Brain Ways: Meynert, Bachelard and the Material Imagination of the Inner Life

The Austrian psychiatrist Theodor Meynert’s anatomical theories of the brain and nerves are laden with metaphorical imagery, ranging from the colonies of empire to the tentacles of jellyfish. This paper analyses among Meynert’s earliest works a different set of less obvious metaphors, namely, the fi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Medical history 2016-07, Vol.60 (3), p.388-406
Main Author: Phelps, Scott
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Austria
Bachelard Gaston
Brain - anatomy & histology
Consciousness
History of medicine
History, 19th Century
Humans
Imagination
Metaphor
Meynert Theodor
Neurosciences
Psychiatry - history
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Summary:The Austrian psychiatrist Theodor Meynert’s anatomical theories of the brain and nerves are laden with metaphorical imagery, ranging from the colonies of empire to the tentacles of jellyfish. This paper analyses among Meynert’s earliest works a different set of less obvious metaphors, namely, the fibres, threads, branches and paths used to elaborate the brain’s interior. I argue that these metaphors of material, or what the philosopher Gaston Bachelard called ‘material images’, helped Meynert not only to imaginatively extend the tracts of fibrous tissue inside the brain but to insinuate their function as pathways co-extensive with the mind. Above all, with reference to Bachelard’s study of the material imagination, I argue that Meynert helped entrench the historical intuition that the mind, whatever it was, consisted of some interiority – one which came to be increasingly articulated through the fibrous confines of the brain.
ISSN:0025-7273
2048-8343
2048-8343
DOI:10.1017/mdh.2016.29