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Democritus of Abdera first put forward the theory that the brain had something to do with thought. Even today, some two thousand years later, we are still in a rudimentary stage of knowledge of the functions of the central nervous system. There are extensive accumulations of knowledge and experience of the anatomy and physiology of the brain. It is hard to say, however, what are the anatomical or physiological structures of the mind – assuming there is one – or what relation exists between the mind and the central nervous system. For example, has the sympathetic system, or the para-sympathetic system, anything to do with the mind or the personality? Is the mind (a theoretical concept) as important as the anatomical and physiological central nervous system?
As psychoanalysts we are concerned with trying to formulate why, and in what way, we think the ‘mind’ important. We assume that the vast amount of psychoanalytic literature is a product of the mind, a way of delineating the mind as a reality, as the reality that corresponds to the theory that there is such a thing as a mind or personality. One might argue that if there is a mind then it should be possible to find some event which could be regarded as the product of the mind, a result of the existence of a mind. Suppose that the psychotic person could produce some physical representation, would that representation betray the presence or the nature of that particular kind of mind? Would pictures drawn by a psychotic all betray a similarity so that if one looked at hundreds of pictures one would say, “Yes, I can put fifty, sixty, eighty of these drawings together and I think they would all of them show certain characteristics”? And if I could interpret what is the pattern of those characteristics, then I would discover that they were all the product of a certain kind of
mind. Criminologists are confident that finger prints provide a means for identification of a physical being. They can compare, apparently to their