University of Sydney Lecture
“Psychiatry and the Passions”, Professor Louis Charland (University of Western Ontario)

Date: July 12, 2013
Time: 11am-1pm
Venue: Rogers Room, Woolley Buildin, University of Sydney
Enquiries: Ursula Potter: ursula.potter@sydney.edu.au
Stephen Touyz: stephen.touyz@sydney.edu.au

Once a major posit of the psychopathology of affectivity, the passions have completely vanished from Western psychiatry. Yet there was a time when the passions reigned supreme, not only in the psychopathology of affectivity, but also in psychiatry generally. Indeed, many of the great pioneers of psychiatry, figures like Philippe Pinel, Sir Alexander Crichton, and Jean-Etienne Esquirol, believed that the passions played a fundamental role in the genesis and nature of mental illness. In this presentation, we examine medical highlights of the history of passion and emotion and then consider several arguments why the passions must be reinstated in Western psychiatry. The passions, it turns out, are not only central constituents of any adequate theory of long-term motivation, but also a precious example of why it is so important to resist the reductionist pressures of our current, predominantly cognitive, psychiatric culture.

Louis Charland is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy, a joint appointment with the Faculty of Health Sciences and a cross appointment in the Department of Psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, at the University of Western Ontario. Professor Charland was previously a member of the Biomedical Ethics Unit and the Clinical Trials Research Group in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University, Montreal.