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Textbook Melancholic Habits Burtons Anatomy The Mind Sciences 1St Edition Radden Ebook All Chapter PDF
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i
M E L A NC HOL IC H A BI TS
ii
iii
M E L A NC HOL IC H A BI TS
Jennifer Radden
1
iv
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
v
vii
CON TEN TS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. embodied mentality 18
2. Imagination “queen of the mental powers” 49
3. symptom, disease, cause 82
4. between the confines of sense and reason 118
5. the akratic melancholic 150
6. when Reason is also corrupted 180
7. who labors not of this disease? 211
viii
Contents
8. remedies 243
9. from the Anatomy to the clinic and lab 273
References 293
Index of Names 321
Topical Index 323
viii
ix
During its long gestation and through the completion of this book,
many friends and colleagues have assisted me in innumerable ways,
and I am grateful to every one of them. My particular thanks are due to
those who read and commented on draft chapters: Pete Zachar, Somogy
Varga, Barbara Houston, Jane Martin, Ann Diller, Beebe Nelson,
Susan Fransoza, Serife Tekin, Ed Brown, Jeff Poland, John Sutton,
Claire Pouncey, Alec Bodkin, and Georg Repnikov. Jenny Lloyd, Phil
Gerrans, Angus Gowland, Amélie Rorty, and Dominic Murphy acted
as valuable sounding-boards, and Frank Keefe provided editorial sup-
port through many changes and revisions. Also deserving my thanks are
unnamed readers of my book proposal, who offered insightful sugges-
tions and guidance. Audiences in Pittsburgh; Linkoping; Louvain; and
Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth, provided valuable ideas and critiques.
The Centre for the History of Emotions at the University of Western
Australia afforded me a congenial perch as an academic visitor. And
finally, along with his editorial wisdom on matters large and small, my
patient editor Peter Ohlin allowed me the time I needed (while remind-
ing me that I must stop eventually).
x
1
Introduction
1
2
Introduction
on mental states explains the label “mind sciences” for the disciplines
involved.1 Read selectively, Burton reveals a complex and sophisticated
account of human psychology and the interaction between mind and
body; he shares many of the presuppositions we associate with contem-
porary cognitivism, and he is alert to issues that are at the center of these
recent perspectives and assumptions, including some that may have
implications for the treatment of mood disorders in the clinic. Before
the advent of cognitivism in psychology, and the development of neuro-
science, Burton’s ideas would have had little currency as science. Today,
they are surprisingly, even strikingly, resonant with contemporary
research on the mind and its pathologies.
Mental illnesses, their treatment, and the suffering associated with
them are still incompletely understood, and these gaps in our under-
standing indicate a second obvious reason to read the Anatomy. The
continuity between melancholy and today’s mood disorders is debated,
the parallels between them are incomplete, and no identity between
the earlier and later disorders will be claimed in the following pages. 2
Regardless, though, and irrespective of the degree of those parallels,
Burton’s book addresses the same, or closely similar, unresolved issues
over disordered feelings and emotions. Its ideas are couched in the lan-
guage of humoral medicine and Aristotelian faculty psychology, yet the
Anatomy contains insights, arguments, and observations of immedi-
ate relevance to debates that are ongoing—over depression and anxi-
ety as disease, delusional thought, diagnosis, prediction, explanation,
treatment, mental health and illness, and the social norms governing
responses to human suffering. We can acknowledge the differences
between seventeenth-and twenty- fi rst-
century forms of affective
1. Although he could hardly have anticipated the substance of these sciences, Coleridge
uses “mind science” in rather the same way at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
(See Holmes 2009.) Here, the expression is used broadly to include a range of research
endeavors (laboratory sciences as well as neuropsychology and brain study) and clini-
cally oriented practices (such as medical psychiatry) whose shared focus is the mind and
mental functioning. That commonality of focus and purpose invites the label, especially
when combined with the many collaborative efforts that now straddle and merge these
separate fields.
2. See Radden 2000, 2003, 2009, 2013, Varga 2013, Berrios 1985, 2011.
2
3
Introduction
3
4
Introduction
3. For important recent historical work, see Bamborough 1989–2 000, Gowland 2006,
2007, 2014, Schmidt 2007, Lund 2010, 2015, Schmidt 2007, Bell 2014. Earlier studies
include Babb 1959, Bamborough 1952, Evans 1972, and Fox 1976.
4
5
Introduction
4. Throughout this work, “normal” and “abnormal” are used statistically, as equivalents of
“typical,” and “atypical,” and without normative implications.
5
6
Introduction
6
7
Introduction
about the mind and cognitive states would similarly dismiss Evans’
psychoanalytic Burton. Yet Evans’ work (now long out of print), is to
my knowledge the only book-length discussion of these questions, and
as he suggests, the Anatomy has been unwarrantedly ignored by those
in mind sciences during the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries. In a
much-quoted remark from a 1914 Yale Review, Sir William Ostler names
the Anatomy of Melancholy the greatest medical treatise ever written by a
layman. The aim of the present work—again by a layperson—is to begin
to redress the unwarranted neglect it has suffered.
Robert Burton was an Oxford scholar and eclectic reader, thinker, and
bibliophile, writing in the first half of the seventeenth century. (He lived
between 1577 and 1640.) His interests and erudition led him from con-
temporary and ancient medicine and psychology, to philosophy, classi-
cal literature and philology, theology and religion. The first edition of
the Anatomy of nine hundred pages that appeared in 1621 was followed
by three ever-larger versions in Burton’s lifetime (1624, 1628, 1632) and
then by a posthumous one (1651). The causes and cures of melancholy
are the respective topics of the First and Second “Partitions,” or parts, of
this very large work. They, particularly, bear on the present project and
are our almost exclusive focus. (Religious and love melancholy, dealt
with in the Third Partition, reflect Burton’s more literary contributions,
but are less relevant for us here.)
Burton was not the first to devote a full book to melancholy. The
literary and dramatic focus on these states during the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries had been matched by scholarly interest. 5 And sev-
eral well-k nown works from renaissance and early modern times are
appealed to quite extensively in the Anatomy. De vita libri tres (Three
Books on Life) (1489) by the Neoplatonist Marcilio Ficino (1433–
1499) had extolled the link between intellectual genius and melancholy,
5. That literary and dramatic interest was extensive, of course, and powerfully entwined
with these more medical and theological investigations. See Bamborough 1952.
7
8
Introduction
6. This link between melancholy and genius was the inspiration for much sixteenth-and
seventeenth-century writing (Kristellar 1988).
7. Exceptions occur: One is in the First Partition where, elaborating on the traits of the
melancholy character, he includes “deepe reach, excellent apprehension, judicious,
wise and witty” (I,3,1,2:391).
8. Discours de la conservation de la veuë: des maladies melancoliques: des catarrhs, & de la vie-
illesse (1594), translated in 1599 as: A discourse of the preservation of sight, of melancholike
diseases, of rheumes and of old age.
9. Jackson 1986.
10. A Swiss physician, Plater or Platter (1536–1614) was a leading medical authority in his
own day and widely read through the seventeenth century.
8
9
Introduction
11. Erasmus’ Praise of Folly was first published in 1511 and is admired and regularly
acknowledged by Burton.
12. Foucault 1965, Thiher 1999.
9
10
Introduction
13. Whether states of outright madness lie on the same continuum is not so clear, it will
become apparent in c hapter 6. But see Bamborough 1989–2 000:xxxiii.
14. See Radden 2011.
10
11
Introduction
11
12
Introduction
and shape them into transmissible form.15 Burton lacks Seneca’s spare
elegance, and others had written about melancholy as well, if not as copi-
ously, before he did. Nonetheless, he stands as the last, and best, repre-
sentative of a tradition that ends as the result of changes that, only a few
years later, ushered in modern epistemology and psychology.
Not only Seneca but also other Stoic philosophers enjoyed a popu-
larity during the renaissance that endured through the eighteenth cen-
tury, and the second half of the sixteenth century had seen an increase
in the translation, publication, and circulation of their works. We might
wonder if Burton’s neo-Stoicism, together with his Aristotelian psychol-
ogy, are due for renewed attention today, as the assumptions of mod-
ern thought are challenged or left behind, and the new psychology of
cognitivism upturns dualistic models of mind that have held sway since
at least the eighteenth century. Such, at any rate, is the speculation and
hope that fuels the chapters that follow.
12
13
Introduction
suffering. (It might well have been, of course, even if not for the reasons
he supposed.)
There is also the matter of the Anatomy’s humoral language and
assumptions. Although the early modern and modern era in western
Europe saw the beginnings of science and medicine as we recognize
them today, the Anatomy uses the language of ancient humoral theo-
ries, and the astrology and lore of renaissance humanism, as much as, or
more than, scientific observation and method. Imbalances of the bodily
humors not only explained temperament but also influenced health and
disease, and as disease, the eponymous Melancholy is associated with
the black bile. From beneath this humoral model can be reconstructed
an elaborate and sophisticated analysis of the interaction between psy-
chological and bodily states, but it is well concealed within the many
references to the dark, cold, dry humor itself.
In addition to the challenge of reading through the humoral lan-
guage and assumptions to find the conceptual structure beneath, and
attributing to Burton a position of his own amid the plethora of others’
opinions he cites, the present task is also magnified by the sometimes
inconclusive or inconsistent, and often skeptical, attitudes expressed
through the authorial voice of Democritus Junior adopted by Burton.
These aspects of style impose such a hindrance that Burton’s whole
investigation has been judged “in essence infinitely complex, particu-
lar, and uncertain,” and so, entirely skeptical (Gowland 2006:29)16 It is a
charge that seems very likely applicable to the Anatomy when taken as a
whole. And, indeed, most twentieth-century commentators have made
some version of the same complaint, acknowledging the work to be “cha-
otic and dispersive,”17 its style giving rise to “confusion and obscurity,”18
“disfiguring” the body of knowledge.19
But ours in what follows is a limited and interpretive reading. And
despite the above impediments, the discussion here is driven by the
16. The addition of authorial opinion, the passage continues, “ would be futile … the eclec-
ticism of the era insurmountable except through recourse to some form of skepticism
(Gowland 2006:29).
17. Tilmouth 2005:525.
18. Williams, H. 2003:35.
19. Williams, R. 2001.
13
14
Introduction
14
15
Introduction
The overall strategy is roughly as follows. The first seven chapters provide
an explication of Burtonian science and psychology, normal (mainly in
chapters 1 and 2) and then abnormal (in c hapters 3–7). These chapters
15
16
Introduction
16
17
Introduction
17
18
C ha pt e r 1
embodied mentality
Because they are not essential to the embodied mind and interaction-
ism constituting cognitive architecture in the Anatomy, the black bile
and its metaphors are briefly introduced here and then set to one side.1
By contrast with them, the Anatomy’s faculty psychology, and the classi-
cal and renaissance ideas Burton follows in describing how bodily states
affect and are affected by thoughts, imaginings, and feelings, have more
telling parallels in today’s sciences of mind. Rather than eclipsed, these
faculty categories form the basis of modern philosophy and cognitive
psychology alike, as they have always done folk psychology. They have
sometimes undergone small shifts of meaning (as we see in chapter 4,
with the reduction of “passions” to “emotions”), but for the most part
the broad categories of perception, memory, feeling, imagination, and
the like remain for us, as they were for Burton, the structure on which
our understanding of human psychology is built. In addition, although
his dualistic account of the mind and its workings was not of the natu-
ralistic kind we find in contemporary science, those mental workings
were firmly, inextricably, and interactively embodied. In this respect, its
particular form of dualist interactionism leaves the Anatomy system sur-
prisingly compatible with the materialistic systems of modern, mental
science.
1. In choosing to bypass all but the broadest aspects of Burton’s humoral system, I do
not mean to disparage present-day efforts to explore and vindicate other humorally
based anatomy and physiology, such as that employed by Burton’s close contemporary
Descartes. (See Cottingham 1998, and essays in Gaukroger, Schuster, and Sutton 2000.)
18
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