Dostoevskii’s background in psychology

In Dostoevskii's time, the boundary between science and philosophy was as indistinct as it had been before Socrates, and the study of the psyche merged inseparably with that of religion, politics and all of nature. As a man of his times, Dostoevskii knew a number of psychological systems: some entered his imagery and his cultural awareness; some shaped the way he described his characters; and the struggle between two of these systems interacted with his most basic social ideas. He knew the Renaissance theory of the four humours, for example, which ascribed human character, behaviour and state of mind to the balance or imbalance of four fluids in the body: choler, phlegm, bile and black bile, which made humans choleric, phlegmatic, bilious or atrabilious, and may directly or indirectly explain why the hero's liver is referred to as diseased at the start of Notes from Underground (v, 99; Pt 1, Sec. 1). Dostoevskii had also encountered the ancient science of physiognomy, which discovered character in facial features, and Franz Joseph Gall's (1758-1828) popular theory of phrenology, which traced our character to the anatomy of the brain as reflected in protruding or sunken regions of the skull. He knew the Pythagorean and Asian theory of transmigrating souls, and Plato's theory of the tripartite soul, with reason, passion and appetite competing for control. But like most of his contemporaries, he drew his central psychological doctrines from two great traditions, both thousands of years old, but both growing directly out of eighteenth-century thinking: the tradition of the neurologists, and that of the alienists.