“My brain needs to be fixed.” My prospective client looked down, then up, to search my eyes.
The statement is deceptive in its simplicity. I feel an involuntary retreat from almost all the multiple layers of meaning I can fathom for the utterance. I don’t think my client’s neuro-chemical functioning is the cause of his pain. I think I can help him more effectively if we explore his mind.
Back in the day, there was body, and there was mind. Medical practitioners treated bodies. Therapists and analysts treated minds. Every binary hides a hierarchy: the people who treated bodies were highly respected. Those who treated minds were considered, well, a little off.
Then people started realizing how much mental and physical functioning affected each other. They can’t be completely separate. The obvious solution (that preserved the hierarchy) was that mind must be an epiphenomenon of brain. Somehow, matter (brain) behaves in a way that creates a non-material phenomenon (mind). The battle cry became “mental illness is disease of the brain.” If you believe that mental illness is a disease of the brain, the way to fix it is to alter the brain. Chemically, surgically, magnetically, whatever. Talk therapy in this scenario is a poor substitute for direct neuro-chemical intervention, and one glorious day we will remember psychotherapy as a treatment analogous to applying leeches.
Except...logic dictates that the effect cannot impact the cause. The effect cannot precede the cause. So, if mind is caused by body, then mind cannot, logically, affect the body; a change in mind cannot precede a change in the body. And yet we know that it does. So maybe mind exists separately from the body after all? But if they’re separate, we’re still left with the problem of how two completely separate things can interact with and affect each other, as we know mind and body do.
As an ontological position (a statement concerning the nature of reality) offered by some philosophers of mind, Dual Aspect Monism offers a simple solution. The position is that there is a single reality that has two equal and irreducible aspects: mind and matter. Prior to the development of Dual Aspect Monism, there were basically three competing views concerning what is real. The dominant view today is Material Monism. From this perspective, reality is believed to be that which has physical properties. If you can’t measure it, it isn’t real. From this perspective, mind is the product of physical (neuro-chemical) activity. Idealistic Monism is the view that what is real is mind, and that matter is an illusion generated by mind. The third ontology is Dualism, which posits that mind and matter are both real, but they are completely separate realities. If they are completely separate realities, it’s hard to imagine why changes in one covaries with changes in the other.
According to Dual Aspect Monists, there is a single reality that is both physical and mental. Neither of these aspects is derived from or reducible to the other. These aspects are like two sides of a coin: you can’t make the head side of the coin square without altering the structure of the tail of the coin. But this does not mean that the change in the head caused the change in the tail. It is the change in the coin that changes both the head and the tail. When we use this analogy to understand humans, we see that some changes are more easily accomplished if we focus on body (I would not suggest that we focus primarily on mind to treat cancer), others may be more malleable by focusing on mind (I would not want to give a client a drug to help them develop a more fulfilling sense of self).
The implications are profound for psychotherapy: if mind is real and irreducible, we can legitimately aim our interventions directly at mind. We can use our minds to help clients change their minds. That means that our minds are the mutative factor in therapy. More precisely, the connection between our mind and the client’s is the mutative factor in therapy.
This means that some of the most profound changes our clients experience are changes in qualia (purely subjective experiences), and hence difficult to put into words, let alone observe from some outside objective position. It means that we know when our clients are improving because our minds are working together, and when their minds change, ours does too, a little bit. It means that what I do/say next is completely dependent on what my client and I are experiencing in the connection, not on some pre-determined protocol. That, in turn, means that my mind must remain attuned to the connection between our minds, not busy trying to problem solve, predict, or control the direction of the process.
We are psychotherapists. Many of us entered this field because the human mind is fascinating to us. Some of us have felt that the understanding of what we do has been slowly eroded as mind has become more and more devalued as an epiphenomenon of body. We always knew the two were connected (Freud was, after all, a neurologist). But many of us also know that what we do is not best captured by purely physical descriptions, or best understood using methods designed to understand the physical world. For us, dual aspect monism offers a way of understanding the world that explains what we do.
“Can you tell me what it feels like for your brain to be the way it is?” I try to join my client’s quale. By seeking to do so my mind reaches out, searching for, inviting a connection that can lead to change.
File under: The Art of Psychotherapy, Musings and Reflections
The statement is deceptive in its simplicity. I feel an involuntary retreat from almost all the multiple layers of meaning I can fathom for the utterance. I don’t think my client’s neuro-chemical functioning is the cause of his pain. I think I can help him more effectively if we explore his mind.
Back in the day, there was body, and there was mind. Medical practitioners treated bodies. Therapists and analysts treated minds. Every binary hides a hierarchy: the people who treated bodies were highly respected. Those who treated minds were considered, well, a little off.
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Then people started realizing how much mental and physical functioning affected each other. They can’t be completely separate. The obvious solution (that preserved the hierarchy) was that mind must be an epiphenomenon of brain. Somehow, matter (brain) behaves in a way that creates a non-material phenomenon (mind). The battle cry became “mental illness is disease of the brain.” If you believe that mental illness is a disease of the brain, the way to fix it is to alter the brain. Chemically, surgically, magnetically, whatever. Talk therapy in this scenario is a poor substitute for direct neuro-chemical intervention, and one glorious day we will remember psychotherapy as a treatment analogous to applying leeches.
Except...logic dictates that the effect cannot impact the cause. The effect cannot precede the cause. So, if mind is caused by body, then mind cannot, logically, affect the body; a change in mind cannot precede a change in the body. And yet we know that it does. So maybe mind exists separately from the body after all? But if they’re separate, we’re still left with the problem of how two completely separate things can interact with and affect each other, as we know mind and body do.
As an ontological position (a statement concerning the nature of reality) offered by some philosophers of mind, Dual Aspect Monism offers a simple solution. The position is that there is a single reality that has two equal and irreducible aspects: mind and matter. Prior to the development of Dual Aspect Monism, there were basically three competing views concerning what is real. The dominant view today is Material Monism. From this perspective, reality is believed to be that which has physical properties. If you can’t measure it, it isn’t real. From this perspective, mind is the product of physical (neuro-chemical) activity. Idealistic Monism is the view that what is real is mind, and that matter is an illusion generated by mind. The third ontology is Dualism, which posits that mind and matter are both real, but they are completely separate realities. If they are completely separate realities, it’s hard to imagine why changes in one covaries with changes in the other.
According to Dual Aspect Monists, there is a single reality that is both physical and mental. Neither of these aspects is derived from or reducible to the other. These aspects are like two sides of a coin: you can’t make the head side of the coin square without altering the structure of the tail of the coin. But this does not mean that the change in the head caused the change in the tail. It is the change in the coin that changes both the head and the tail. When we use this analogy to understand humans, we see that some changes are more easily accomplished if we focus on body (I would not suggest that we focus primarily on mind to treat cancer), others may be more malleable by focusing on mind (I would not want to give a client a drug to help them develop a more fulfilling sense of self).
The implications are profound for psychotherapy: if mind is real and irreducible, we can legitimately aim our interventions directly at mind. We can use our minds to help clients change their minds. That means that our minds are the mutative factor in therapy. More precisely, the connection between our mind and the client’s is the mutative factor in therapy.
This means that some of the most profound changes our clients experience are changes in qualia (purely subjective experiences), and hence difficult to put into words, let alone observe from some outside objective position. It means that we know when our clients are improving because our minds are working together, and when their minds change, ours does too, a little bit. It means that what I do/say next is completely dependent on what my client and I are experiencing in the connection, not on some pre-determined protocol. That, in turn, means that my mind must remain attuned to the connection between our minds, not busy trying to problem solve, predict, or control the direction of the process.
We are psychotherapists. Many of us entered this field because the human mind is fascinating to us. Some of us have felt that the understanding of what we do has been slowly eroded as mind has become more and more devalued as an epiphenomenon of body. We always knew the two were connected (Freud was, after all, a neurologist). But many of us also know that what we do is not best captured by purely physical descriptions, or best understood using methods designed to understand the physical world. For us, dual aspect monism offers a way of understanding the world that explains what we do.
“Can you tell me what it feels like for your brain to be the way it is?” I try to join my client’s quale. By seeking to do so my mind reaches out, searching for, inviting a connection that can lead to change.
File under: The Art of Psychotherapy, Musings and Reflections