Advances in neuroscience can eventually lead to psychiatry losing its relevance, said renowned scientist V.S. Ramachandran, who is the director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego.
Delivering the ninth R.P. Ranga Endowment Lecture at Loyola College, his alma mater, on Thursday, he said majority of the Freudian theories, however ingenious, were already being disproved by developments in neuroscience.
Dr. Ramachandran explained that his approach was to study people with anomalous conditions in their brains to throw light on how the brain normally functioned. He said that many patients with rare symptoms were often referred to his centre.
“We mainly have three objectives — first, to try and identify what is causing the behaviour; then to see what this finding can tell us about the functioning of the brain; and finally, what we can do to reduce the pain or the discomfort the patient faces,” he said. He cited the example of Capgras syndrome, in which a patient can recognise the face of a close one, but will believe the person is an identical-looking impostor.
Highlighting that Freudian analysis could give strange explanations for this, he explained how neuroscience showed it to be a case of a disconnection caused by an injury in the brain.
