It is not unusual to hear that psychology is dead, or dying, gasping for air under the tidal wave in the neurosciences. It reminds us of Hegel and Marx announcing the end of history, with the establishment of the modern democratic state for one, the crowning of socialism for the other. Two hundred years later, look where we stand! History continues with plentiful blood and injustice. The fundamentals remain the same despite the goodwill of all the bloody French and other red revolutions. By analogy, exciting progress in current neurosciences do not eliminate the fundamental questions that drove centuries of psychological inquiries, from Heraclitus in ancient Greece to great Eastern thinkers like Lao Tzu, all trying to capture human experience: what it means to be alive in this world.
I often see my colleagues reassured by their vision of a dying psychology, agonizing under the new lights of the brain sciences. But are we really on the edge of reducing human experience to its brain substance? Are we truly at the threshold of an absolute deterministic understanding of what it means to be alive, in this world, and more important, alive among other embodied and sentient entities? Nothing of the sort since the stuff of basic science is, as always and in an infinite regress, opening doors leading to more, never able to get absolute closure on anything. We are just getting better at approximating psychic phenomena. My neuroscience colleagues tend to get ahead of themselves in their renewed enthusiasm, and psychology resists reductionism in all its classic dimensions, be they clinical, cognitive, social, or developmental. Michael Heller’s book is a masterful demonstration of psychology resisting brain reductionism.
It is not a secret that part of the enthusiasm around the neurosciences is dictated by the exponential technological progress in imaging and recording brain activities, notwithstanding the enormous financial investment in brain imaging laboratories that put much pressure on the kind of psychological research questions addressed by neuroscientists: questions and psychological phenomena that have the potential of being reduced and redescribed in neurochemical, biological terms. But the new brain enthusiasm comes at a cost and at a loss. Because of its necessary reductionist and mechanistic undertone, it eludes the meaning of human experience in all its complexity and all its basic nondeter-ministic “messiness.” It is an experience that in essence cannot be captured by the study of a brain “in a vat” or a contextual vacuum (see Thompson, 2008). Our brain is just part of a whole that includes the rest of the body, but also other bodies and other interacting brains.
When we think of it, in the end, the fundamental problem of psychology (i.e., the meanings of being alive in this world and what can be deduced from such meanings to capture the human experience) is not reducible to an individual bodily and brain system, a system that would be completely isolatable to be “decorticated” to its marrow, in the same way that one now decodes and describes the human genome with one long string combining a small ensemble of constitutive DNA elements. No.
The rapid progress in our understanding of brain structure and functioning certainly forces us to reformulate ancient questions about human experience: the mind-body question, the interplay between the physical and the mental, intersubjectivity in general. It does not however resolve questions raised for at least twenty centuries, from the Greeks in the West and the philosophies and meditation practices in the East, particularly those that flourished in India. This textbook is a brilliant demonstration of the importance of anchoring historically the relation of the psyche to the organism, and eventually to the body within traditions and conceptions that have evolved and continue to evolve. Heller reminds us of the importance of positing issues within a diachronic, historical perspective.
In our rich era made of exponential technological inventions and scientific discoveries, we should not get blinded of the fact that the problems of the relation between the body, the organism, and the psyche are eternal problems. They take roots in a long Western and Eastern tradition. If the current neurosciences provide a decisive jolt to reflections about these problems, they are far from offering decisive answers, particularly when limiting its foray to an isolated, individual brain in a vat, be it a bony scull.
In his book, Heller demonstrates painstakingly and cogently that psychological phenomena cannot be captured only inside the individual but rather emerge at the interface of individual bodies, organisms, and brains. The meanings of psychological phenomena can be only captured in the process of an interaction between these systems. Heller makes the demonstration in ways that are reminiscent of the eighteenth-century encyclopedic tradition, not shying away from a large harvest, with broad connections from Western philosophy to Eastern traditions and other Eastern and Western ancestral intuitions and practices.
Heller reminds us that psychic experience is the integration of all these levels with processes that operate within and outside the individual, in interaction with other individuals, like patients interacting with therapists.
Psychotherapy of any kind, whether it focuses primarily on the body or not, does not just pertain to a body, an organism, or a psyche organization that is more or less well functioning. It always pertains to a relation between bodies, organisms, and psychic entities.
There is developmental proof of such general assertion in the fact that from around two years of age, all children (except probably those showing symptoms of autism) start to conceptualize themselves as perceived and judged through the evaluative eyes of others. From this age children start to express unambiguous embarrassment and the first signs of shame and guilt, presumably the trademarks of our species (see Darwin, 1872, on blushing). All these self-conscious emotions are eminently social, determined by the interplay and integration of mutual self and others’ feelings and mental representations, a major source of typical psychological ills that eventually lead patients to seek therapeutic help.
These psychological ills are not just circumscribed and contained within the patient’s head and body. Such ills are revealed in interaction of the patient with others, with the therapist in particular, who become aware with the patient of his or her suffering. In interaction, patient and therapist become co-conscious of ills and sufferings that become objectified to both. In the therapeutic relation or alliance, both parties reactualize such ills so they can be objectified and treated together, rendering them public for the duration of the therapy.
This point is not as trivial as it might sound. In the case of body therapies, when patients allow the therapist to touch them or to be guided in breathing exercises, they surrender to the therapist providing intimate access and the possibility for the therapist to share the experience of the patients, particularly the experience that led them to seek therapy, whether it is an acute pain, an obsessive rumination, a simple curiosity, or a need for social attention and recognition on the part of the patient.
No matter what, therapeutic effects rest on a basic phenomenon of coconsciousness. They cannot be attributed to either the patient or the therapist. It is, rather, at the interface of their encounter, and this is why there is something fundamentally wrong in thinking that the comprehension of the individual brain will exhaust what is conceived by some as “prehistorical” psychological problems. Current leaps in individual brain understanding are only one decisive, yet not exhaustive progress in a traditional questioning, namely, the interplay between body, organism, and psyche. This a major point brilliantly made by Heller in his book, using a vast array of cogent details and analogies that cross over clinical and experimental psychology, the neurosciences, and also history: the history of sciences as well as the history of Eastern and Western philosophies. It is a masterful contribution.
Heller’s book provides an indispensable tool of reflection on what is at the core of any clinical work: the relation and interplay between body, organism, and the psyche. Heller provides here a broad, encyclopedic synthesis on an issue that is at the core of clinical psychology and allied disciplines. He offers us the gift of his insatiable curiosity, enormous knowledge, and, more important, an untamed enthusiasm that permeates this monumental contribution. The enthusiasm is not just intellectual or academic. It is also clinical. Heller’s effort is primarily aimed at therapists who will benefit from his knowledge by becoming more cogent of their own practices and theoretical intuitions. Heller’s bet is that they will become better therapists. Not too farfetched, really.
By its clarity and enormous intellectual breadth, this book can only broaden the clinical grasp of practitioners, whether or not they are well versed in the practice of body psychotherapies.