‘Between the sciences: locating the object of psychosomatic medicine’ Michelle Jamieson (Macquarie University) Psychosomatic medicine was an interdisciplinary medical field established in the late 1930s in response to growing dissatisfaction with the Cartesianism assumed in both conventional medicine and psychiatry. Seeking a method that could address the many health conditions that fell outside the scope of any particular specialisation, advocates of psychosomatic medicine were doctors, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who insisted on studying and treating the organism as a whole. This movement was championed by Helen Flanders Dunbar – an enigmatic psychiatrist and philosopher who insisted that the success of medicine rested on its ability to take account of the entanglement of mind and body in illness. This paper examines Dunbar’s struggle to locate and define the object of study in psychosomatic medicine: namely, mind-body interrelation. I suggest that she was burdened with the seemingly impossible task of creating a scientific discipline that would challenge and overcome the problem of disciplinarity, or specialisation, itself. What is an object of study without a stable frame of reference? How did psychosomatic practitioners negotiate the different, competing knowledges and technologies of medicine, psychiatry and other areas? Drawing on the work of prominent New Materialist scholars Elizabeth Wilson and Karen Barad, this paper critically elaborates the philosophical and empirical implications of Dunbar’s project for thinking about the nature of objectivity, and the politicalethical entanglement of ‘what’ and ‘how’ we know.
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Michelle Jamieson holds a PhD in sociology and lectures in the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University, Sydney. Moving between sociology, feminist science studies and the medical humanities, her research critically engages the assumed division between sociality and biology, especially in relation to illness and medicine. She recently completed a major project about allergy and the politics of immunological discourse. She is the author of ‘The Politics of Immunity: Reading Cohen through Canguilhem and New Materialism’ (2015) Body and Society, and ‘Imagining Reactivity: Allergy Within the History of Immunology’ (2010) Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. She is currently co-editing a special issue of the philosophy journal Parallax on the theme of ‘autoimmunities’.
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