Abstract
At the entrance of the Temple of Delphi, the inscription possibly best known in the history of ideas warned about the importance of self-knowledge. In turn, this inscription is philosophically unfolded by the argument that one can only know oneself who cares, since caring is already in itself, to know oneself. Accordingly, many of the ancient medical practices recommended healing through the word (of which there are numerous examples, like for instance, the Egyptians or the Greeks). However, only with the advent of clinical hypnosis (even that it started with some wrong ideas such as magnetism or mesmerism) has this practice recovered, which in theoretical terms seems to run counter to the main lines of the philosophy of mind, whether from the physicalist or the dualistic point of view. In this essay, we will try to show to what extent the concepts of caring and mind can be compatible according to these areas.
“The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind ”.
William James
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Notes
- 1.
Some examples of kings who by the “touch” healed and that Streeter refers: «The Greek king Pyrrhus, of Epirus (318–272 b. C. (...) was attributed to the touch of the big toe of his foot the ability to cure diseases. At least two Roman emperors, Vespasian (9–79 a. C.) and Hadrian (76–138 a. C.) were also known to possess similar powers. (...) Closer to our times, the ability to heal by touch was also attributed to the English King Edward, the Confessor (1003–1066), and Philip I of France, almost contemporaneous. These examples point to what we would now call the power of suggestion». (Streeter 2004: 11).
- 2.
For this purpose, please see: Bachelard, Gaston (1990. A Psicanálise do Fogo. São Paulo: Martins Fontes; Eliade, Mircea (1964). Shamanism and the Archaic Techiniques of Ecstasy. London: Routledge; Koubetch, V. (2004). Da Criação à Parusia. São Paulo: Paulinas; Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1948). La Vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara. Paris: Société des américanistes; Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1955). Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon; Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1962). La Pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon; Vidal, Fernando (2005). Le sujet cerebral: une esquiss historique et conceptuelle, Psychiatrie, sciences humaines, neurosciences 3 (11): 37–48; Vieira, Raymondo Mano (2012), Raízes Históricas da Medicina Ocidental. São Paulo: Unifesp.
- 3.
Cf. Valerie Austin, Self-Hypnosis (2015), about the notion that hypnotic communication is made through suggestion, in its various forms and aspects.
- 4.
«The Greeks, on their side, had what are sometimes called sleeping temples, where the patients, desperate for a cure, lay down and slept. It was believed that the cure for the patient’s illness would appear to him in a dream as he slept. Of these temples, the most popular was the one dedicated to the Greek god of healing, Asclepius, who was probably a physician who lived around 1220 BC. The fame of his healing powers led him to be worshiped as a god, first by the Greeks and then by the Romans (…). These temples existed throughout the Greek world and were seen as a common and perfectly normal way of seeking treatment. It was believed that it was the gods who penetrated the idea of healing deep into the patient’s mind». (Streeter 2004: 10–11).
- 5.
«In 1841, Dr. James Braid, a famous English surgeon, scholar of the hypnotic phenomenon, ignored the term “animal magnetism” and, based on the dream principle, introduced the word hypnotism, derived from the Greek word Hypnos, meaning sleep». (Fontes 2013: 59).
- 6.
«A few years later, in 1847, Braid revised his thinking to give preeminence to psychological factors and somewhat minimized the physiological; thus, he advanced to the third stage. At that point he regretted his general use of the term neuro-hypnotism, because the nervous sleep had become for him only a special case of the more fundamental principle of exclusively concentrated attention (monoideism, that is, single-idea-ism). But the very change from one misnomer to another, from mesmerism to hypnotism, helped to alter mesmerism’s public and professional image». (Fromm and Shor 2009: 25).
- 7.
As it is known, Freud would abandon hypnosis although, according to Shor, he has never lost interest in it. Shor emphasizes that this abandonment was due to a methodological need and to the historical-social circumstances that the science of the psyche was assuming: «Freud’s development of psychoanalysis began somewhat paradoxically with his rejection of hypnotism as his scientific and therapeutic method – but he never lost interest in developing a theoretical understanding of hypnosis. Freud turned instead to free association and the analysis of dreams as his “royal road” to the unconscious, but hypnotism is properly recognized as the treasure map that send him forth on his journey. (…) Freud’s abandonment of hypnosis as a therapeutic method was a wise decision if not a historic necessity, since the authority and obedience brand of hypnotism that dominated his era was too unwieldly, artifact-laden, and encrusted with transference and countertransference problems to allow the slow, painstaking, detached exploration of the hidden inner world which he needed». (Fromm and Shor 2009: 32).
- 8.
«Referring to the already recalled distinction between verbal or direct suggestion and nonverbal or indirect suggestion, Freud refers to the similarity between psychic processes that take place in non-verbal suggestion and those that generate hysterical symptoms. “It is not so much a suggestion as an incitement to self-suggestion, which, as you well understand, contains an objective factor, independent of the will of the doctor … By virtue of this self-suggestion spontaneous hysterical paralyzes arise, and the tendency to the self-suggestion characterizes hysteria much more than suggestibility before the doctor (...)». (Andersson 2000: 95).
- 9.
The term epiphenomenalism appears in William James’s The Principles of Psychology (it occurs once in the chapter entitled “The Automaton-Theory”), but some writers found the underlying roots of the word in Thomas Henry Huxley, published in 1874 with the suggestive title “On the hypothesis that animals are automata, and its history”. However, we think that a first formulation is found in the Essai de Psychologie of the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet, dating from 1755.
- 10.
«A partir de nuestras discusiones de que la mente es más que simple actividad cerebral y de que es plenamente corpórea, hemos adquirido una perspectiva más amplia de lo que la mente supone. Al considerar que la realidad subjetiva no es idéntica a la fisiológica, ni siquiera a la activación neural en la cabeza, hemos llegado a darnos cuenta de que la vida mental no es una actividad encerrada en el cráneo. También estamos en un punto de nuestro viaje que nos permite considerar que la mente puede ser más que la mera experiencia subjetiva y la conciencia de esa sensación de vida vivida». (Siegel 2017: 220–221).
- 11.
If the philosopher of the Phenomenology of Perception views the Freudian apparatus of the unconscious as itself unconscious, criticizing the pretensions of unveiling a psychic apparatus that must live by the perceptive consciousness, already in the later work The Visible and the Invisible, the dialogue with Psychoanalysis and with Freudism will be highlighted by the analysis of the pre-objective order of language.
- 12.
Remember the major sentence of Husserl to define consciousness: «the fundamental property of the modes of consciousness, which the self lives as I [self], is the so-called intentionality, which is always to be aware of something». (Husserl 1992: 21).
The concept of intentionality is translated by the premise that all consciousness is consciousness of something. The notion of intentionality defined an original character of the psychic phenomenon. But, while retaining this character as one of the definitive acquisitions of psychology, Husserl will use it for other purposes: this character will enable him, precisely, to go beyond the limits of the psychic phenomenon given in the inner perception. In fact, according to Brentano, the mode of relation of consciousness to its content is still understood as relating to an immanent object, “intentional in-existence” of the object. From this definition, Husserl maintains only the idea that consciousness is always related to something, and “that there are specific varieties of the intentional relation: the representative, judicative, volitional, emotive, aesthetic modes” in which the object is targeted, each in a different way». (Kelkel and Schérer 1982: 32).
- 13.
« If all our mental states are different from each other, this also includes thought. The fact that we feel our thoughts happening in our heads makes them a special type of qualia. The paradox is that it can become an intersubjective qualia insofar as it can be communicated through language. (…) So, when I ask how I can know if your anger is as intense as mine, the answer is: always». (Teixeira 2010: 104–105).
- 14.
The author also explains the difference between the search of neurophenomenology and cognitive neuroscience: «First, as we have seen, neurophenomenology does not only search for correlations between experience and neural activity. It proposes, on the one hand, to generate fist-person data that can be used in interpreting physical activity and, on the other hand, to use third-person data to refine first-person data (…). Second, neurophenomenology does not interpret the “dynamical neural signatures” of conscious experience as “minimal sufficient” for consciousness. This point is easy to overlook; after all, neurophenomenology has so far investigated correlations between experience and brain processes only, and the term “neurophenomenology” itself may suggest that brain processes are taken to be sufficient for consciousness, yet neurophenomenology, as an offshoot of the enactive approach, is not committed to this view. According to enactivism, brain activity is only a part of the larger biological system (the situated organism) that enacts the mind, including consciousness». (Colombetti 2013: 142).
- 15.
Siegel, 2017: 14.
- 16.
Eagleman thus synthesizes Libet’s experiences (in the 1960s) «[Libet] placed electrodes on the head of a series of subjects and assigned them a simple task: to raise their finger at a time chosen by them. The subjects looked at a high-resolution chronometer and were asked to note the exact moment when they “felt the urge” to make the move. Libet found that people were aware of the urge to move their fingers about a quarter of a second before they did. But this was not the surprising part. Libet looked at the records of the electroencephalogram - the brain waves - and discovered something even more curious: the activity in the brains had begun to rise before the subjects felt the urge to make the move. And it had not been lightly before. It had been more than a second before. (...) In other words, parts of the brain were already making decisions well before the person experienced the push consciously. (...) Libet’s experiences provoked a commotion. Could the conscious mind be the last link in the chain of command to receive information?». (Eagleman 2012: 180–181).
- 17.
Siegel 2017:19.
- 18.
This representation is also often used to describe the attributes of the imagination (as a human mental faculty).
- 19.
Damian Hamil in An Introduction to Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy, devotes virtually a whole chapter trying to demystify the wrong beliefs about hypnosis. In summary, the main points of the 2nd chapter: «Myth – hypnosis is a form of sleep; Myth – a hypnotic subject is in the power of the hypnotist; Myth – you can get ‘stuck’ in trance; Myth – hypnosis is a battle of wills between the subject and the hypnotist; Myth – when in trance there is a risk that you will reveal all your innermost secrets; Myth – you can’t remember what happens during trance; Myth – if you are hypnotized by one person, no-one else can hypnotize you; Myth – the power to hypnotize is a ‘gift’ you are born with». Hamill 2012: 23.
Still on this subject, see: Battino, Rubin, e, South, Thomas L. 1997. Ericksonian Approaches. A Comprehensive Manual. Bancyfelin: Crown House Publishing Limited; Green, J. P. 2003. Beliefs about hypnosis: Popular beliefs, misconceptions and the importance of experience. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 51: 369–381; Bauer, Sofia. Manual de Hipnoterapia Ericksoniana. Rio de Janeiro: Wak Editora.
- 20.
«Dr. Erickson was a proponent of hypnosis as an altered “state”, but he had many definitions for the phenomenon, some of which did not use the concept of “state” at all». (Zeig 2014: 83–84).
- 21.
Tart published at the beginning of his career a book called, Altered States of Consciousness in which he defined an altered state of consciousness as a state in which a subject made a qualitative leap (of patterns) in mental functioning. Note that Tart had a greater interest in parapsychology and for him an altered state of consciousness had a mystical, transcendental, or spiritual charge (this is clearly visible in the essay of 1967, «Psychedelic Experiences Associated with a Novel Hypnotic Procedure, Mutual Hypnosis», American Journal of Clinical Hipnosis, 19: 65–78.
- 22.
Rules Committee Packet – Attachment 12, The American Psychiatric Association: pp. 96–97)
- 23.
A fasciculation is a small, local, momentary and involuntary muscle contraction that may be visible under the skin or detected more deeply with electromyography. Fasciculation occurs as a result of spontaneous depolarizations of low motor neurons, leading to the synchronous contraction of all skeletal muscle fibers into a single motor unit. Note that fasciculations can occur in any skeletal muscle in the body
- 24.
In the prologue to the work of Hanson and Mendius, Buddha’s Brain, Daniel Siegel refers precisely to this point: «Although in the past many practitioners in the field have stated that the mind is only the activity of the brain, we can now see the relationship between these two dimensions of life under a new perspective. If we consider the mind as a personified and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information, we will realize that we can actually use it to transform the brain. The question is how the concentration of attention and the intentional directing of the flow of energy and information through the neural circuits are capable of directly altering the activity and structure of the brain. The key is to know the steps to be followed using consciousness to promote well-being. Knowing that the mind is relational and that the brain is the social organ of the body, we come to another point of view: relationships are not a casual part of life; are, in fact, fundamental to determining how the mind works, as well as being essential for brain health. The social relations we establish shape our neural connections that form the structure of the brain. This means that the way we communicate changes the circuits of the brain, especially helping maintain the balance of life». (Hanson and Mendius 2009: 7).
- 25.
«Today’s psychology textbooks typically describe two different kinds of empathy: Affective empathy This is about mirroring or sharing other people’s emotions. So, if you see anguish on a child’s face and you too feel anguish, that is affective empathy. If, on the other hand, you notice their anguish but feel a different emotion, such as pity (‘Oh, the poor little thing,’ you might think), then you are showing sympathy rather than empathy. Sympathy generally refers to an emotional response that is not shared. Affective empathy can also include sharing positive emotions such as joy, which distinguishes it from the concept of ‘compassion’, which does not involve positive emotional resonance . Cognitive empathy (or ‘perspective-taking empathy’) This is where you really try to put yourself in the shoes of another person and imagine their values, experiences, hopes and fears – their whole mental outlook. We do this quite naturally all the time. You might walk past a homeless person begging on the street and rather than just feeling sorry for her (which is sympathy) you try to imagine what it might be like to ‘be her’ – to sleep out rough on a cold winter night, or to have somebody walk straight past you without looking you in the eye». (Krznaric 2015: 6).
- 26.
Krznaric contrasts with introspection (albeit recognizing as fundamental to self-understanding) the “othernesspection”, that is, the idea of discovering its place and its identity and how it is to live outside itself, in order to discover the life of others people and their cultures. Cf. Empathy: A Handbook for Revolution.
- 27.
«Empathy is difficult to measure, and like measures of happiness or wellbeing, quantitative indices tend to be based on self-reported ratings (and so should be treated with caution). One of the most respected measures is Simon Baron-Cohen’s Empathy Quotient, where people rate themselves on a four-point scale on the extent to which they agree with 40 statements that tap into both affective and cognitive empathy (statements include, for instance, ‘In a conversation, I tend to focus on my own thoughts rather than on what my listener might be thinking’). What does the data reveal? Empathy is distributed normally across the population in the familiar bell-curve shape. Around 98% of people exhibit at least some capacity to empathize. A minority of some 2% show ‘no empathy at all’ or ‘zero degrees of empathy’, according to Baron-Cohen. These include people with psychopathic tendencies, and also those with Asperger Syndrome (who can find it hard to cognitively understand others’ feelings although they may still have a caring nature) ». (Krznaric 2015: 9).
- 28.
As Colombetti states: «also, we know from therapeutic techniques, such as music therapy , that overtly imitating and matching the other is an effective way to indicate that one is paying attention to the other, and to “resonate” experientially with him, thus establishing rapport. Admittedly, the therapist needs to use techniques skillfully, or otherwise the client may feel ridiculed, but the point is that in some contexts overt mimicry appears to importantly contribute to the establishment of an affective bond». (Colombetti 2014: 195).
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Castro, P.A.e. (2021). Take Care of Your Mind: A Short Discussion Between Clinical Hypnosis and Philosophy of Mind. In: Braga, J., Santiago de Carvalho, M. (eds) Philosophy of Care. Advancing Global Bioethics, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75478-5_22
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