What Aristotle can teach us about personality disorder
Dr Hanna Pickard, Wellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics Clinical Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and All Souls College gave a thought provoking lecture at the 11th Annual Conference of the British and Irish Group for the Study of Personality Disorder exploring why we should turn to Aristotle to better understand personality disorder.
We attach an article exclusively commissioned for the PD website. Dr Hanna Pickard sets the scene in this opening paragraph:
“Why turn to Aristotle to better understand personality disorder? After all, Aristotle is an ancient Greek philosopher who wrote over 2000 years ago, before the science of psychiatry and allied fields like neurobiology, experimental psychology, and psychotherapy had developed at all. He also had some strange ideas about biology: he believed the organ of thought was the heart, and that the brain functioned as a kind of refrigeration system for blood! What could we, with our more advanced science and understanding, possibly learn? In my view, the surprising fact is that we have a lot to learn. Contemporary psychiatry is plagued by a rift between neurobiological and psychotherapeutic models of the mind. If we want to advance our understanding of psychiatric disorders in general, and personality disorder in particular, we need to mend this rift. Aristotle can help us do this.”
For more information about Dr Hanna Pickard’s work please follow this link to the Faculty of Philosophy website.
[...] at Oxford called Hanna Pickard who is also a therapist at the Oxford Complex Needs Service, using Aristotle to help people with personality disorder. And there’s Derek Bolton of Kings University in London, who’s a philosopher and also a [...]