Between phrén and psyché: Gabriele Buccola and his contribution to the birth of experimental psychology in Italy.

Abstract

The institution in 1880 of a laboratory of experimental psychology in the San Lazzaro Mental Hospital of Reggio Emilia, directed by Augusto Tamburini, marks a fundamental stage for the birth of scientific psychology in Italy. It was in this laboratory that the Sicilian psychiatrist Gabriele Buccola worked, carrying out reaction-time experiments in a broad and systematic way on "sane" and mentally ill individuals. In so doing, he was following Claude Bernard's lesson--which was advocated also by Comte, Taine, and Ribot, as in Italy by Livi and Tamburini-- according to which mental functions are to be studied in both normal and pathological conditions. With these experiments, Buccola highlighted the way in which reaction time is tied to "attention," how it is altered by mental illness, and how there are various "modifiers" that influence the results. He also shows how the measurement of this "time" represents an important instrument for the differential diagnosis of several mental pathologies. Buccola's work, which is implemented in the first volume of experimental psychology written in Italy, demonstrates how psychology, which in the second half of the nineteenth century aspired to become an autonomous science, developed in Italy from the root of psychiatry, on the common ground of evolutionary positivism.