Intuition in Therapeutic Practice

A Mind-Centered Depth Approach for Healing

Margaret Arnd-Caddigan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000439816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

Margaret Arnd-Caddigan helps clinicians to expand their understanding of intuition by introducing mind-centered dynamic therapy (MCDT), providing them with the tools to incorporate this approach into their practice.

Written accessibly for clinicians new to MCDT, the book presents this powerful method to help clients alter their thinking and overcome suffering. Divided into two parts, the book begins by clearly exploring the origins of intuition in philosophical thought, covering ideas such as panpsychism, cosmopsychism, and depth psychology views of mind, before examining how problems arise in psychotherapy from a Relational Perspective and how MCDT can help. Chapters then demonstrate how MCDT can be used in practice by exploring specific issues and treatment implications, clearly explaining how clinicians can define and develop general intuition, what the difference between clinical intuition and intuitive inquiry is, and how clinicians can help clients develop their own intuition during sessions. Filled with practical examples, key points, and creative activities such as journaling and body work throughout, this book helps both clinicians and clients attune to and trust their own intuition in the process of healing.

Rooted in empirical research and clinical practice, this book is essential reading for counselors, psychotherapists, and clinical social workers looking to incorporate intuition in their therapeutic approach.

Part I
A Philosophy of Mind

1
Panpsychism and Cosmopsychism

DOI: 10.4324/9781003090816-3

I am a psychotherapist. I conduct treatment (therapy) for mind (psyche). In order to do this, I think it’s very important to have some idea about the nature of the mind. The way that we understand mind is based on our worldview. In psychotherapy, techniques come from theory, and theory comes from world-view (also called meta-theory or paradigm). Our meta-theory has two parts: ontology and epistemology. The words refer to the way that we understand fundamental questions about the world. Our ontology, or ontological position, is the way we answer the question what is the nature of reality? What is real; what is the fundamental nature of reality? Our epistemological perspective is the way we answer the questions how do we know about the world? How do we acquire knowledge? What is legitimate knowledge?

The treatment part of psychotherapy is aimed at helping our clients change. The way we understand the reality of the mind is going to highly influence what, exactly, we are targeting for change, and how we go about trying to change that. How do we know what specific kinds of changes to the mind might be helpful to a specific client? Each theory of psychotherapy and psychological counseling has an implicit or explicit view on these questions.

Panpsychism is an ontology that has roots that extend as far back as ancient Greek philosophy. Recently, this view of reality has been gaining support by some contemporary philosophers of mind. There are many areas of disagreement among philosophers who identify as panpsychists. Each of these differences can impact the way we think about therapy and, thus, what we do in our practice. One of the positions some panpsychist philosophers take is cosmopsychism. This view will be explored in detail. As will become clear, the implications for psychotherapy are profound.

The view of mind offered by panpsychism and cosmopsychism may be enhanced by another movement in the philosophy of mind. This is the extended mind theory. Taking these two views of mind into consideration, the resulting conclusion is that our minds exist beyond our bodies, and can connect. This suggests an epistemology for psychotherapy. How do we know about our clients’ minds, their mental processes and contents? It is possible that another’s mind can be known directly through connection. As a result of the connection, both minds expand to admit new experience.

This ability to share experience is at the very heart of clinical intuition, and forms the epistemological position of MCDT. Clinical intuition has been shown to be a powerful tool that therapists from different theoretical backgrounds rely on in order to help people improve their mental functioning. MCDT is designed from the epistemological position that minds can directly influence and experience each other.

1.1 The Definitions of Matter and Mind in Panpsychism

Before we look at the philosophy of mind that guides the therapy set forward in this book, we have to be clear about what we mean by matter and mind. Most people are probably very comfortable with their understanding of matter, or things that physically exist. We know a great deal about matter; we have been learning about it since we were in grade school. For example, we know that it exists in space; it has properties like mass, volume, and density. That is, we can measure it. We know that we can perceive matter with our senses: it possesses texture, smell, or color, etc. This is all probably pretty well understood by most readers.

But when it comes to the nature of mind, there is less clarity. There are different definitions of mind. For example, some psychologists have defined mind as,

an incredibly complex set of interactive cognitive processes, which includes analyzing, comparing, evaluating, planning, remembering, visualizing, and so on. And all of these complex processes rely on the sophisticated system of symbols we call human language.

(Harris, 2019, p. 19)

This quote suggests that mind is our rational, discursive, analytic thinking processes. Mind is something that we are capable of reflecting on. And mind is related to our ability to generate and manipulate symbols. The most important symbol from this perspective is language: the way we use words to represent our experiences. By stating that mind is language, the role of culture becomes very important: language reflects the categories that are culturally endorsed. For example, in Western culture, we used to only be able to see gender as binary. This blinded people to an array of other gender experiences. The epistemology implicit in this definition of mind is that the way we can know about our clients’ minds is through the words they share with us. This further implies that we can only know what the client is aware of, or able to reflect on and talk about.

Panpsychist philosophers have a very different definition of mind. They define mind as “what-it’s-likeness.” Mind, or phenomenal consciousness,

is a general property that comes in specific forms: pain, anxiety, and the forms of experience involved in seeing red, or smelling gasoline, or tasting coffee. Specific forms of phenomenal consciousness are variously called conscious states, experiential properties, or phenomenal properties …. how … [experiences] feel or what it’s like to have them, are known as ‘phenomenal concepts.’

(Goff, 2017, p. 3)

The term “qualia” (singular, “quale”) is often used to denote this qualitative nature of mind. These are experiences that cannot be communicated by describing physical processes. For example, “My muscles are tensed up and squeezing on a nerve” does not capture the pain that I am experiencing. Such experiences are, contrary to the previous definition, often difficult to put into words or directly designate. Perhaps the most important example of mindedness, from a psychotherapeutic perspective, is what it’s like to be “me.” There are sub-sets of this experience, as in what it’s like to feel sad and tired and anhedonia all at once, or what it’s like to have had my partner just tell me that they are leaving me.

Mind includes not only the aspect of qualia but also the subjective experience that the qualia are happening to “me” (Benovsky, 2018). Thus, the sense of self becomes a central issue in a mind-centered therapy. This will be explored in greater detail in Chapter 4. What is important to stress here is that mind, by definition, is tied to a sense of self.

1.2 Is Mind Real?

Freud’s work was historically situated at a time when the dominant world-view was Logical Positivism. This view was based on the ontology known as materialism or physicalism. The ontology posits that reality is made up of matter: that is, reality was held to be limited to that which has physical properties. This is where we get the statement we all learned in graduate school: “If you can’t count it, it isn’t real.”

Given this belief (the position can’t be proven by any means that does not come from research that is based on the very position it seeks to prove), when Freud set about to study mind it should not be surprising that he framed his theory in the language of physicality: he represented both his topographic model (the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious) and structural model (id, ego, and superego) of mind as existing in space and having structure. Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) emphasized this point in their discussion of Freud’s drive/structure model:

Freud implied at times that drive is to be understood as a quasi-physiological quantity, which exercises force mechanistically within the mind. The express intention of the Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895a) was to establish psychology on the same materialistic basis as that which supported other natural sciences …. He often expressed the hope that his hypothesized psychic structures would someday be confirmed by anatomical finding, and his attempts to create a pictorial representation of the mental apparatus (1923a, 1933) indicate that he thought of the mind as existing in physical space.

(Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983, pp. 21–22)

It is little wonder that over time when many analytic thinkers and other psychotherapists discussed mind, its parts and operations, they spoke of it as if it were a thing. Many non-analytic therapists decided to ignore mind altogether: they decided that they would only focus on things that they could count, like observable behaviors, or clients’ reports (words) of specific thoughts.

This position has changed over time. In particular, the Interpersonal, Relational, and Intersubjective Psychoanalytic Theorists discuss the process of how mind structures experience, as opposed to the mind being or having a structure (Mitchell, 1988). And yet, there continues to be a pull toward materialism that is evident in the widespread adoption of neuroscience as an explanation for mental processes. From this perspective, the physical—biological neurochemical processes—that occur in the body are believed to cause mental functions. The good news here is that it is acceptable to talk about mind again. Suddenly, psychotherapy is viewed as a bit more legitimate.

But this legitimacy comes at a price. By making all experiences ultimately neurochemical, we blinker the centrality of subjectivity in humanity. Nearly all humans have a direct experience of their minds. As Goff (2019a) noted, one’s mind is the only aspect of reality of which one has a direct experience; all other experiences, including our experiences of our bodies and the physical world, are mediated by our minds!

While seeing the mind as a by-product of the brain (or neurochemical processes that are located throughout the entire body) may have helped psychotherapists achieve a degree of respectability, the view itself is the product of the mind. For this and other reasons, philosophers of mind have arrived at the position that mind is not based on biological processes. They call their perspective “panpsychism.” Most simply put, panpsychism is the position that mind and matter are both fundamental and omnipresent in the universe. Both are fundamental, meaning that mind is not reducible to matter. Matter does not cause, create, or gives rise to mind. Of particular interest in this context is the point that mind is not a side effect of neurochemical processes. Put more bluntly, the mind is not the brain. Thus, panpsychism is the position that mind (in more complex forms, consciousness) is as real as matter.

If mind and matter are both real, the question may arise as to what, exactly, they have to do with each other. Early philosophers suggested that mind and matter were entirely distinct: they represented separate realities: “There are, under dualism, two ‘ontological realms’, the mental and the physical, and they both are—ontologically speaking—autonomous” (Benovsky, 2018, p. 11). From this perspective, it is difficult to understand how the human mind and body can have an effect on each other, or why changes in one are so closely correlated to changes in the other. Yet we know that your body and your mind do affect each other. Mind and matter are highly correlated in humans. But as we were continually reminded in graduate school, correlation is not causation. A panpsychist position is that mind and matter are correlated because they are both aspects of a single reality: a single universe.

Two panpsychist philosophers, Godehard Bruntrup (2017), along with Jiri Benovsky (2018) identified panpsychism with dual aspect monism as an alternative to strict dualism. That is, it is a “one-category ontology … [in which] there is only one kind of thing but it features physical and mental properties” (Bruntrup, p. 51). Benovsky used the term “phental”—both physical and mental—to designate the singularity of reality. This position solves the problem as to why they are so tightly correlated: one cannot heat up the head of coin without the tail becoming warmer. Thus, if one’s mind changes, we would expect there to be some change in physical properties, as well. This does not mean that the change in the mind is caused by the alteration in the body.

Panpsychists who endorse this position tend to hold that mind and matter can only exist together. In other words, mind only exists “in” or “with” physical objects: a molecule may have some form of mindedness, but mind cannot exist separate from something physical. Mind cannot exist between bodies. Although, upon close inspection, the disagreements on this point can become confusing. Certainly, among some panpsychists, there are those who suggest that matter can have a “protomind” (see, for example, Benovsky, 2018). There are those who are clear that not all matter has a mind (a chair does not necessarily have the experience of what it’s like to be a chair). But there are none who have claimed that mind can exist apart from matter. There is not a reference to mind with “protomatter,” or assertions that not all instances of mind are embodied.

Yet the idea that mind can only occur together with matter may be challenged by the work of some other philosophers of mind. There are thinkers who have suggested that mind can “travel,” so to speak. This is known as the extended mind hypothesis (Menary, 2010). The extended mind hypothesis is a philosophical argument in which it is demonstrated that the minds of humans are in part constituted by things (like a notebook or a computer) that exist in the environment (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). In the example that gave rise to the theory, Clark and Chalmers (2010) established that a person’s cognitive processes—particularly memory and belief—can be created by the information stored in a notebook, which is external to the person whose mind it impacts. Since their seminal work, the view has been elaborated on by several other thinkers who have arrived at the conclusion that nearly all mental functions and states can be, in part, constituted by things that are outside of a person. How can mind be created between two things? If mind must be tied to matter, how can two separate physical entities co-create a mental experience? Shani and Keppler (2018) have suggested that perhaps sub-atomic particles, which are enminded, are exchanged between the mind of a person and an entity external to that person. There is another, perhaps simpler, way of conceiving of the extended mind, however. This is the position of many panpsychists known as cosmopsychism, to which we will turn momentarily.

1.3 Forms of Panpsychism

1.3.1 Bottom-Up Approaches

According to panpsychism, the phenomenon of what-it’s-like is a fundamental aspect of reality. But this experience is not uniform; there are simpler and more complex forms of mind. Within panpsychism, there are very broadly two distinct approaches to questions regarding the relationship between simple forms of mind and complex consciousness, as is found in humans. The first approach is a “bottom-up” understanding that is analogous to the atomistic view of the physical world. A compound is composed of smaller units: elements. Elements are composed of molecules, which are composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons, which are composed of atoms, which are composed of even smaller units. It is the combination of very small units that creates the physical world. In the same way, many panpsychists believe that complex forms of consciousness are the result of combining small units of mindedness.

This bottom-up approach takes two different forms: constitutive panpsychism and emergent panpsychism. Constitutive panpsychism is basically the premise that m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: A Mind-Centered Depth Approach
• Part I A Philosophy of Mind
• Part II The Practice of a Mind-Centered Depth Therapy (MCDT)
• Conclusion: Metaphysics and Psychotherapy
• Appendix A: Developing Intuition
• Appendix B: Annotated Bibliography of the Benefits of Developing Intuition
• Index