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Nature, niche and nurture: the role of social experience in trasforming genotype into phenotype1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2011

Leon Eisenberg
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Summary

Nature and nurture stand in reciprocity, not opposition. Offspring inherit, along with their parents' genes, their parents, their peers, and the places they inhabit. The ontogenetic niche is a crucial link between parents and offspring, an envelope of life chances. Development is at one and the same time a social and a psychological and a biological process. If we psychiatrists allow ourselves to become mere pill pushers — or psychotherapists who fit all patients into one Procrustean bed — each as the exclusive road to mental health, we will have abandoned the duty we owe our patients and our integrity as physicians.

Riassunto

Nature e nurture (genetica ed ambiente) hanno rapporti di reciprocità, non di opposizione. La prole eredita dai genitori, insieme ai geni, i genitori stessi, gli amici, i luoghi dove vivere. La nicchia ontogenica rappresenta un collegamento cruciale tra genitori e figli, un contenitore delle opportunità della vita. Lo sviluppo è allo stesso tempo un processo sociale, psicologico e biologico. Se, come psichiatri, accettassimo di essere solo distributori di pillole, oppure psicoterapeuti che mettono tutti i loro pazienti su di un letto di Procuste, ciascuno ritenendo di seguire l'unica strada che porta alia salute mentale, verremmo meno ai doveri che abbiamo verso i nostri pazienti e perderemmo la nostra integrita di medici.

Keywords

psychiatric geneticsenvironmentgenetica psichiatricaambiente
Type
Invited Paper
Information
Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , September 1999 , pp. 190 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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Footnotes

1

This paper has been previously published in Academic Psychiatry (22: 213-222, 1998). Reproduced in Epidemiologia e Psichiatria Sociale with permission given to Professor L. Eisenberg by the Publisher

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