(from the 19th to the 21st century)
/frəˈnäləjē/
noun HISTORICAL
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1.the detailed study of the shape and size of the cranium as a supposed indication of character and mental abilities.
Lorenzo Niles (L.N.) Fowler, creator of the bust on the right, was the son of New York farmers who grew up working on the farm and was educated at the district school. He later studied to become a clergyman at
Amherst Academy. By the age of sixteen he had helped to found a student temperance society. In 1834 his elder brother Orson Squire Fowler (1809-1887) became a convert to phrenology while a student at
Amherst College New York from fellow students and from reading
J.G. Spurzheim and
George Combe. Lorenzo soon followed his brother. Before long they were reading heads and offering lectures on the subject assisted by their sister Charlotte. They immediately found the new science of the mind profitable and eventually gave up on the idea of becoming clergymen. In 1836 Lorenzo set up a phrenological establishment in New York and in 1838 Orson set up a similar establishment in Philadelphia. Here in the same year they founded the
American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany which would continue until 1911. Antique collectors like Lorenzo’s mass-produced busts.
Phineas P. Gage (1823–1860) was an American railroad construction foreman remembered for his improbable
[ survival of an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left
frontal lobe, and for that injury's reported effects on his personality and behaviour over the remaining 12 years of his life—effects sufficiently profound (for a time at least) that friends saw him as
"no longer Gage."
John Martyn Harlow, his doctor, was a student of phrenology. He was also the physician who first treated Phineas, who supported him through early infection caused by his injury and who wrote detailed descriptions of him over time. Dr Harlow described Gage as follows: “Remembers passing and past events correctly, as well before as since the injury. Intellectual manifestations feeble, being exceedingly capricious and childish, but with a will as indomitable as ever; is particularly obstinate; will not yield to restraint when it conflicts with his desires.”
Dr Harlow reports that Gage’s employers, “who regarded him as the most efficient and capable foreman ... considered the change in his mind so marked that they could not give him his place again.... He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires.... A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man.... His mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was ‘no longer Gage.’”
Harlow’s explanation of the personality change was poetic: “the iron passed through the organs of Benevolence and Veneration, which left these organs without influence in his character…”
These were notions characteristic of 19th Century phrenology.
Australian professor Malcolm McMillan holds that Gage actually recovered. Did Gage become an unreported case of neuroplasticity? Did his personality reside in distinct brain areas? If so, can these areas recover? Subsequent reports of Gage's physical and mental condition shortly before his death imply that his most serious mental changes were temporary, so that in later life he was far more functional, and socially far better adapted, than in the years immediately following his accident. A social recovery hypothesis suggests that his almost 9 years of highly complex, and necessarily social endeavours as a stagecoach driver in Chile fostered this recovery by providing daily structure which allowed him to regain lost social and personal skills. Maybe he was “no longer, no longer Gage...”
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The story of Phineas Gage has been one of the most constantly told, avidly debated and roundly analyzed medical stories, with the documentation of Dr. Harlow the brilliant 19th century phrenologist, who looked for brain areas lost by Gage as clues to certain notions that the regions of the brain operate semiautonomously, and that associations between them are the determinants of behaviour and even personality. Gage’s personality was changed, while his brain functioned pretty well. Out of Harlow’s description scientists see emerging an entirety called Frontal Lobe Syndrome, McMillan’s speculations about “social recovery” resurface in the 21st century as we look for answers about how to treat PTSD.
(20th century phrenology?)
Learning has burgeoned along the way, The
triune brain is one
model of the
evolution of the vertebrate forebrain and behaviour, proposed by the American physician and neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean. MacLean originally formulated his model in the 1960s and propounded it at length in his 1990 book
The Triune Brain in Evolution. MacLean made a case for three brain regions expressing themselves quite autonomously i.e. that they were parts of differing personalities.
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• Reptilian complex, or Primal Brain (Basal Ganglia). Referred to as the monkey brain.
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•Neo-mammalian complex or Limbic System, some times called the emotional brain.
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•Neocortex - the uppermost, outermost layer of the brain - is found only in mammals, and is linked with “high-level cognitive abilities” like abstract planning, tool-making, language, and self-awareness. CLICK HERE to see the 60 second triune brain movie. MacLean went on to hypothesize that these three “complexes” not only represented three distinct stages of brain evolution, but remained three separate, semi-independent brains, “[each] with its own special intelligence, its own subjectivity, its own sense of time and space and its own memory." MacLean was saying, in other words, that each human brain contains 3 independent subjective consciousnesses. We believe that’s right. If feels like he was reading the “bumps” accurately.
Bessel van der Kolk, who likes the
Triune Brain theory (
The Body Keeps The Score page 69) writes that PTSD patients, Stan and Ute Lawrence became
“hypersensitive and irritable” when part of their prefrontal cortex (DLPDC) was knocked out by emotional, not physical trauma for years after a tragic crash on the 401 in 1999. They appeared on a
CBC David Suzuki Nature of Things documentary on PTSD. They were found with fMRI evidence to duplicate Harlow’s story of how personality is situated and seen as different in each person’s brain. See also Pages 48 and 51 below.
the three-coloured brain(lol)
(21st century phrenology?)
There have been
many theories of personality along the way, stretching back to Hippocrates time. More recently, beginning with psychoanalyst
Karen Horney in the 40-50’s saying that all children could be divided into one of
aggressives, (red) detacheds (blue) and
compliants (yellow), and more recently by neuroscientists who have concluded that different brain regions contribute to personality.
We confirmed this in the most surprising way, discovering that when we assembled groups of patients who’d fared particularly well, without having any “talk therapy.”I saw them spontaneously gather into three groups like
MacLean and
Horney had described. In a phrenology sense, it was as if their heads had different bumps from those in the next group. Each had a different way of succumbing to and getting over PTSD.
Treating people according to their colour trumps any attempt at “one size fits all.”
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My 2020 Phrenology notes: I have already, in the opening chapter (Page 4), talked about the 3 types of people whose personalities were revealed by their getting better from trauma with Dr. Michael O. Smith’s
5-point ear acupuncture. These were people, like those who, pushed to the limit, while, say,
witnessing the destruction and fall of the
World Trade Centre towers, recovered in short order, or never ended up with
PTSD.
These were the people who would have been seen either withdrawing into themselves and hiding (blues), cycling around others to make sure they were OK (yelllows) or planning to get back at whoever had commandeered this travesty (reds). That’s when
they weren’t at their best.
But at their best, in Smith’s case after
they had their ears pinned, the
BLUES “knew what to do” from moment to moment (like
Lincoln at
Gettysburg or
Churchill at
Dunkirk,) or
YELLOWS like
Mother Teresa who were able to look after her self while she looked after others, or
Jill Bolte Taylor who quite likely saved her own life by tripping over her
YELLOW aspect when she needed it. Or
Martin Luther King, a
RED who graduated from being angry at segregationists, to being a fierce advocate for compassion for them, while
RED Oprah Winfrey appears to always have had a very compassionate (and passionate ) approach to her life and the lives of others.
TYPES OF PTSD When one surveys both the professional and lay literature there are any number of estimations of how many PTSD types there are - two, three, four, five? But most of these are based on presentation, and the majority of these make Dissociative PTSD a distinct entity as does the DSM-5. There is also some difficulty in what to do with Complex-PTSD, as it does not appear concisely in DSM-5 - so there must have been some disagreement over where it fit. But it’s, in fact, the PTSD form we therapists see most often. From the photos above you’ll see that my thinking is based on personality.
So I looked for a PTSD classification based on personality, as that’s the spontaneous manifestation which was appearing to me right before my eyes. This does not account for severity, though the dissociative type has the greatest likelihood of being seen conjoined to a personality disorder. It might, for some be the hardest to treat. In my experience, it is sometimes the easiest. I found an article with a personality-
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based classification, which others in the field might argue with. All I can say is “So what?” I will reproduce it almost verbatim as it has interesting features which could interest you as either a recipient or provider.
"Identifying PTSD symptoms typologies: A latent class analysis" (published online in a Psychology Today article. Researchers found that a 4-factor model allowed for the best data fit. The subtypes were:
1. Dysphoric (23.8 percent): Intrusive thoughts; avoidance of situations and thoughts related to the trauma; negative thoughts and feelings; isolation, numbing and irritability; and difficulty with sleep and
concentration. They were more likely to be younger, and male. They were less likely to have experienced combat. They were less likely to receive
medication for PTSD. They were more likely to be diagnosed with depression, and less likely to be diagnosed with anxiety. They were more likely to use
nicotine.
( I call this type the FEELING type. They make the least use of their limbic brain, not reading well what other people mean. In the armed forces, they’re likely found in special forces. They “hunker down” under stress, reduce their feelings to occasional anger or planning to move against the stressor. Their need is to learn to take others into their lives. One way they can do this is with Power of Eight.)
2. Threat (26.1 percent): Increased re-experiencing symptoms; high self-blame and negative emotion; lower levels of loss of interest, numbing, isolation and irritability; and high levels of physiologic arousal (“hyperarousal”). They were more likely to be older, and less likely to have recent homelessness or unemployment. They were more likely to have personally experienced natural disasters, and had illnesses or injury to people close to them. They were less likely to report
childhood sexual abuse as their worst trauma, and reported better mental health. They tended to have fewer additional psychiatric diagnoses.
(I call this type SENSING THINKING because, they have the strongest defences against PTSD - naturally being drawn to other people, yet always expecting adversity and are less likely than other personalities to fall apart. Even though it is probably not the best way for them, they are hyper-vigilant when adversity hits, as they are used to being that way. Our best way “in and through” trauma for therm is by learning to meditate actively - as described by Silva Mind Control.)
3. High Symptom (33.7 percent): Elevated levels of all symptoms except trauma-related amnesia and high-risk behaviours. They were more likely to be female, less likely to be White, reported lower education and income levels, and were more likely to have recent public assistance, homelessness, and unemployment. They were more likely to report combat and childhood sexual abuse as their worst trauma, were younger when they developed PTSD and had it longer, and reported worse mental and physical health. They were more likely to have received therapy and/or medication treatment for PTSD. They had higher rates of other psychiatric conditions, including anxiety disorders,
bipolar disorder, chronic depression,
marijuana and alcohol use disorders, and
personality disorders including Borderline,
Schizotypal and Antisocial. This group most closely resembles
cPTSD. (I call this type INSTINCTUAL because their instinctual reaction to stress is to freeze, They need to establish more mature instinctual responses, usually by toning down their amygdala, in this approach emphasizing
Emotional Freedom Technique or
emWave 2.
Both induce activity.
4. Low Symptom (16.3 percent): Lower levels of all symptoms, except for intrusive thoughts, negative emotions, and hypervigilance. People in this group were more likely to have higher income levels. They were more likely to report the worst trauma to someone close to them, rather than to themselves personally, and were less likely to report personal war trauma.They tended to be older and have PTSD for a shorter time, and to have better mental and physical health. They were less likely to have received treatment with therapy and/or medications. They were less likely to have other psychiatric diagnoses, and less likely to have personality disorders.
(I see this as the mildest form or PTSD in a sensing/thinking type of person, probably requiring the least amount of treatment. Given But all of our “toys” might work as well. These folk might benefit from Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. As for Ute and Stan, I’ll come back to them in a more appropriate chapter. They’re well described in
The Body Keeps The Score.
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