Abstract
If consciousness, as Csikszentmihalyi (1978) suggests, must be understood in a holistic context, then there should be evidence in the products of consciousness of the integration of the person in his or her world that the notion of holism suggest. If contents of consciousness are to be considered an essential and critical area of study in psychology, they must have explanatory value for understanding the behavior of people at the level of human action and experience. Up until now, the study of consciousness pc se has done little to address the criticisms by behaviorism that consciousness is an epiphenomena that contributes little if anything to the control, prediction or understanding of behavior. The recent work of Mischel (1973) and Meichenbaum (1977) among others has begun to consider the role of consciousness in the form of expect-encies, values, inner speech, etc. in the behavior of people. Consciousness, then, has finally been accorded a place in the thinking of behaviorally-oriented psychologists; however, the question of meaning, which has been proposed from the psychoanalytic tradition, is left for the most part unaddressed, even by these more holistically-oriented behaviorists.
“People who have a faith or a philosophy will gain unintentional self-illumination in conjunction with their actual performance, they are led on by everything that befalls them, by ideas, by truth itself and by God. Self-reflection may serve them on the way but it is never a primary force, it only becomes effective through actual being, which in turn lays hold of its help. But once self-reflection in the form of psychological study of the self becomes the whole atmosphere in which a person lives, there is no end to it since the person’s psychic life is not yet being itself but only a place where being is envisaged. There is a dangerous tendency in psychotherapy to convert the psychic actuality of an individual into an end in itself. The person who turns his psyche into a god because he has lost both world and god finds himself standing finally in a void” (Karl Jaspers, 1964, P. 33).
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Reference notes
Mallouk, T. A survey of the self reports of couples in terms of Interpersonal conflict. Unpublished manuscript, 1979.
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Mallouk, T. (1981). Interpersonal Conflict and Mental Imagery. In: Klinger, E. (eds) Concepts, Results, and Applications. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-3974-8_24
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