Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T15:38:32.106Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Between Soma and Society: Neuroscience and the Ontology of Psychopathy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2009

Martyn Pickersgill
Martyn Pickersgill
Affiliation:
Institute for Science and Society, West Wing, Law and Social Sciences Building University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD UK E-mail: [email protected]
Get access

Abstract

Contemporary neuroscience links together soma and society in complex ways, casting the brain as the locus of a matrix of reciprocal interactions between soma and society. Accordingly, critiques of such research which revolve around its perceived ‘reductionism’ and ‘determinism’ are rendered somewhat problematic. That is not to say, however, that a critical sociology of neuroscience is redundant. Drawing on interviews with different kinds of neuroscientists investigating psychopathologies associated with antisocial behaviour (specifically, antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy), this article draws attention to the degree to which, by assigning roles to both ‘biology’ and ‘environment’ in the development of antisociality, neuroscience complicates the ontology of these categories, while at the same creating possibilities for the emergence of new kinds of deviancy, and legitimating social intervention in ‘risky’ children. In aligning somatic and societal narratives for the development of psychopathology, contemporary neuroscience may resist older sociological criticisms of biological reductionism, yet, in so doing, generate new claims with novel ethical and political valence.

Keywords

Antisocial Personality DisorderEthicsNeuroscienceOntologyPsychopathyReductionism
Type
Articles
Information
BioSocieties , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 45 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © London School of Economics and Political Science 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

APA (American Psychiatric Association). (1987). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, 3rd edn, revised. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.Google Scholar
Babiak, P., & Hare, R.D. (2006). Snakes in suits: When psychopaths go to work. New York: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Barnes, B., & Dupré, J. (2008). Genomes and what to make of them. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beaulieu, A. (2001). Voxels in the brain: Neuroscience, informatics and changing notions of objectivity. Social Studies of Science, 31, 635–680.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Beaulieu, A. (2002). Images are not the (only) truth: Iconoclasm, visual knowledge and experimentation in brain mapping. Science, Technology and Human Values, 21, 53–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benning, T.B. (2003). Neuroimaging psychopathy: Lessons from Lombroso. British Journal of Psychiatry, 183, 563–564.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Berrios, G.E. (1993). European view on personality disorders: A conceptual history. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 34, 14–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blair, J.R. (2003). Neurological basis of psychopathy. British Journal of Psychiatry, 182, 5–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blair, J., Mitchell, D., & Blair, K. (2005). The psychopath: Emotion and the brain. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Borck, C. (2008). Recording the brain at work: The visible, the readable, and the invisible in electroencephalography. Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 17, 367–379.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caspi, A., McClay, J., Moffitt, T.E., Mill, J., Martin, J., Craig, I.W.et al. (2002). Role of genotype in the cycle of violence of maltreated children. Science, 297, 851–854.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Canguilhem, G. (1998 [1966]). The normal and the pathological. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Cullen, J., & Cohn, S. (2006). Making sense of mediated information: Empowerment and dependency. In Webster, A. (Ed.), New technologies in health care: Challenge, change and innovation, 112–130. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Dingwall, R., Nerlich, B., & Hillyard, S. (2003). Biological determinism and symbolic interaction: Hereditary streams and cultural roads. Symbolic Interaction, 26, 631–644.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dolan, M. (1994). Psychopathy—a neurobiological perspective. British Journal of Psychiatry, 165, 151–159.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dolan, M. (2002). What neuroimaging tells us about psychopathic disorders. Hospital Medicine, 63, 337–340.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dolan, M.C. & Anderson, I.M. (2003). The relationship between serotonergic function and the psychopathy checklist: Screening version. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 17, 216–222.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dolan, M., & Park, I. (2002). The neuropsychology of antisocial personality disorder. Psychological Medicine, 32, 417–427.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dumit, J. (2004). Picturing personhood: Brain scans and biomedical identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duster, T. (2006). Comparative perspectives and competing explanations: Taking on the newly configured reductionist challenge to sociology. American Sociological Review, 71, 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eastman, N., & Starling, B. (2006). Mental disorder ethics: Theory and empirical investigation. Journal of Medical Ethics, 32, 94–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Foley, D.L., Eaves, L.J., Wormley, B., Silberg, J.L., Maes, H.H., Kuhn, J.et al. (2004). Childhood adversity, monoamine oxidase A genotype, and risk for conduct disorder. Archives of General Psychiatry, 61, 738–744.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fontaine, N., & Viding, E. (2008). Genetics of personality disorder. Psychiatry, 7(3), 137–141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilber, G.N., & Mulkay, M. (1984). Opening Pandora's Box: A sociological analysis of scientists' discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.Google Scholar
Hacking, I. (2002) Historical ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.Google Scholar
Hagner, M., & Borck, C. (2001). Mindful practices: On the neurosciences in the twentieth century. Science in Context, 14, 507–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hedgecoe, A. (2001). Schizophrenia and the narrative of enlightened geneticisation. Social Studies of Science, 31, 875–911.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jansy, B.R., Kelner, K.L., & Pennisi, E. (2008). From genes to social behaviour. Science, 322(5903), 891.Google Scholar
Joyce, K.A. (2008) Magnetic appeal: MRI and the myth of transparency. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP.Google Scholar
Kendler, K.S. (2005). ‘A gene for…’: The nature of gene action in psychiatric disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry, 162, 1243–1252.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kiehl, K.A. (2006). A cognitive neuroscience perspective on psychopathy: Evidence for paralimbic system dysfunction. Psychiatry Research, 142(2–3), 107–128.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.Google Scholar
Lewis, B. (2006). Moving beyond Prozac, DSM, and the new psychiatry: The birth of postpsychiatry. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manning, N. (2002). Actor networks, policy networks, and personality disorder. Sociology of Health and Illness, 24, 644–666.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mol, A. (2002). The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Durham, NC: Duke UP.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Payne, G., & Williams, M. (2005). Generalization in qualitative research. Sociology, 39, 295–314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pickersgill, M.D. (forthcoming). From psyche to soma? Changing accounts of antisocial personality disorders in the American Journal of Psychiatry. History of Psychiatry.Google Scholar
Pilgrim, D. (2007). New ‘mental health’ legislation for England and Wales: Some aspects of consensus and conflict. Journal of Social Policy, 36, 79–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinch, T., & Bijker, W.E. (1984). The social construction of facts and artefacts: Or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. Social Studies of Science, 14, 399–441.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rafter, N.H. (1997). Creating born criminals. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Raine, A., Lencz, T., Bihrle, S., Lacasse, L., & Colletti, P. (2000). Reduced prefrontal gray matter volume and reduced autonomic activity in antisocial personality disorder. Archives of General Psychiatry, 57(2), 119–127.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Reid, W.H. (2001). Antisocial personality, psychopathy, and forensic psychiatry. Journal of Psychiatric Practice, 7, 55–58.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Richards, D. (1996). Elite interviewing: approaches and pitfalls. Politics, 16(3), 199–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, N. (1998). Governing risky individuals: The role of psychiatry in new regimes of control. Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, 5(2), 177–196.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, N. (2007). The politics of life itself: Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenberg, C.E. (1992). Framing disease: Illness, society, and history. In Rosenberg, C.E. and Golden, J. (Eds), Framing disease: Studies in cultural history, xii–xxvi. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rosenberg, C.E. (2007). Our present complaint: American medicine, then and now. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shostak, S. (2003). Locating gene–environment interaction: At the intersections of genetics and public health. Social Science & Medicine, 56, 2327–2342.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Soderstrom, H., Blennow, K., Manhem, A., & Forsman, A. (2001). CSF studies in violent offenders: I. 5-HIAA as a negative and HVA as a positive predictor of psychopathy. Journal of Neural Transmission, 108, 869–878.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Timmermans, S., & Berg, M. (2003). The gold standard: The challenge of evidence-based medicine and standardization in health care. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP.Google Scholar
Turner, R. (2001). Culture and the human brain. Anthropology and Humanism, 26(2), 167–172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Viding, E., & Jones, A. (2008). Cognition to genes via the brain in the study of conduct disorder. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61, 171–181.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Volkow, N.D., & Tancredi, L. (1987). Neural substrates of violent behaviour: A preliminary study with Positron Emission Tomography. British Journal of Psychiatry, 151, 668–673.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Werlinder, H. (1978). Psychopathy: A history of the concepts—analysis of the origin and development of a family of concepts in psychopathology. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International.Google Scholar