THE DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOPATHOLOGY: NATURE AND NURTURE

Abstract

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOPATHOLOGY: NATURE AND NURTURE By Bruce Pennington 2002. London: Taylor & Francis Books Ltd Price £34.50. pp. 380. ISBN 1‐57230‐755‐2 This is a book providing clarity on how developmental neuroscience has progressed, especially recently. It is one hundred years since Freud’s Interpretation Of Dreams was published and the important role of our unconscious processes first recognised. How excited he would have been, to read what neuroscience is now revealing about developmental psychopathology. Pennington begins his book pointing out that the twentieth century started with Freud’s comprehensive, if inadequate, theory of psychopathology, stating that what often seems irrational become rational given more understanding of a person’s early history. In contrast, the neuroscientific approach shows that some of the explanation for irrational behaviour is ‘sub‐personal’, i.e. the causes lie outside the persons individual beliefs, e.g. in Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia and ADHD. It is unusual to find an account such as this book, which integrates with such mastery the biological and psychological mechanisms involved in the recent advances in genetics, epidemiology, neurobiology, neuropsychology and neuroimaging. (The author has even dipped into primate psychology). In just 380 pages, Pennington reduces the complexity into a four‐level framework: aetiological; brain mechanisms; neuropsychology; and a surface or symptom level which addresses psychopathology as syndromal clusters of defining symptoms, for which an explanation is sought. He pays particular attention to the hazards of such categorisations. Pennington’s first chapter dealing with fallacies of diagnosis, for instance the fallacy of reification (turning an abstract notion into a concrete entity), and cautions us to note that our taxonomy still have examples of inaccurate reifications and hypotheses. We have only recently moved out of the era of ‘OGOD’, (one gene, one disorder) and other single cause hypotheses. After setting out fundamental issues facing the field, the second chapter, on …