The Twenty-First Maudsley Lecture: Nosophobia

Abstract

“Fear is more pain than is the pain it fears.”Sir Philip Sidney.In the opening chapter of his Body and Mind (1873) the physician and philosopher whom these lectures commemorate wisely insists that our inquiries into human faculties should begin with the elementary and proceed only later to the elucidation of the complex. “Surely,” he says, “it is time that we put seriously to ourselves the question whether the inductive method, which has proved its worth by its abundant fruitfulness wherever it has been faithfully applied, should not be as rigidly used in the investigation of mind as in the investigation of other natural phenomena. If so, we ought certainly to begin our inquiry with the observation of the simplest instances …” In the chapters which follow he applies this principle, and—or so it seems to me—provides a number of healthy correctives to much modern thinking and writing, and not least to the opinions of those who have allowed too little or assumed too much in their appraisals of the body-mind relationship. If we have for too long separated psyche and soma, past and present, organism and environment, individual and society, in our attempts to fathom Man, may not an extension of interest in a primitive emotion such as fear, in which the interdependence of all of these is manifest, have value?