José Juan Bruner (1825-1899): una estrella fugaz en la historia de la psiquiatría chilena / The contribution of Jose Juan Bruner to Chilean psychiatry

ABSTRACT

The contribution of Dr. Bruner to psychology and psychiatry is largely unknown. This is a summary of the ideas proposed in his "Medical-Psychological Monograph" from 1857, that was written after a case of a possibly possessed woman from Santiago. In this work Dr. Bruner discards the spirit-brain duality, proposes a functional morphology of the brain, recognizes the importance of remote history taking when interviewing patients, proposes a theory for self-formation and the risks of self-fragmentation. He proposes that the case of the woman corresponds to a brain disease, opposing the thought of an ovarian and uterine origin. He proposes a hypothesis of the psychogenic origin of the disease, the importance of what happened during dreams and beyond the conscience of the patient. Many of his ideas preceded by decades those of Charcot and Freud, but they have not had a proper recognition.