Psychogenesis/Organogenesis

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PSYCHOGENESIS/ORGANOGENESIS

The notions of psychogenesis and organogenesis come out of a classic debate in the field of psychology—a debate that, throughout history, has taken the form of a dichotomy between innate and acquired or subjective and objective. Today, its most radical form is illustrated in the opposition between neuronal and mental. These two notions are usually associated with causal deterministic or etiopathogenic types of mental disorders.

Classically, psychogenesis of a mental problem is understood to mean an etiological or etiopathogenic process that is exclusively supported by events or mechanisms of a mental nature and outside of any organic factor, especially those affecting the nervous system or the brain. Psychoanalysis, as a theory of the human mind based on exploration of the unconscious, for a long time represented and illustrated the psychogenetic point of view within psychology by emphasizing the dynamics of unconscious conflict. Some doctrinal trends within contemporary psychoanalysis, such as the current informed by the work of Jacques Lacan, radicalized this viewpoint through the use of a formalization of the structures of language in relation to the unconscious.

By contrast, organogenesis of a mental problem is understood to mean an etiological or etiopathogenic process grounded in an organic dysfunction. While in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries organic dysfunction was conceived in terms of lesions of certain areas of the brain according to an anatomical model, present-day contributions from molecular biology, genetics, and, above all, the neurosciences have instead situated such dysfunction within the neuronal connections that make up the structures of the brain. Certain currents within psychology, such as those derived from neuropsychobiological, experimental, or cognitive approaches, by privileging the objective dimension within observation protocols and data collection, illustrate this organogenic point of view.

From a psychoanalytic point of view, the debate between psychogenesis and organogenesis can no longer be treated schematically and exclusively. This debate raises the question of psychic causality, the affirmation of which is indissociable from psychic reality. According to Freud's conception, mental life is necessarily grounded in organic life, but there is a limit beyond which psychoanalytic inquiry can no longer be relevant. Following up from that viewpoint, today one can say that mental functioning is grounded in brain functioning, but that it does not derive directly from, nor is it reducible to, brain functioning. The logic of the mental thus remains heterogeneous to the logic of the neuronal, as is shown, in particular, by its theoretical referents. Notions such as the drive—with its two polarities, somatic and psychic—or representation, as well as modern psychoanalytic studies on borderline states or psychosomatic states, which emphasize symbolic transformations (meaning) and economic transformations (force) attest to a specifically mental reality that has its own causality.

At the margins of the psychogenetic and organogenetic points of view, one current of doctrine, the organodynamic current, attempted to make a synthesis between the two. An outgrowth of the work of the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, and based on a hierarchical, evolutionary conception of the structures of the nervous system, this trend was applied in the field of psychopathology, specially by Henry Ey and others. In this conception, it is posited that mental disorders are linked to dissolution or disorganization at a certain level of mental organization, by means of damage of organic origin that generates negative symptoms, and to reorganization at an inferior level, linked to mental life's characteristic dynamism and ability to generate positive symptoms. In the field of psychosomatic phenomena, Pierre Marty applied this model in an original and personal way to the psychosomatic economy and its disorders.

Claude Smadja

See also: Constitution; "Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses"; Heredity of acquired characters; Organic repression; Phylogenetic Fantasy, A: Overview of the Transference Neuroses ; Psychic causality; Psychotic/neurotic.