Clinico Anatomical Method

the brain stem hypothesis would be falsified by clinicoanatomical methods if it could be demonstrated unequivocally that dreaming is eliminated by forebrain lesions that completely spare the brain stem.

Solms positions the clinico-anatomical method as the decisive instrument for falsifying the brainstem-REM hypothesis, arguing that forebrain lesion data can refute the dominant activation-synthesis model of dreaming.

Solms, Mark, Dreaming and REM Sleep Are Controlled by Different Brain Mechanisms, 2000thesis

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I shall entirely disregard the fact that the mental apparatus with which we are here concerned is also known to us in the form of an anatomical preparation, and I shall carefully avoid the temptation to determine psychical locality in any anatomical fashion.

Freud explicitly renounces the clinico-anatomical method as a basis for psychical topography, substituting functional-psychological locality for anatomical localization — a founding epistemological gesture of psychoanalysis.

Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900thesis

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the localization or the place of this insensibility. Charcot used to say that in hysteric paralyses anesthesia takes the form of geometric segments, meaning that it is terminated by distinct, regular lines assuming definite forms which can be foreseen.

Janet, invoking Charcot, demonstrates the diagnostic logic of the clinico-anatomical tradition by showing that the geometric patterning of hysterical anesthesias distinguishes psychogenic from organically lesioned presentations.

Janet, Pierre, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, 1907supporting

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this ensemble of signs is absolutely characteristic, and it is possible to recognize a hysteric hemiplegy solely through this objective examination which requires nothing of the patient’s psychological observation.

Janet critically evaluates the Babinski-era claim that objective, anatomy-referencing signs alone suffice for differential diagnosis of hysterical paralysis, acknowledging the method’s theoretical appeal while noting its practical limitations.

Janet, Pierre, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, 1907supporting

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Medicine in general has to deal, in the first place, with man as an anatomical and physiological phenomenon, and only to a lesser degree with the human being psychically defined. But this precisely is the subject of psychotherapy.

Jung demarcates psychotherapy’s domain against anatomical medicine, implicitly subordinating the clinico-anatomical method to a different, psychically defined epistemology.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects, 1954supporting

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the tic and the choreic movement are much more intellectual phenomena than they appear to be. We notice many mental phenomena at their beginning exactly as at the beginning of somnambulisms.

Janet applies differential clinical observation to distinguish hysterical from organic movement disorders, foregrounding the psychic substrate that the purely anatomical method fails to capture.

Janet, Pierre, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, 1907supporting

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There is a possible anatomical analogy to what I believe to be the course of development of the infantile sexual function in Bayer’s discovery (1902) that the internal sexual organs (i.e. the uterus) are as a rule larger in new-born children than in older ones.

Freud cautiously cites anatomical embryology as a partial analogy for his developmental theory of infantile sexuality, illustrating the qualified, supplementary role he assigns to anatomical evidence.

Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905aside

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We have no laboratory equipped with elaborate apparatus. Our laboratory is the world. Our tests are concerned with the actual, day-to-day happenings of human life.

Jung articulates depth psychology’s methodological self-distinction from laboratory and anatomical science, positioning lived experience as the proper evidential terrain.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Development of Personality, 1954aside

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