University of Warwick.
Transcult Psychiatry. 2020 Dec;57(6):741-752. doi: 10.1177/1363461519853652. Epub 2019 Jun 10.
One of the most distinctive aspects of contemporary psychiatry is its firm grounding in a neurological and biochemical framework for the interpretation of mental life and its disturbances. In the absence of any strong neurological understanding or systematic knowledge of active pharmaceutical substances, one might expect that early ancient medicine readily resorted to non-somatic approaches to healing mental suffering. Instead, what is usually labelled "therapy of the word" and other forms of what one may call psychotherapy emerge relatively late in Greek medicine, only in the first centuries of our era. This paper provides an overview and analysis of this development in ancient history of psychology, philosophy and medicine, covering a broad period of time from the fifth century BCE to the end of the late-antique period, the fifth century CE. The focus is on the very idea (or lack thereof) of the curability of mental disturbance, and on the particular branch of therapeutics which addresses the psychological and existential condition of the patient, rather than his or her physiological state.
当代精神病学最显著的特点之一是，它在解释精神生活及其障碍方面有坚实的神经科学和生物化学基础。由于缺乏对神经科学的深入了解，也不了解活性药物物质的系统知识，人们可能会认为古代医学很容易求助于非躯体方法来治疗精神痛苦。然而，通常被称为“言语治疗”的疗法和其他形式的所谓心理疗法，在希腊医学中出现得相对较晚，直到我们这个时代的公元 1 世纪才出现。本文概述并分析了古代心理学、哲学和医学史上的这一发展过程，涵盖了从公元前 5 世纪到公元 5 世纪晚期的广泛时期。本文的重点是精神障碍可治愈性的概念（或缺乏这一概念），以及关注解决患者心理和生存状况的治疗方法，而不是他或她的生理状态。
