On psychological mindedness [redux]
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Here’s an ever-so-slightly reworked version of an essay I published and then unpublished a few months ago; I had some misattributed quotes in the last version, how embarrassing.
I think it is past time to put aside other business and to turn our energies to the remystification of virtually everything.
—Marilynne Robinson, “About Books; Language Is Smarter Than We Are”, 1987
It goes something like this: You’re hanging out in a big group. There seems to be an elephant in the room. Your friend is giving her boyfriend the cold shoulder but is playing it down, trying to obscure her actions from your view but not his view. Everyone is acting cool, but people are giving a wide berth to the couple in question. Later you’re driving your other buddy home and you say, “Wow, the girlfriend sure was acting weird.” Your buddy says, “Really? What was she doing?” And you describe what she was doing. He says, “That doesn’t seem that weird. I mean, I didn’t notice it.” And you say, “You were avoiding them, too.” He says, “I don’t think I was.” And you say “That’s fair,” because what else are you supposed to say to that? You’re not going to tell him you watched him avoid eye contact with the boyfriend all night. That would be needlessly aggro of you, for one thing, but even if it weren’t, it’s the same genre of statement as “I saw faeries dancing all around the room all night”: even if you were to see it with your own eyes, it’s not the kind of thing that he sees.
Here’s another one: You’re a little kid and you’ve been noticing a pattern. The phone rings, your mom picks it up, and she says, “Hello” with a boisterous affectation and inflection that you only hear her use when she picks up the phone. “This is she,” she chirps to the person on the phone, a phrase you have never heard her say except on the phone. She laughs a braying laugh that she never laughs except for on the phone. At the end of the call she signs off with “Thanks, mmbye” in a cadence that is reserved for the phone. After observing this phenomenon for a long time, you finally ask her, “Mom, why do you talk like that on the phone?” “Like what?” she asks testily. “Like that,” you say, and thus ensues a bitter exchange in which she vociferously denies that she talks like that on the phone. From this it can be learned that not only does she not know why she is doing it, she also does not know that she is doing it. This lesson, painfully, turns out to be true of your mother under many circumstances to this day, but also quite generalizable as a phenomenon: we all have some version of phone voice.
I’ve been trying to articulate what makes it so difficult to talk to certain people about certain subject matter like this. Much to my frustration and dismay, the best I can come up with is “psychological mindedness”: some folks got it, some don’t.
I remember the first time I heard the term. Years ago a therapist friend of mine was talking about a vacation she had been on. She said there had been a lot of tensions because one of her traveling companions was “not psychologically minded”. I laughed out loud because I literally thought she was joking. “What do you mean? She said to you, ‘I only perceive with my senses’?”
Well, in retrospect I feel bad for being a dick to my friend. But I stand by my initial assessment of “psychological mindedness” as an opaque and kind of silly phrase. But I knew what my friend meant when she said it: it points to something. I’m trying to get clear about what that something is.
I have written before about “false consensus”—basically the idea that we are all going around the world implicitly imagining that everyone agrees with us. I mentioned how I’m obsessed with this phenomenon especially when it comes to language itself, particularly how people are carrying around idiosyncratic definitions with no awareness of this fact. I said that I think psychology and discussions of it (both by people In The Field and laypeople) are especially rife with linguistic false consensus because the field is necessarily squishy and non-concrete. And with that in mind, man oh man is “psychological mindedness” something to think about.
Some cursory research procured an excerpt of a 2014 book called “Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychotherapy: Network Principles For a Unified Theory” by someone called Warren W. Tryon. I had never heard of him, perhaps because applying neuroscience to psychology, which seems to be this guy’s whole thing, upsets me and creeps me out for a thousand reasons, some of which you will be able to infer from this essay. But anyway, in the excerpt he delivers a useful litany of historical definitions of “psychological mindedness”. Here are some that stood out to me: It’s “a person’s ability to see relationships among thoughts, feelings, and actions, with the goal of learning the meanings and causes of his experiences and behaviour”, according to Appelbaum. Farber wrote, “Essentially, psychological-mindedness may be considered a trait or state that has at its core the disposition to reflect upon the meaning and motivation of behavior, thoughts, and feelings in oneself and others.” McCallum and Piper noted that “[t]he term psychological mindedness has been used interchangeably with a multitude of concepts, for example, insight, introspection1, intraception, self-awareness, self-reflection, capacity for self-observation, private self-consciousness, and self-focused attention”. So yeah. Like so many of the most useful concepts2 in psychology, this one appears to be very slippery: many definitions are slightly at odds with each other. In just these three definitions, I notice that one is about desire and capacity to solve your shit using self reflection, one is about noticing cognitive, affective, and behavioral patterns in oneself and others, and one just says yeah, it’s a bit of a catch-all.
According to the above definitions I would consider myself psychologically minded. I’m very (at times excruciatingly) attuned to my thoughts and feelings and I have a pretty good map of them, and I am also self-aware enough to know that there’s a lot of terrain I can’t yet map. I’m deeply affected by others and their emotional states. If someone were to invent an instrument3 to measure each of the following, I would guess I would score in the 90th percentile of picking up on people’s feelings and noticing their behavioral patterns, the 54th percentile of knowing what I “should” do or say in response to what I pick up, and (generously) something like the 40th percentile of actually doing what I discern I “should” do. In other words, I’m a very introspective person with very good intuition and perception, very high interpersonal awareness, and average-to-poor social aptitude. Sound like a psychoanalyst? I think it does. After all, isn’t psychological mindedness just a term psychoanalysts coined to describe themselves, even if they didn’t realize that’s what they were doing? I really think it could be. I really think that might be part of why it’s so difficult to pin down. The self-obscured self is tricky like that.
It’s important to emphasize that the term psychological mindedness comes from the world of psychoanalysis. For those readers not in the know (if I haven’t already lost you with the word “intraception”), classical analytic theory, since its post-war golden age, has been declining in popularity in this country for more than 50 years. It’s been slowly getting replaced by behaviorism (think CBT) and psychopharmacology (drugs!), and nowadays there are the somatic modalities (sensorimotor psychotherapy, somatic experiencing) and the neurobiological schools of thought (polyvagal theory) and the parts-related modalities (internal family systems) and the repackaged Eastern spirituality (ACT, DBT) and the hypnosis shit (EMDR, brainspotting), to name a few broad categories. Oh, and if you have analytic leanings but don’t to become a full-on analyst because that’s too icky or stuffy or old fashioned for you, you can become a psychodynamic psychotherapist. Now, I’m not in The Field so I can only speak to my experience as a client/patient. I’ve had a lot of therapists over the years, and in keeping with demographic trends, most of them have not been analysts or anything adjacent. My hometown, where I still live, is a town with a large university and prestigious hospital, and these institutions churned out legions of CBT therapists (these days they’re churning out EMDRers and drug-assisted therapists as well), so most of the therapy I received as a young person was CBT. And I gotta say, guys… a lot of these CBTers are not very psychologically minded. Some of them didn’t really seem to believe in the psyche, which, in my opinion, is a big fucking problem if you’re out here practicing PSYCHOLOGY. Of course, all clinical mental health work is not psychology, strictly speaking. But like… where do you anti-psychology therapists think the field of “mental health” even comes from? Do you think EMDR arose fully formed from neuroscience? Do you think DBT was handed down by God?4 Bad news: your shit was begat by psychologists, who were trained by analysts before them, right back to your nemesis Sigmund Freud, who, by the way, died in 1939, at which time your grandparents were alive, if you’re no younger than me. How quick we are to forget!
Speaking of believing in the psyche, I think it’s a good exercise to remind ourselves about etymology every once and again. Ψυχή, psyche. What is that? Well, old time scholars translate it as soul. I’m no classicist so I’ll have to take Liddell and Scott at their word, but according to their Greek-English lexicon, it means life, though it also means spirit like ghost, and then soul, yes, and personality. The old Greeks loved talking about the psyche, the soul—you could call Plato a psychologist, a soul studier. In Medieval Europe Latin speakers called it anima, the anima of animate and animism—not necessarily the same anima as deployed by a certain Swiss analyst.
This brings me to a definition of psychological mindedness that I neglected to mention before: the tautology. Psychological mindedness is “a tendency to understand or explain behavior in psychological terms,” write Wolitzky and Reuben. “Psychological mindedness is the capacity to achieve psychological understanding of oneself and others,” Hatcher and Hatcher boldly assert. Psychological mindedness is having a psychological mind. When this tautology is read solely with a modern, post-post-Freud lens, it becomes worse than useless. A psychological mind understands things in psychological terms. Ok, a psychological mind believes in psychology as an epistemology, then? What is that, exactly? Whose psychological terms does he use to understand things? Which type of psychology are we talking about? A psychological mind loves Lacan, loves Jung, loves Skinner, loves Reich, loves Fanon, loves Marsha Linehan? A psychological mind is an adherent of A School of Thought? No, a psychological mind is woven through with whatever thread runs through the thinkers I just listed. What could that thread possibly be?
The answer can only be gleaned by zooming out to look at the whole fabric of history. To have a psychological mind is to be an initiate of Soul Studies5.
Mysticism, according to its historical and psychological definitions, is the direct intuition or experience of God… In Greek religion, from which the word comes to us, the mystæ were those initiates of the mysteries who were believed to have received the vision of the god, and with it a new and higher life.
—Evelyn Underhill, “The Mystics of the Church”, 1925
Psyche, the soul, is personified in the old Greek mythic stories as a butterfly-winged goddess, though she’s born a mortal woman. Here’s her story, paraphrased from Apuleis’ transcription of the same.
Psyche is so beautiful that Aphrodite is jealous. In her jealousy she sends her son Eros to make Psyche fall in love with a monster. Eros visits her in the night in invisible form with a quiverfull of his famous arrows. He pricks her with one and she wakes up and looks right at him, even though he is invisible. In shock he wounds himself with the same arrow, and thus he falls in love with her. Aphrodite is so mad about this that she curses Psyche so no mortals can fall in love with her. When no one proposes marriage to their beautiful daughter, Psyche’s dismayed parents ask the oracle who Psyche will marry. The oracle says she’s destined to marry a horrible monster on a mountain, so the family takes Psyche to the top of the mountain to meet her husband, and there they leave her.
While Psyche stood on the ridge of the mountain, panting with fear and with eyes full of tears, the gentle Zephyr raised her from the earth and bore her with an easy motion into a flowery dale. By degrees her mind became composed, and she laid herself down on the grassy bank to sleep.
When she wakes up, she finds a magnificent palace and begins to explore it. A disembodied voice tells her that this is her new home, that all of it is hers. After enjoying her new palace home for a while, she goes to her new room to wait to be visited by her new husband. He comes to visit under the cover of darkness and the two have a wonderful night, but the unseen husband departs before morning. Many nights pass this way, and Psyche begs her husband to stay til morning so she can see his face. Her husband says no. He says that she doesn’t need to see him, that she already knows he loves her and that’s what matters. When Psyche tells her sisters about this development, they are suspicious. They tell her that she needs to see his face; after all, the oracle said that she was supposed to be marrying a monster! What if this is just the monster lavishing her by day so that one day he can kill her at night? Psyche’s sisters tell her to hide a lamp and a knife in her room so that she can catch the monster in the act and then kill him. Psyche resists for a long time, until one night her curiosity gets the better of her. She uncovers the lamp and reveals not a beast, but instead the most beautiful of all the gods, Eros himself. She tries to get a better look at him, leaning with lamp in hand over his body. Hot lamp oil falls on Eros’ shoulder and burns him awake. He looks her in the eye and flies out the window. Psyche, trying to follow him, leaps out the window and, being mortal, falls to the ground.
Her godly lover did not abandon her as she lay on the ground, but swooped down to a cypress tree nearby and from its topmost branch spoke to her, deeply angered: “Simple-minded Psyche, I forgot the commands of my mother, Aphrodite. Instead of addicting you with love for a poor wretch of the basest rank, instead of dooming you, as she ordered me, to the worst marriage, I flew to you as a lover. I acted thoughtlessly in this, I know, and I, the famous archer, wounded myself with my own arrow: I made you my wife. Did I do this so you would think me a beast? So that your knife would cut off my head which holds the eyes that adore you? How often I appealed to your prudence; what kindly counsels I lavished on you! Your excellent advisers will quickly pay for the wicked lessons they have given you. But I shall punish you only by my flight.” Having said this, he stretched out his wings and flew away.
Psyche finds her sisters again and tells them what happened. They pretend to comfort and commiserate with her, but they get it in their heads that maybe Eros might choose one of them now.
Each of them rose early the next morning and ascended the mountain, and having reached the top, called upon Zephyr to receive her and bear her to his lord; then leaping up, and not being sustained by Zephyr, fell down the precipice and was dashed to pieces.
So Psyche wanders the country until she finds a different palace. Inside she hopes to find her husband, but instead finds grain scattered everywhere. The lady of the house, who just happens to be Demeter, finds Psyche sorting the grain. Demeter takes pity on Psyche and encourages her to go turn herself in to Aphrodite, which she does.
Aphrodite received her with angry countenance. "Most undutiful and faithless of servants," said she, "do you at last remember that you really have a mistress? Or have you rather come to see your sick husband, yet laid up of the wound given him by his loving wife? You are so ill favored and disagreeable that the only way you can merit your lover must be by dint of industry and diligence. I will make trial of your housewifery."
And she does. Psyche is made to sort a whole storehouse of grain in an afternoon, to shear golden sheep on the far side of an impassable river, and descend to the underworld. Her task in the underworld is to take a box belonging to Aphrodite down to Persephone, ask Persephone to fill it with her beauty, and then bring the boxful of beauty back to Aphrodite. Down to the underworld goes Psyche. She is so certain that she will fail her task that she goes to the top of a tower to jump.
A voice from the tower said to her, "Why, poor unlucky girl, do you design to put an end to your days in so dreadful a manner? And what cowardice makes you sink under this last danger who have been so miraculously supported in all your former?"
The voice tells her how to bypass all of the obstacles in the underworld, and warns her that most of all she must not look inside Aphrodite’s box once it has been filled with Persephone’s beauty. So Psyche sets off on her journey to Persephone, and after following all of the tower voice’s instructions, Persephone welcomes her and fills up Aphrodite’s box with her beauty. Psyche eagerly exits the underworld.
But having got so far successfully through her dangerous task a longing desire seized her to examine the contents of the box. "What," said she, "shall I, the carrier of this divine beauty, not take the least bit to put on my cheeks to appear to more advantage in the eyes of my beloved husband!" So she carefully opened the box, but found nothing there of any beauty at all, but an infernal and truly Stygian sleep, which being thus set free from its prison, took possession of her, and she fell down in the midst of the road, a sleepy corpse without sense or motion.
Psyche sleeps and sleeps on the road until Eros comes searching for her. He finds her, tucks the sleep back into its box, wakes her up, and says,
“Again have you almost perished by the same curiosity.”
Eros sends Psyche with the box back to Aphrodite while he visits Zeus, king of the gods, to ask him to intervene with Aphrodite on their behalf. Zeus prevails, of course, and sends Hermes down to pick up Psyche.
When she arrived, handing her a cup of ambrosia, he said, "Drink this, Psyche, and be immortal; nor shall Eros ever break away from the knot in which he is tied, but these nuptials shall be perpetual."
Thus Psyche became at last united to Eros, and in due time they had a daughter born to them whose name was Hedone.
To be Psyche is to attract the ire of wrathful mistress Aphrodite by your very nature. To be Psyche is to be tortured by knowledge both sought and unsought. To be Psyche is to sort impossible quantities of grain, to be brought down into the Underworld to gather black water from the River Styx and boxes full of secrets. To be Psyche is to marry Eros and bear Hedone.
In the story of Eros and Psyche, especially the version brought to us by Apuleis, Psyche doesn’t come across as very wise or even very smart. She’s not playing 10 dimensional chess with the pantheon. She is quite beholden to her emotions. She is very curious and very naïve. She doesn’t think very hard about what she or doing or why she is doing it because what she is focused on is being in love with love himself. She’s not cunning, not conniving. She is subject to the whims of greater powers, yes, but also subject to the will of her parents, and subject to manipulation by her sisters. She makes it from her kingdom to Eros’ kingdom and across the countryside and through the underworld with the help of the gods, not through her own ingenuity or forethought.
This description does not fit the description of someone we would call psychologically minded or even very competent. After all, Psyche is not studying her soul, she is just being Soul. If Psyche were to reflect at all, of course, she would cease to be the Psyche of myth. So we mere psyches have to do it for her. We have a whole field of study dedicated to this task. What’s up with you, Psyche? Why can’t you just be a good daughter? Why do you keep sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong? Why do you keep answering to Aphrodite even though she clearly has it out for you? And why do all the other gods favor you? Why can’t you get your emotions under control and stop throwing yourself off buildings, for Zeus’ sake?!
To be psychologically minded is to ask questions like these. To be psychologically minded is to situate one soul among souls.
One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave
the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:
sad is Eros, builder of cities,
and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
—W.H. Auden, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”, 1939
Introspection is the kind of thing that can’t be self reported very reliably. Don’t we all know people who think they’re really keenly introspective but who are actually just very fucking neurotic? Don’t we all know people who think they’re introspective but are missing huge swaths of territory to introspect because they actually have very low intraception and/or distorted self concept? Don’t we all worry that maybe we are secretly just one of the above? …No?
Trauma, intersubjectivity, dissociation.
Attempts have been made to do something like this, actually. Conte made a psychological mindedness scale and tried to measure what it had to do with treatment outcomes. His definition of psychological mindedness for this article is this: “an attribute of an individual that presupposes a degree of access to one’s feelings, a willingness to try to understand oneself and others, a belief in the benefit of discussing one’s problems, and interest in the meaning and motivation of one’s own and others’ thoughts, feelings, and behavior, and a capacity for change”. His study measured each of these five items. From the abstract of his paper: “PM was unrelated to levels of functioning and psychosocial symptoms at admission and positively associated with number of sessions attended.” (emphasis mine)
Some people do really seem to think this.
I guess it makes sense that they aren’t calling this field Soul Studies in university, but that’s what it its name is, and that’s what it is, to the extent that the True Self exists in the False Self.
Subscribed just to say: I LOVED this. Not sure I've ever felt so seen by a piece of writing. Keep it coming!
you are blossoming into your FULL GLORIOUS WEIRDNESS