Psychology at the Crossroads

Abstract

Indeed, every student in the western tradition “knows” that there are at least two aspects to the “beingness” of being human — the body and the mind. And every student knows that often a third part, the ineffable soul which somehow lives beyond the individual’s lifespan, is axio-logically differentiated from these two (as a topic of conjecture, faith, or metaphysical experience), René Descartes’ version of this dualism, which had antecedents in pre-Aristotelian and Avicennian philosophies, merely formalized the prevailing wisdom of the early seventeenth century, its influence persisted through the twentieth century and continues today (although the burgeoning dispute over its tenets makes this persistence increasingly shaky). The body, res externa, operates as a machine having the material properties of spatial extension and motion that obey the laws of physics. By contrast, the mind, res cogitans, has neither extension nor motion and is not ruled by physical laws. In this cosmology, there is a mind-body connection, but its operation remains enigmatic. Thoughts are structured by time, but do not occupy space. Thus, there is an absolute, but problematic, divide between the immaterial mind (housed somehow in the cortex) and the material body. The mind controls the body — at least as best it can — but how it does so remains quite obscure, even to the most dogmatic Cartesian.

Somatic psychology? Isn’t that an oxymoron? A contradiction in terms? After all, ‘soma’ refers to the body, the material aspect of being human, and ‘psyche’ refers to the soul or the mind, the non-material aspect of our thoughts, feelings, willpower, or spirit, which seems to be housed in the brain but that isn’t wholly reducible to the stuff of neurons ... soma and psyche are two different sorts of being. Every undergraduate since Descartes knows that!