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HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Evolutionary Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1570049
The Modular Mind and Psychiatry: Toward Clinical Integration with a Focus on Self-Disorders
Provisionally accepted
Gheorghe Ilie*
Adrian Jaeggi- Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland
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One of the foundational tenets of evolutionary psychology, the modular view of the mind, offers promising applications for clinical psychiatry. This perspective conceptualizes the mind as a collection of specialized information-processing modules, shaped by natural selection to address adaptive challenges faced by our ancestors. In this paper, we propose several points of integration between the modularity framework and clinical psychiatric practice. First, we argue that the descriptive psychopathology of self-disorders provides evidence supporting the modular view, demonstrating how a dysfunctional minimal self may expose the mind's modular architecture to conscious awareness. Next, we will explore how the modular perspective can illuminate the nature of intrapsychic conflicts. Finally, we will discuss how evidence from neuropsychiatric syndromes supports the modular view of the mind and, in turn, how this perspective can provide a basis for classifying mental disorders.
Keywords: cognitive modularity1, psychiatry2, self-disorders3, enzymatic computation4, information encapsulation5, modular conflict6, classification of mental disorders7, evolutionary psychology8 functional specialized regions
Received: 02 Feb 2025; Accepted: 07 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ilie and Jaeggi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Gheorghe Ilie, Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland
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