ONTOLOGY PART 1: THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM (OR, WHY DO I STILL FEEL LIKE UTTER SHIT ALL THE TIME DESPITE ALL THE POSITIVE THINKING I AM DOING?)
C.W. References to mental health difficulties.
N.B. I am hoping this will be the first of a 3-part blog series on the ontological foundations of Western psychology (i.e. what psychology assumes about the nature of reality). Here I am less interested in repackaging what Ed Psych doctorate courses often present (a spectrum between positivist ‘realism’ and social constructionist ‘relativism’, with critical realism plonked somewhere in the middle) and more interested in questioning the ways Western psychology often disconnects subjectivity from the world in which subjectivity arises. My hope for this project is to convincingly make the case for subjectivity to be understood as fundamentally embodied, social, and reattached back up to the world we all live in. I will argue throughout this 3-part blog for the importance of a ‘social-materialist’ ontology as the foundation to any psychological practice concerned with social justice.
Part 1 will be on the Mind-Body Problem.
Part 2 will consider the ways in which our subjectivities are socially constituted.
Part 3 will outline a systemic understanding of ontology, aiming to demonstrate the ways in which history, economics, politics, and social structures (like the school, the courts etc) shape our subjectivities.
P.S. For maximum impact give this a listen whilst reading 🤩
HAVE YOU EVER JUST CONSIDERED BEING HAPPIER?
My mother was a sociology teacher. Her role, broadly defined, was to support young people to understand the social systems that govern our lives. Back in the 70s and 80s sociology was one of the dominant theoretical viewpoints with which we understood our world and our lives within that world. That world is long gone, and that dominant theoretical perspective has been replaced by psychology and its attempts to understand the self as an individual.
This perspective requires you to work on yourself! Have grit! Think positively! Self-actualise! As the alien impersonating Bill Clinton states in the Simpsons: “we must go forward, not backward. Upward, not downward. And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!”
So this is what we do. Jordan Peterson tells us think about who we were yesterday not who someone else is today, and so we do. Carol Dweck tells us to have a growth-mindset, we have a growth mindset. Angela Lee Duckworth says we need gritty determination and a positive mindset, so we grit our teeth and think positively. None of this is new. Norman Peale was telling us about the ‘Power of Positive Thinking’ back in 1952.
My profession peddles in this narrative all the time with concepts like ‘positive psychology’ which focuses disproportionately on identifying the ‘good’ in our lives (regardless of how ‘good’ our lives actually are). Indeed psychology as a profession has expanded exponentially in the West since the 1970s on a foundation of messages such as these, selling itself as a way to make people happier through strategies we can practice in our daily lives. And yet, despite all our positive reframing (i.e. telling a more bright and sunny story about a problem-situation) and gratitude exercises (…puke) the Western societies we live in are in the midst of a worsening mental health crisis and, bluntly put…everyone feels like shit all the time.
Why might this be? Well, I’m glad you asked. This first post in a three-post-series on the ontological foundations of psychology will attempt to address this problem by looking at the mind-body problem, which essentially asks the question ‘what is the relationship between our minds and our bodies?’
(N.B. I will be side-stepping the knotty but linked problematic of ‘how does our consciousness come to be?’ Mainly because this is understood as ‘the hard problem’ that philosophers haven’t been able to answer…so I certainly won’t be able to. This post will focus more on how body and mind interact. For anyone interested in exploring ‘the hard problem’ I recommend this new article by China Miéville - Beyond Folk Marxism: Mind, Metaphysics and Spooky Materialism - Salvage)
THE PARLIAMENT-FUNKADIALECTIC
Ok, so this is some quite heavy philosophical stuff…but I promise it’s worth it, and I’ll try and make it accessible and practical and so on. But I also need to amuse myself as well so I’m going to use a framing device I am calling The Parliament-Funkadialectic.
Parliament-Funkadelic, for anyone who doesn’t already know, were a legendary American funk collective (comprised of two bands, Parliament and Funkadelic) formed by the equally legendary George Clinton in the 1960s. As a teenager growing up in a parochial West-Midlands town, the eccentric, reverb-soaked and often joyful sounds of George Clinton’s musical projects significantly expanded my somewhat closed-off consciousness. Funkadelic, with their tendency towards funk-infused rock music, acted as a gateway drug enabling me to expand my musical lexicon from the hard-rock and metal genres the West Midlands is known for, towards more experimental music.
Of all Funkadelic’s records, the one that most fascinated me was their second record. A bizarre psychedelic masterpiece called Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow. ‘Sounds cool,’ thought teenage Sean… ‘I’d like to free my mind and my ass…neither feel all that free in Stafford in 2003. If only I could think differently, maybe I could feel better in my body’.
FREE YOUR MIND AND YOUR ASS WILL FOLLOW
I associate Western Psychology with an ontology based on this initial reading of Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow. Its prime target is the mind as separate from the body. Thinking differently is the target (free your mind), feeling an embodied sense of betterness is the hoped for result (and your ass will follow).
In Western philosophy, this separation of mind and body was popularised in the philosophy of Renee Descartes, a 17th century thinker whose substance dualism argued that the world consists of two separate substances. The first – mind (or soul), an immaterial substance closer to God, able to think, reflect and vitally *make interventions in the world of matter*. The second – matter (bodies, trees, objects etc.) which works mechanistically according to laws unless mind or soul makes an intervention. In Descartes world only humans consist of both of these separate substances (which supposedly interact with each other through the pineal gland in the brain). Animals, for example, are only understood as matter, working to pre-determined rules.
Criticise me all you like fellow psychologists, but I will maintain that the two dominant paradigms in our profession (as practiced in the real world) remain behaviourism and cognitive psychology. Both behaviourism and cognitive psychology have their ontological foundations in a secularised form of cartesian dualism. In behaviourism we have the ‘black box’ of the mind, unknowable and unobservable and therefore ignored. Then, during the cognitive revolution of the 1950s this black box is revealed not to be soul…but a computer! (or at least the mind as a metaphorical computer).
Either way, the mind here remains separate from the material world and the object. In an approach such as cognitive-behavioural therapy, which brings together aspects of behaviourism and cognitive psychology and is still the most popular form of therapeutic intervention in the West), is to ‘correct’ the mind so that it can intervene in ways that make the body feel better. It’s not to say there’s no connection between mind and body (with Descartes the connection was via the pineal gland, with cognitive psychology it is the inputs and outputs of the computer interface), however mind and matter remain separate in this understanding. We target the mind, so it is better able to make intervention in the material world. If only we could free our mind, our ass would follow!
Only CBT has been shown to be ineffective when compared to other forms of therapy and has been critiqued as something that acts more as a short-term fix rather than something that actually makes people happier in the long term. I would argue that its popularity is less to do with its effectiveness, and more to do with economic efficiencies such as the speed at which you can train someone up to deliver CBT, the time it takes to deliver, and the way it works to push people back into employment.
The practice of educational psychology is also based on a similar separation of mind and body that emphasises the mind as the primary site of change. We *still* use IQ testing to measure cognition as if it is separate from the mind. We *still* use personal construct psychology tools to gather views and perceptions as if they are what is going to drive the change we need to see in bodies within a system. We still focus on discursive and mental change within consultation to drive material change in bodily behaviour. We do all this with little to no evidence of its effectiveness.
Only maybe we’ve got it all wrong. I’ll return to my initial question: Why do I still feel like utter shit all the time despite all the positive thinking I am doing?
I, for one, struggle to change the way my body feels by thinking happy thoughts. Even when I am aware that the thoughts I am thinking are distorted or counterproductive, I’m not sure such a recognition helps much. What about the thoughts that seem perfectly reasonable to have and accurately reflect current events but weigh down on me painfully (I miss my Dad, the far-right are on the march, Israel have started immediately attacking Gaza again after a cease-fire was called)?
I think its revealing that ‘toxic positivity’ as a concept has become part of our popular understandings over recent years. Maybe as a society we’ve finally seen through the concept of ‘positive thinking’, and we are moving towards new ideas about how to make ourselves happier. But what is emerging in its place?
FREE YOUR ASS AND YOUR MIND WILL FOLLOW
A cursory glance through the brain-melting platform that is Linked-In provides me with a wealth of posts that warn us of the dangers of burnout. They proclaim that self-care ‘isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity’ (often without acknowledging the material conditions needed to care for oneself). Elsewhere, we see Doctors prescribing exercise for something they have termed ‘shit life syndrome’ (a recently developed term to describe the psycho-physiological effects produced by immiserated living conditions)
What’s happened here is that the Funkadelic song has been turned on its head. We are now being told if we free our asses, our mind will follow! Go for a run, take a holiday, treat yourself to a duvet day, stop drinking, eat healthily, make time for friends etc. etc. The separation between mind and body seems to have been maintained, but the priorities have been reversed. And you know what, from lived experience, I’m far more sympathetic to this position. Running is one of the few activities over the years that has helped me with my anxiety levels. Moving my body into a space where other bodies are present (i.e. socialising) helps me to ‘get out of my head’ and into the world, often making me feel better. Maybe positive thinking isn’t the way forward but positive doing?
Furthermore, this funky inversion whereby we ‘free our ass and our mind will follow’ allows us to bring bodies into the equation. And when we bring bodies into the equation, we have to acknowledge that bodies live in the world, with other bodies. And from here we have to acknowledge that what we are allowed to do with our bodies in the world is governed by rules dictated by economics, politics and power. Thus, any psychological practice which starts from this ontological position must eschew any form of apolitical or non-social practice (more on this in parts 2 and 3 of this blog series).
However, whilst I think this reversed position is more of a productive ontological starting point, it’s not without its problems. Primarily because it maintains some form of separation between mind and body. Within this formulation, my mind is at the whim of my body. I can’t think good unless my body is functioning correctly. What does this mean for our intentionality? Our free will? This formulation might be able to account for the fact that going for a run made me feel better. But how did I force myself to go out for a run on a cold, rainy day in late October in the first place? Having overplayed our mental agency at first, do we run the risk of underplaying it too much here?
For sure, I think ‘mental health problems’ is a poor phrase for the subjective experience of negative affect. For me it’s a full body thing. I feel anxiety in my gut, in my arms and legs, in my chest. But I also simultaneously feel it in my consciousness. This may be as a fleeting thought (that room, the smell of death). But it may equally be a conscious reflection that cannot be inscribed into language. It’s a discomfort that is ineffable in both the conscious and the body. At times it peaks in a crescendo of excess whereby everything just breaks down. At these times of intense panic, the lack of separation between mind and body impresses itself upon me. I cannot think, my body does not work, there is no separation between thought and feeling, the excess floods my entire being.
THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS WITHIN
And so we get to the resolution of our dialectic. We overcome it by acknowledging the ultimate truth. The big reveal: Funkadelic recorded the entirety of ‘Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow’ tripping on LSD.
When LSD is ingested, it is taken into the bloodstream, travelling round the body. It floods our organs, liver and brain alike. It does not discriminate. It changes the composition of the gut’s microbiota; affects the way our brain responds to serotonin and even changes the way the gut and the brain communicate with each other. Experientially, the body feels an overwhelming sense of interconnectedness. Euphoria, hallucinations, emotions, memories. Can any of these be truly said to belong to either the mind or the body? At high points of psychedelic experience even our sense of self-breaks down, revealing not only the lack of separation between mind and body, but even the separation between body and universe.
Put simply, there is no separation between ass and mind.
The more we learn about the body, the more interconnected we find it to be (see brain-gut axis research for lots of interesting stuff on this). This is something that was intuitively argued for by another 17th Century philosopher – Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza, in contrast to Descartes, argued that there was only one substance in the world (making him a Monist, instead of a Dualist). In Spinoza’s thought this one substance was God. Or, God is nature.
Within this framework, everything in the universe is a different presentation of the same substance, which is God. The implications for this ontological starting point are that all objects in the world are connected (this includes connections between humans and other humans, and humans and nature – more on this in future blog posts). But it also means that there is no separation between mind and body. Both thinking (mind) and extension (body) are understood here as two attributes of the same substance.
Thus, when Spinoza talks about ‘affects’ he’s not just talking about ‘emotions’ as we might ‘think’ them or ‘feel’ them (e.g. I think I’m sad, I feel depressed), he is talking about embodied states that are both mental *and* physical in nature.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? WHY SHOULD I CARE?
If body and mind are inseparable, and are indeed one and the same…so what?
Well, I think this is a useful ontological foundation for us to engage in praxis (i.e. a coherent set of principles via which we can go out into the world and make positive change). I’ll go on to argue in future posts for the idea that human subjectivity is socially constituted and also constituted via systems, but this foundation of a non-separation between mind and body is an important starting point.
The fundamentally intertwined nature of both mind and body means we can’t promote or demote either in terms of importance. We might not be able to think ourselves happier, but we can’t ignore the fact that we are thinking beings. However, we must acknowledge that we are embodied thinking beings whose bodies live in a world, alongside other bodies. Thus, as psychologists we need to consider the whole, holistic self in our understanding of subjectivity.
So next time we’re feeling like shit, or we are working with someone who is having a hard time, we need to recognise the importance of our bodies in generating that feeling, but also the role of our mind in reflecting on that feeling as well. We need to acknowledge that a raised or changed consciousness is likely to lead to different behaviours, but only if it is enabled by bodily feelings that facilitate this. We need to acknowledge we have intentionality and agency, but within an embodied context that might act as a facilitator or hinderance to our abilities to act on such intentionality and agency. Spinoza knew this when he said that negative affect (e.g. experiencing depression) inhibits our body’s capacities, whilst positive affect (e.g. experiencing joy) increases our body’s capacities.
So yes, in my instance, going for a run might make me feel less anxious, but the stress I feel in my body is completely connected to my restless thoughts and a conscious sense of self-obligation that drives me to go running. Similarly, the act of running releases tensions both physical and conscious in a way that, in a phenomenological sense, I find hard to separate. Some days I might feel too low to run and may ‘give in’. Some days I may be able to force myself out and due to my running, I’ll be able to think more clearly afterwards.
How might we apply such logics to our work with children, young people and families? Well, we need to not only consider them as minds, not only bring bodies back into the equation, but think about how the two are connected. There’s an optimism here, encapsulated by Spinoza’s famous phrase “no one has yet determined what a body can.” If body and mind are the same thing, then under the right facilitation our bodies can do amazing things. It was a body that painted the Sistine Chapel. A body that walked a tight rope between the Twin Towers. The aid flotilla’s that head towards Gaza in the hope of providing support and raising awareness about the genocide are manned with bodies. Thought plays a vital role in achieving these goals but so too does the social and material facilitation of bodies.
Thus, as psychologists if we understand our role as improving the subjectivities of others, our role must be to work with children, young people and families in ways that liberate both mind and body from sources of distress and negative affect. This will require simultaneously engaging in acts of consciousness raising whilst all the while changing systems to allow bodies to act freely on the basis of their raised consciousness. A child will only think more positively about school if they are supported to recognise a tangible benefit that school will provide them, all whilst systems are being changed to allow their body and the bodies of others to realise that tangible benefit.
And, whilst I will go on to explore the implications of this further in part 2, it is vital to finish by noting that our bodily feelings are going to be hugely impacted by the conditions our body is exposed to and the forces that shape those conditions.