Mental Illness - The Brain And The Unconscious

The concept of mental illness has undergone many transformations as the development of civilization and the history of thought. But past history that is present in many current scientific research and publications. Whether we like it or not we continue in a few sentences, still thinking, for example, from the standpoint of religious and magical-animistic, or did anyone of you have seen on occasion and even then discard, a person foaming at the mouth and convulsing as if possessed by a demon?. The truth is that there is nothing new, in Mesopotamia and people were thought to be possessed by an evil spirit and were treated with magical-religious methods, which still, in many contexts and societies are still used.

But rather than mess with religion and the "cures" magical-religious could work on other writing, we are struck by the desire to "localization" and "animal" from other existing disciplines devoted to the study and treatment of mental health that we back to 31 BC

And do we mean by this that the issue is not a complex or anything, but locating mental disease in the brain, to understand the passions, conflicts and desires insastifechos as organ dysfunction or biochemical, has been a work from Greeks have been carried out and to what medicine and psychiatry has come a long way. However, they recognize that there is something that escapes them and not end to fix: you can not understand why a person after a drug treatment again fall on the same or another mental illness repeatedly, do not quite understand how a patient may improve more with a placebo, another person with the same ailment taking prescribed medication for you, nor how it is possible the period of hospital stay was reduced for those who have someone to talk and are accompanied, do not tell already specialized treatment based on the word, such as psychoanalysis. The goal, however, should not be an understanding of anything, but the acceptance and training within a scientific model that gives answers to these questions and allow us to bring new ones in this line of thought, ie in the construction of a knowledge not known enable work effectively in the treatment of mental illness.

Scientific thinking in the field of the psyche, art, culture and daily life without the Theory of the Unconscious, is stagnant. Such is the situation we are having our psyche research comparing with that of an animal instinct. In fact, the animals learned the concept of family together with love, protect us from extinction for a premium of pleasure, and reminds us that we come from a species that reproduces by sexuation. But humans unlike animals, speech, "has" unconscious instinct rather than "must" drive, your body beyond the biological consists of words and has powers to erogeneity, eroticism and in turn , beauty. We are imperfect, that imperfection and die even though we have passed the "life" in denial. In this way, it is impossible to extrapolate the results of research conducted with rats to humans. Another argument between those already mentioned, is that these investigations do not talk about the decisions that would take a human being, but the behavior and brain of rats.

Brain plasticity and their functions are not enough to account for the unconscious desire, which is top of every diagram possible for the psyche, both for the enjoyment of life, and for the unfortunate pleasure of suffering. A wish that is not destiny but act, present in a time out of chronological time, a non-sense, only with multiple-sense or sense in terms of what each one does. We would inevitably ask about desire and the enjoyment of a subject more actions you can take in life is always doomed to repeated failures.

The complexity of the human abolishes the cause-effect relationship, we can not blame or weather conditions, or brain, nor demons, neither reason nor feelings, because this is a illusion.

Freud builds the concept of the unconscious in theory but with practical effects and everything we thought real science of the mind is turned upside down. From psychoanalysis consciousness is a perceptual organ, with the limitations that this entails, time does not correspond to any memory timing and exactly what happened in the past. The word is not the thing. Whatever the meaning, no term defines or designates an object directly because there is no linear relationship between what is said and "reality" outside or inside, for the human being. word to define, create the thing, which means that there is a reality signifier for another signifier. The word, as sexual, due to a symbolic order in which instead of instinct, the drive operates overdetermined unconscious by the laws of language, where truth is constructed, temporarily, between what the words say each other.

Added to this, the goal of psychoanalysis is not to cure anything, but good practice to free association, transference and interpretation-construction aspects of healing are unavoidable side effect. One theory, a method and a technique will allow the subject to build another story of desire. And when we speak of the subject, we speak of an individual analysis.

We say that the interpretation must be within the limits of science, and listening, once established, the patient's desire to speak, within the universal imagery of poetry. The floating attention raised by Freud refers to an unconscious knowledge, where good analyst does not have to remember anything, not the interpretations they did, neither supervisory nor who studied alone, that's enough, hear from the imaginary where any word can be combined with any other building a new reality for even the same analyst, and if you know the interpretation that will give the patient from psychoanalytic theory, is neither interpretation, nor psychoanalysis, because then what you have done previously is what makes psychiatry and psychotherapy, align the subject of diagnosis, did not attend such as speaker but as sick and interpret his speech believing that truth is in the manifest content.

Talking is the only human disease. To become speaker the child had to be aware of the sexual difference that makes us mortals. A know that without being able to operate in our psyche and we are not very willing to accept given the requirements imposed by law Oedipal involved.

Build a desire to allow us the joy of life is possible beyond psychiatric diagnoses demanded by many patients to continue boxed into the stereotype. The other possible change is feasible for all designated as the mechanisms that operate in the disease are the same mechanisms that operate in the normal. However, each in every sentence, establishes a different relationship with reality for some two plus two equals four, but do not support it, others say no way, that two plus two are five, and others that are closer to "normal" say that two plus two equals four, and that this amount is likely to become psychoanalytic sessions.

Susana Gomez Lorente

Psychoanalyst Psychologist