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| Page from a 14th century edition of De Anima |
I read this article about Asperger's Syndrome in the NYT recently and was annoyed by its insistence that people misdiagnosed with Asperger's nevertheless suffer from "social disabilites." They're quiet, so something must be wrong with them ...
Articles like this make me appreciate how wonderfully free from excessive psychologizing classics usually manages to be. I wanted to delve a bit into what did pass for psychology in antiquity.
It seems that psychology from the classical period up through the 19th century is based on Aristotle (big surprise). For Aristotle (Peri psyches/ De Anima) the soul is inseparable from the body. The rational soul has a 'possible intellect,' a storage area of ideas essentially, and an 'agent intellect', which forms selected ideas into thoughts. This is a bit like the concept of mind espoused by one of my favorite Victorian detectives (and fittingly, one with considerable "social difficulties"):
I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.
-Sherlock Holmes, "A Study in Scarlet"photo credit Pin It
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