In this essay, James Barnes, a practising relational psychotherapist, outlines how relational psychotherapy provides a different model of understanding and healing mental distress than the more prevalent models of understanding and ‘treating’ the brain.
Dualism has long impacted our understanding of the human mind:
“When the new scientific discipline of psychology separated off from philosophy in the mid- to late 19th century, it adopted an essentially naturalised version of Descartes’s dualism, which persists to the present day, certainly in mainstream psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy. Instead of seeing mind as a separate substance, this neo-Cartesian perspective assumes that the mind is somehow identifiable with the brain, brain states and brain functioning. Much like Descartes, however, it maintains the very same vision of ‘mind’ as an experientially private interior, categorically cut off from the world and others outside.
For Descartes and for modern neo-Cartesian models alike, our experience of the world and others occurs ‘on the inside’ – in our individual minds or brains. For modern psychology, this meant that mental life could be studied and measured in isolation, lending itself to empirical and quantitative science.”
On the other hand, “Instead of locating the problem ‘in’ the person, relational therapists see distress as arising in the relationship between the individual and the rest of the world.”
Barnes goes on to compare the differences between the two approaches in light of his own lived experience.
An important caveat:
“To be clear, this isn’t to say that internal processes – biological or otherwise – are not involved; of course they are. It is only to say that, in the relational-intersubjective model, the interpersonal, social level is foundational, and this often, we might say, transcends and includes these processes.”
Read the full article here.
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