Juan Huarte de San Juan (1529-1588) was one of the doctors and philosophers who laid the foundations of modern psychology in Spain, an issue that significantly challenged the religious canons of the time. Among other things, he proposed that it was possible to analyze psychological differences between human beings in an experiential way.

We will see in this article a biography of Juan Huarte de San Juan , as well as some of his main contributions to the development of psychology in Spain.

Juan Huarte de San Juan: biography of the “patron” of Spanish psychology

Historical studies show that Juan Huarte was born in the Basque town of San Juan de Pie de Puerto around 1529 . His family emigrated to Andalusia, so in 1540, Juan Huarte was already in the province of Baeza.

Some time later, he studied medicine in the northeast of Madrid, in Alcalá, and then practiced the same profession in La Mancha. Later he returned to Baeza, where the first edition of his great work was published , in 1575.

Such was the impact that his work spread rapidly throughout different Spanish provinces. From Bilbao to Valencia and later on in the neighbouring towns, as it was translated into French and Italian. By 1581 it fell into the hands of the kingdoms of Portugal, where it was included in the books forbidden by the Inquisition . The same happened in the kingdoms of Spain three years later.

Juan Huarte de San Juan died around 1558. Years later, in 1594, his work was re-edited with important modifications that Huarte himself had made to avoid the prohibition of the Inquisition. Nevertheless, in Spain, this edition was printed and diffused until 1846 due to the fact that it was again abolished.

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Juan Huarte de San Juan lived more than a century ago, which is why it has been complicated to recover his complete biography. In fact, little is known about Huarte de San Juan’s life; he is mostly known for his work and for the impact it had on the development of psychology and modern science.

What Huarte de San Juan proposed in this work broke with the Christian idea of the immortal and immaterial soul that inhabited the body . Within the framework of the organicist conception of the human being, St. John defended that reason, judgment and understanding (what was understood as soul), were not of a spiritual nature, but had a physiological and biological basis that could be studied and manipulated. And for the same reason, it was not properly immortal, but could fall ill and perish.

But I wasn’t just suggesting that. His thesis also implied that understanding was the product of a particular evolutionary development, as well as education , with which, it was completely natural (not mystical or religious) to find important differences between the ingenuity of one and the other.

Huarte himself inscribed his investigations in a “natural philosophy” (which with the passage of time would become the basis of modern psychology), and positioned it in an important contrast to the metaphysicists or “vulgar philosophers”, as he called them, referring to the philosophers of the Middle Ages.

Relationship between intellect and brain

Huarte de San Juan was one of the first to argue that there was a direct relationship between understanding and the brain . Unlike his predecessors, this philosopher argued that for the intellect to develop and manifest itself, it was necessary for the body to make it possible.

The sensorial and corporal experience was what gave rise to the understanding, likewise it was what allows to differentiate the individual way of manifesting, which later would be fixed not only in the body but in a single organ (the brain).

In other words, according to Huarte, it is thanks to these differences in the particular functioning of the organs that human beings develop different forms of intellect. Thus, some organs “more” or “better” developed than others, would determine the development or the corresponding intellectual functioning .

In addition, the differences in ingenuity, for Huarte, could be manifested by three specific foundations, which he explained in the same work:

  • On the one hand, nature, referring to the physiological foundations of the human being and the faculties of each one .
  • On the other hand, art, which refers to the differences between genius and science according to their political needs.
  • Finally, the harmony of the two previous ones, represented by the king for being the highest scale of ingenuity in his terms.

Finally, in Juan Huarte de San Juan we find something similar to the distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence that would be made centuries after his death, given that differentiated between mental agility and the fruit of the application of previously acquired knowledge .

In short, for Huarte de San Juan, the intellect or understanding is the motor of the body, and nature is the principle of everything. His work represented one of the first forms of understanding the understanding from the organic activity, which impacted in an important way the beginnings of modern psychology.

Bibliographic references:

  • Bellido Mainar, JR., Sanz Valer, P., Berrueta Maeztu, LM. (2012). Juan de Huarte de San Juan: a precursor of activity analysis and occupational orientation. TOG (A Coruña) [Online]. Retrieved 18 October 2018. Available at http://www.revistatog.com/num15/pdfs/historia1.pdf.
  • Gondra, J.M. (1994). Juan Huarte de San Juan y las diferencias de inteligencia. Yearbook of Psychology. Universitat de Barcelona, 60: 13-34.
  • Velarde, J. (1993). Huarte de San Juan, patron of psychology. Psicothema, 5(2): 451-458.