Institute of Epileptology, Weston Education Centre, King's College, Denmark Hill Campus, Cutcombe Road, London SE5 6PJ, UK.
J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry. 2012 Feb;83(2):199-201. doi: 10.1136/jnnp-2011-300455. Epub 2011 Sep 28.
The history of obsessive compulsive, phobic and psychopathic behaviour can be traced to the 17th century AD.
We draw attention to these behaviours in a Babylonian cuneiform medical text known as Shurpu. These three categories were united in the Babylonian mind around the concept of the māmīt 'oath' idea, the behaviour habits being so unbreakable it appeared that the subject had sworn an oath to do or not to do the action involved. The behavioural accounts were entirely objective, including what we would call immature, antisocial and criminal behaviour, and obsessional categories of contamination, aggression, orderliness of objects, sex and religion. They do not include subjective descriptions of obsessional thoughts, ruminations or the subject's attitude to their own behaviour, which are more modern fields of enquiry.
The Babylonians had no understanding of brain or psychological function but they were remarkable describers of medical disease and behaviour. Although they had both physical and supernatural theories of many medical disorders and behaviours, they had an open mind on these particular behaviours which they regarded as a 'mystery' yet to be 'resolved'. We are not aware of comparable accounts of these behaviours in ancient Egyptian or classical medicine. These Babylonian descriptions extend the history of these disorders to the first half of the second millennium BC.
强迫症、恐惧症和精神病患者的行为可以追溯到公元 17 世纪。
我们在一个名为 Shurpu 的巴比伦楔形文字医学文本中提到了这些行为。这三个类别在巴比伦人的观念中被统一在“誓言”的概念下，行为习惯如此不可打破，以至于看起来主体已经发誓要做或不做所涉及的行为。行为描述完全是客观的，包括我们称之为不成熟、反社会和犯罪行为，以及强迫性的污染、攻击、物体秩序、性和宗教类别。它们不包括对强迫性思维、沉思或主体对自己行为的态度的主观描述，这些是更现代的研究领域。
巴比伦人对大脑或心理功能没有任何了解，但他们是医学疾病和行为的杰出描述者。尽管他们对许多医学疾病和行为都有物理和超自然的理论，但他们对这些特定的行为持开放的态度，认为这些行为是一个尚未“解决”的“谜团”。我们没有在古埃及或古典医学中发现类似的关于这些行为的描述。这些巴比伦描述将这些疾病的历史追溯到公元前第二个千年的上半叶。
