What was “Biological” about the “Biological Revolution” in Psychiatry?

This paper draws from interviews with psychiatrists and psychologists in the UK and USA who began research projects in the late 1970s and 1980s which re-centred clinical research on biological validators for psychiatric illnesses. The key historical bifurcation traced here is the divergence in experimental
cultures between earlier attempts by psychiatrists to performatively realize the brain through electromechanical models (Ashby, Walter et al) and the experimental neurobiology which focussed on in vivo attempts to unlock brain function. The experimental culture of the latter proved politically useful for the psychiatrists of the 1980s in using an in vivo experimental design which supported a reductive biological realism. I argue here that attention to the different experimental cultures is an effective way to understand how the meaning of the biological in psychiatry was transformed in this period. By also looking at how the theories associated with these experimental cultures were popularized in “brain books”, these constellations of concepts and theories will be contextualised in their political and social context. Overall, the “biological revolution” will be assessed as a moment in the shifting identity of the late-modern psychiatrist, and as part of a longer historical attempt to construct a ‘biology of mind’.

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