Overview: Neurobiological Systems and the Psychobiology of Enactive Intersubjectivity

Abstract

In the early part of the twentieth century, Adolph Meyer, a Swiss neurologist/psychiatrist coined the term, psychobiology, to express his view that mental illness was better studied and treated as maladaptive behavior rather than as diseases of the brain. Just as Bowlby (1969) integrated theory and research from multiple disciplines (ethology, psychoanalysis, information theory, and cognitive psychology) and developed his profoundly influential theory of attachment, Meyer’s integration of evolutionary biology, philosophy (pragmatism), and neurology transformed psychiatry, from emphasis on a disease model of mental health, to one that emphasized “subjective experience and social behavior [as] functions of human biology—causal agents, not inert side effects, in the human organism’s interaction with its environment.” (Lamb, 2015, p. 445). By emphasizing a systemic approach to the science and practice of psychiatry within the context of evolutionary biology and pragmatic philosophy, Meyer not only transformed psychiatry, but also he pre-dated the emergence of dynamic systems theory’s (Overton, 2015) and evolutionary psychology’s emphasis on adaptive phenotypes resulting from organism-environment transactions over the life course (del Guidice & Ellis, 2016). Meyer conceptualized the brain as serving the same function ascribed to it by Ammaniti and Trentini (Chap. 15); providing for the integration of the organism’s sensory and motor experience and adaptive processing. Meyer’s concept of social adaptation is inclusive of all biopsychosocial actions of the individual from a dynamic systems framework. Moreover, he emphasized that each individual constructs a unique pathway to identity development (self) and to what we refer to today as mentalization (understanding the synchrony between our thoughts and those of others) (See Lamb, 2015).