Proving the somaticist position: J. B. Friedreich on the nature and seat of mental disease

Abstract

The emerging specialty of psychiatry in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century showed a preoccupation with theoretical issues regarding whether mental disease was correctly attributed to somatic or psychic causes. J. B. Friedreich was a champion of the somaticist view, and the methods and evidence which he used to defend this position and which he presented as a series of proofs, are scrutinized in detail in this paper. This illustrates how the dichotomous debate between the somaticist and mentalist viewpoints was sustained by a speculative philosophical method based on a dualistic conception of body and soul and supported by subjective clinical observations ranging from succinct to banal or even absurd.