The Self-healing Mind:
Harnessing the Active Ingredients of Psychotherapy
To be published by Oxford University Press
Evolutionary psychology/psychiatry teaches us about why some mental illnesses developed. However, Brian J. McVeigh, a mental health counselor and anthropologist, argues that much more recent changes in mentality hold lessons about improving our mental well-being. Indeed, by around 1000 BCE population expansion and social complexity had forced people to learn conscious interiority, a package of capabilities that culturally upgraded mentality. The functions/features of conscious interiority (FOCI) are instances of adaptive meta-framing: abstracting, metaphorizing, reframing, and transcending our circumstances. Adopting a common factors and positive psychology perspective, McVeigh enumerates FOCI—“active ingredients”—of the self-healing mind: mental space (introspectable stage for manipulating mental images); introception (employing semi-hallucinatory quasi-perceptions to “see” different perspectives); self observing and observed (increasing role/perspective-taking); self-narratization (intensifying retrospection/prospection capabilities); excerption (editing mental contents for higher-order conceptualization); consilience (fitting conceptions together more effectively to bolster abstraction); concentration (peripheralizing unrelated mental material); suppression (deleting distracting and distressing thoughts); self-authorization (self-legitimizing one’s decisions and volitional behavior); self-autonomy (bolstering self-direction and self-confidence); self-individuation (highlighting personal strengths); self-reflexivity (cultivating insight, self-objectivity, and self-corrective abilities). FOCI underlie the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic techniques. Though psyche’s recuperative properties correct distorted cognition and grant us remarkable adaptive abilities, FOCI sometimes spiral out of control, resulting in runaway consciousness and certain mental disorders. Also addressed, then, is how snowballing FOCI become maladaptive processes in need of restraint. The benefits of temporarily suspending FOCI (hypnosis) and regulating them (meditation) are also explored. This work will appeal to practitioners, researchers, and anyone interested in how therapeutically-directed consciousness repairs the mind.
The Psychology of Ancient Egypt: Reconstructing a Lost Mentality
Does ancient Egypt, with its innumerable gods and goddesses, magnificent temples, and monumental mortuary architecture, have lessons for psychology? This exploration challenges assumptions about Egyptology, the study of other ancient societies, and the nature of human cognition. Adopting a cognitive relativistic approach, this work reconstructs the mentality of this impressive civilization that continues to fascinate the modern imagination. By surveying the spiritual landscape of glorified ancestors, radiant gods, and a theocentric social order crowned by awe-inspiring pharaohs that lasted for three millennia, this book argues that depictions of supernatural visitations were not mere mytho-literary fabrications. Rather, they were recountings of audiovisual hallucinations interpreted as divine guidance. Moreover, the multiple manifestations of the deceased—Kas (spiritual doubles), Bas (human-headed bird body‒souls), and Akhs (transfigured dead)—evidence hallucinated visitations. These experiences have their roots in a vision-inducing psycholinguistic communication system that developed in response to population pressures during the agricultural revolution for purposes of social control, i.e., as groups expanded in size individuals “heard” or “saw” authoritative figures who were not present. But the communication system that propelled humankind through the agricultural and urban revolutions could not prop up inherently fragile theopolities. Demographic expansion, sociopolitical complexity, and the Late Bronze Age Collapse led to civilizational implosion. By around 1000 BCE individuals were forced to culturally learn an even more adaptive mentality, i.e., introspectable conscious interiority. But the legacy of the older mentality is still with us: the successor to hallucinations—semi-hallucinatory inner imagery—allows us to mentally “picture” and navigate the world. The descendants of what were once apparitional figures of the “blessed dead” haunt us as present-day doppelgängers and autoscopic experiences generated by vestigial neurostructures
