Wilhelm Griesinger (1817-1868) employed dynamic psychiatry; social psychiatry; brain science consisting of brain pathology and neurophysiology; and descriptive psychopathology as methods of psychiatry, and proposed outstanding theories in each field. His thesis "Psychosis is a brain disease" was backed by the insight that the human mind has an autonomy that cannot be reduced to brain activity, which sets it apart from simple reductionist thinking. In the field of neurophysiology, he considered the activity of the human brain to be a "mental reflex" based on his knowledge of the "spinal reflex", and proposed the view that "the brain is a giant reflex organ that is constantly being renewed". In the field of dynamic psychiatry, he described post-traumatic stress disorder and prolonged grief disorder (ICD-11) from the viewpoint of the theory of dynamic representational association, in which a collection of representations is formed in human growth and an ego with opposing groups of representations is formed. His theory of dynamic representational association is closely linked to the concept of neurophysiology around the mechanism of "mental reflex", in a way that the neurophysiology according to Griesinger can be seen as a perspective that subsumes the science of the unconscious.
Author's abstract
Wilhelm Griesinger: Focusing on Neurophysiology and Dynamic Psychiatry
Oyama Fujimidai Hospital
Psychiatria et Neurologia Japonica
125: 226-237, 2023
https://doi.org/10.57369/pnj.23-032
https://doi.org/10.57369/pnj.23-032
<Keywords:Griesinger, neuroscience, psychosomatic relations, psychoanalysis>