Event Description
What does the soul—or, more precisely, the modern, medically articulated concept of the psyche—stand for? Over the last two centuries, psychiatry and psychology, the so-called modern sciences of the soul, have sought to transform the psyche into an object of scientific knowledge. Yet the meanings and boundaries of the soul, psyche, and mind, as well as their relationship to the brain, have remained historically contingent and contested.
This talk traces the genealogy of these transformations in modern Turkey, focusing on the culturally Islamic yet radically secular context of the early Turkish Republic and its subsequent reconfigurations. It examines how Mazhar Osman (1884-1951), often called the father of modern Turkish psychiatry, sought to redefine the Islamic concept of ruh (soul) as a physiological fact and to establish psychiatry as an authoritative secular science. It then turns to his last pupil, Ayhan Songar (1926-1997), whose biological psychiatry incorporated an increasingly explicit Islamic and spiritualist vocabulary, challenging the strictly secular and materialist terms through which the psyche had earlier been defined. Following these shifting configurations into contemporary Turkey, the talk explores how psy-scientific concepts have been translated and reconfigured through changing formations of secularism and across the boundaries between the material and the immaterial, science and religion, and the normal and the pathological.
Event Speaker
Kutlughan Soyubol, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bogaziçi University
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. Registration for guests without an active Columbia University ID closes at 1 PM on November 17. Contact [email protected] or [email protected] for questions.
This event is part of the New York History of Science Lecture Series.
Sponsoring Organizations:
- Columbia University in the City of New York
- NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study
- The Graduate Center, City University of New York
- The New York Academy of Medicine
- The New York Academy of Sciences
