Psychoneurology

PSYCHONEUROLOGY, a complex of sciences concerning human behavior. According to some authors, this concept includes the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system, neuropathology, psychiatry and mental hygiene, psychology, psychotechnics, and pedology. However, such a scope of psychoneurology provokes serious objections from numerous authors who understand psychoneurology to mean only neurology and psychiatry. Of course, the dispute here is not only about the formal scope of psychoneurology, but also about the very essence of the concept. In the first understanding, we are not talking about a mechanical bag of disparate disciplines studying various aspects of human behavior. Proponents of this concept understand psychoneurology as a certain synthesis of the indicated sciences, providing a comprehensive and complete study of the personality—both healthy and sick—at all stages of its development. However, weighty objections are raised against such an expansive interpretation. Psychoneurology in this unjustifiably broad sense inevitably leads to the biologization of a number of phenomena belonging to the social order, and to the washing out of the main and determining factor from them—class determination. The term "psychoneurology", which did not gain recognition in the West, was introduced in the USSR by Bekhterev, but the latter brought into this concept methodological errors characteristic of him, of both an idealistic and mechanistic order. The followers of Bekhterev (Zalkind and others) were unable to free psychoneurology from them. The concept of psychoneurology is also used in an organizational sense to designate research and public health institutions whose activities encompass issues of neuropathology and psychiatry. In this sense, the Psychoneurological Institute was created by Bekhterev back in the pre-war years. In the post-revolutionary years, a number of psychoneurological institutes were created, and recently in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic—the Psychoneurological Academy. Psychoneurological congresses, which brought together representatives of a number of relatively distant specialties (e.g., psychiatry and psychotechnics, neurology and criminology), proved cumbersome and have outlived their usefulness. The term "psychoneurological", used in healthcare practice, is equivalent to "neuropsychiatric". In relation to personnel, the term "psychoneurologist" is used to designate a specialist trained to provide neurological and psychiatric care.