ABSTRACT
Psychology has always been shadowed by the question of brain functioning. From the late 1600s the brain was understood as the major physical location of psychological phenomena, although the site of the emotions in particular remained debatable. With Franz Joseph Gall’s craniology (later called phrenology) in the 1790s the brain, along with the sense organs, became the principal meeting-point between physiology and Psychology. Studying the brain presented unique difficulties. The physical functions of most organs are reflected in their morphology – e.g. how the heart pumps and the lungs transfer oxygen from the air to the blood. By contrast, brain morphology is unrevealing, presenting a gelatinous mass within which only the grossest structural elements such as the hemispheres, the major ‘lobes’ and the cerebellum, are easily discernible. Around 1800 Gall and other physiologists at last began finding some order in the chaotic folds of the cortex. Thus while the brain was understood to be the nexus of the nervous system, and accepted as the seat of consciousness, how it operated remained totally obscure. Phrenology’s account may now seem no more than a crude and arbitrary allocation of faculties to different parts of the cortex, lacking any genuine theory about its workings, but it highlighted, as R.M. Young has explained in depth, a central theoretical problem: that of empirically identifying the various psychological functions themselves.
