Читать книгу Phobias: Fighting the Fear - Helen Saul - Страница 15

Charles Darwin had no desire for a head-on collision with the Church. By nature he was diplomatic and unassuming, certainly not confrontational. On top of this, his beloved wife Emma Wedgewood was deeply religious. But he was exasperated by the Church’s stranglehold on biology. The doctrine that we are made in the image of God, implying our perfection, was a particular problem. It elevated any study of humans into a direct challenge to God’s greatness and effectively stifled scientific thought.

Scientists in other disciplines in the early nineteenth century had much more freedom than biologists. Darwin viewed them jealously as he wrote: ‘What would the Astronomer say to the doctrine that the planets moved [not] according to the laws of gravitation, but from the Creator having willed each separate planet to move in its particular orbit?’

Another problem facing biology was the legacy of rationalist philosophy. It had produced great insights and set up trains of thought still followed today, but in practical terms it had come to a dead end. The philosophical view of the brain did not lend itself to systematic study. Kant even said that the mind was unquantifiable and beyond direct investigation so that a science of the mind was a logical impossibility.

Darwin eventually overcame these obstacles and his work paved the way for an explosion of activity in mind and brain research. The parts relevant to phobias are explored in detail in the next chapter, but his greatest contribution was, in the mildest possible manner, to wrest control of biology from the Church.

The Origin of Species, published in 1859, simply observed that living things adapt themselves to their surroundings. Species change over generations, he said. And if living things are not God-given, created once for all time, this implies that they are a legitimate target for scientific study. Darwin carefully excluded humans so as not to court more problems with the Church than was absolutely necessary, but his argument plainly implied that we are not distinct from animals. And if we have not been selected by God for special treatment, there is no reason why we cannot be studied scientifically.

The work caused a social and moral storm on publication but it was assimilated by scientists and the public alike within a decade. From there, developments in the many fields of science relevant to anxiety, fear and phobias started to snowball. Psychologists started collecting data. They devised experiments and studied the behaviour of animals and humans. Wilhelm Wundt, who set up the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, epitomised this new approach. His followers were trained to look for traits that could be measured, and then collect data before they started building their theories.

The foundations were laid for the modern neurosciences. Spanish physiologist Santiago Ramón y Cagal was awarded the Nobel prize for his discovery that the brain is made up of neurones, or nerve cells. Afterwards, scientists went on to establish that the brain consists of a vast interconnected network of these cells. Scientists today are still trying to determine how far communication between these cells determines emotions like fear or anxiety.

Medicine progressed. Psychiatrists like C. Westphal started closely observing and defining phobias. The American Civil War brought tragic opportunities for clinicians to study fear at close quarters. Doctors who might once have moralised about courage or faith started taking measurements and looking more dispassionately at the effect of fear on the heart, lungs and other body systems. They wrote up their observations and developed theories, some of which are explored in chapter 4, on neurophysiology.

All of this work set the scene for probably the single most influential figure in the history of thought on phobias.