The Self-Healing Mind

Description:

Evolutionary psychology explains why some mental illnesses developed, but to answer questions about how to improve our mental well-being in the face of these challenges--how the mind works to heal itself-we should look to more recent changes in mentality.In The Self-Healing Mind, mental health counsellor and anthropologist Brian J. McVeigh postulates that around 1000 BCE, population expansion and social complexity forced people to learn "conscious interiority"--a package of cognitive capabilities that culturally upgraded mentality. He argues that the mental processes that help us get through the day are the same ones that can heal our psyches. Adopting a common factors and positive psychology perspective, McVeigh enumerates and defines these active ingredients of the self-healing mind: mental space, introception, self-observing and observed, self-narratization, excerption, consilience, concentration, suppression, self-authorization, self-autonomy, and self-reflexivity. McVeigh shows how these capabilities underlie the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic techniques and interventions. Though meta-framing effects of psyche's recuperative properties correct distorted cognition and grant us remarkable adaptive abilities, they sometimes spiral out of control, resulting in runaway consciousness and certain mental disorders. This book also addresses how maladaptive processes snowball and come to need restraint themselves.With insights from counseling, psychotherapy, anthropology, and history, The Self-Healing Mind will appeal to practitioners, researchers, and anyone interested in neurocultural plasticity and how therapeutically-directed consciousness repairs the mind.

Table of Contents:

Prologue: Searching for the Active Ingredients of the Self-​Healing Mind

Part I

1. Purposes and Premises: The Therapeutic Properties of Subjectivity

2. What Is Consciousness? Clarifying the Stuff of Mind

Part II

3. The Advantages of Conscious Interiority

4. Runaway Consciousness: The Price of Scaled-​Up Cognition

5. A Brief History of the Interiorization of Psychotherapy

Part III

6. Treating Mental Illness and Facilitating Mental Well-​Being

7. The Nature of Self: Systemized, Serialized, Dramatized

8. The Self-​Organizing Mind: Rhythms, Routines, Rituals

Part IV

9. Using Conscious Interiority as a Therapeutic Tool

10. Key Therapeutic Skills and Conscious Interiority

11. Groups and Families as Therapeutic Systems

12. Emotions and Conscious Interiority

13. Hypnosis and Meditation: Suspending and Modulating Conscious Interiority

14. Human Diversity, Social Adaptation, and Psychotherapy

Epilogue: Final Thoughts

Appendices

A. Synopsis of Positive Psychology

B. Synopsis of Common Factors

C. The Historical Birth of Conscious Interiority

D. What Conscious Interiority Is Not

E. Psyche—​Biological Hardware or Cultural Software?

F. Examples of Metaphoric Creativity

G. Five Perspectives on Conscious Interiority: A Summary

H. Developmental Stages of the Life Span and FOCI

Glossary: A Jaynesian Therapeutic Perspective on Techniques and Interventions

References

About the Author

Index