases to which man is unwittingly subject by defects in birth or education concern himself and his inner life and they cannot be dismissed with simplistic allegories. According to Plato they originate from a conflict, supported by a secret, hidden, irrational "self" that has its roots in the sôma, the rational "self" being only able to recuperate its total integrity if it manages, through self-discipline and knowledge, to check the somatic impulses, the folly of the body. Also, Plato offers a series of remedies to correct the undue influence of body on soul and soul on body, with a view to instituting a right balance and proportion between them. This, together with a stress on "care of the soul", particularly of the divine and immortal element, implicitly assumes that it is in man's power to apply the necessary remedies to himself and effect some sort of readjustment.
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