Models of the mind
What happens when psychologists can’t agree?
Re-Assembling Reality #25a, by David A. Palmer and Mike Brownnutt
In Re-Assembling Reality #24 and #25, we discussed the meaning of the Greek term psyche as a conception of vitality; while Aristotle’s work on psyche is typically translated as On the Soul. But the psyche is now known to us as the root of the term psychology — a scientific discipline which, in its orthodox form, firmly rejects anything to do with either vitalism or the soul, but is rather concerned with the “mind”. The term psyche is connected to the distinct but interconnected notions of mind, soul, and vitality. In this essay and the next, we will unpack these ideas, considering what they can tell us about the relationship between science and religion.
Psychological models
The American Psychological Association (APA) states that “Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior.” A medical magazine specifies that “It is the study of the mind, how it works, and how it affects behavior.” The discipline of psychology, then, currently rests on the belief that there is some thing called the “mind”, which has a causal impact on another thing, called “behaviour”. As a scientific discipline, it also rests on the belief that the workings of the mind can be known and researched.
What is the mind? How does it work? And how does it affect behaviour? In standard introductory accounts of American psychology, there are five major “perspectives” or “approaches” in psychology (though, in some accounts, there are six or seven). Each of these approaches is based on a different model of the mind, of its mechanisms, and of its effects. Although they are all recognised as part of the same discipline of psychological science, they are based on contradictory ontological assumptions about the nature of the world, the human being, and the “mind”.
In the behaviorist model, we don’t need to know what is going on inside the mind. The only thing that matters is how humans behave, and how peoples’ behaviour can be modified. The model has three basic components: a “black box” (the mind), what is inputted into the box (the stimulus) and what comes out of the box (the behavioural response). In this model, we don’t need to know anything about the mind itself: whether or not the mind exists, how it is made, and its inner workings are irrelevant questions. The only things that matter are the stimulus and the response. When you train a horse the only thing that matters is figuring out the right stimulus (a piece of bread, a kick on the side) that will trigger the right response (jumping through a hoop). You don’t really need to know anything about the horse’s mind. The practical causes and effects of behaviour are all that matters.
In the cognitive approach, the mind is modelled as an information processing machine, analogous to a computer. What matters in this model is the input and output of information, and the mechanisms by which the mind processes information. Here, the mind isn’t a black box: we want to know what is going on inside the box. What are the input processes — how information from the external environment is handled by processing systems such as attention, perception and short-term memory; storage processes — how the information is stored and altered in the mind; and output processes — how information is retrieved, and prepared, and presented in response to a stimulus.
In the biological approach, the model of the mind is the same as the biological model of the brain. All behaviour is caused by physical processes including the brain structure, brain chemistry, and genetics. Different behaviours are associated with specific areas of the brain, such as the frontal lobe or the hypothalamus. Behaviours can also be associated with neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin, or in terms of other hormones, such as testosterone or estrogen. Alternatively, behavioural characteristics, such as intelligence or mental illness, may be the result of genetic inheritance. With the biological model, we want to learn more about how the brain structure, its chemical changes, hormones, and genetics influence behaviour. The causes of abnormal or unhealthy behaviour or thinking are caused by biological dysfunctions; to understand a person’s mental problem, we need to understand what is wrong with their brain. The problem could be structural damage or abnormalities in the brain (caused, for example, by disease); chemical abnormalities in the brain (caused for example by toxins or drugs); or genetic abnormalities of the brain.
The solution might then involve brain surgery to intervene on the structure; pharmaceutical drugs or hormone treatments to intervene in the chemistry; or, more recently, gene therapies to intervene at the genetic level.
The psychodynamic approach involves many models; for the sake of simplicity we focus here on Freud’s psycho-analytic model, which is the source of the psychodynamic approach. In this model, the mind consists of unconscious, pre-conscious and conscious regions. The unconscious includes those things that are not in our conscious awareness, including many memories and thoughts, as well as urges, especially sexual drives that are considered inappropriate and that we prefer to suppress and not think about. The pre-conscious includes those things we can bring to our conscious attention whenever we wish; while the conscious includes everything we are consciously aware of. This division of the mind based on degrees of consciousness is overlaid by a tri-partite model of the self, consisting of the id, the ego and the superego. The id consists of our instinctive drives including sexual and aggressive impulses; it is largely unconscious. The superego is our moral conscience coming from society; much of it is also unconscious. The ego is the part of us that tries to find a realistic balance between the conflicting pressures of the id and of the superego. In the Freudian model, psychological problems occur when the ego is unable to manage these stresses and succumbs to either the id or the superego. Psycho-analysts who use this model try to bring the unconscious forces into consciousness, and to help the ego to manage them better.
Finally, the humanistic approach looks at each person holistically, as a unique individual who has his or her own path of development and self-actualization. All people have free will and the potential to actualise their innate capacities. In the model developed by Abraham Maslow, the founder of humanistic psychology, all humans have a hierarchy of needs, beginning with physiological needs, then the need for safety and security, the need for love and belonging, the need for esteem, and finally the need for self-actualization. The goal of the psychotherapist or educator is to help create the conditions for the person to progress in the development of their potential and their path of self-actualization.
How the models differ
These five approaches to psychology are based on completely different ontological and epistemological assumptions.
We see through this quick survey that, even though all five approaches are classed as psychology, they are dealing with very different types of things: behaviour, the brain, information, a fractured psyche, or a holistic self. Each approach adopts a different cosmology, that is to say, a completely different model of what entities constitute that part of the universe that is the human mind. There is no necessary connection between any of them: a biological psychologist might agree that a holistic self emerges from the brain, or she might deny the existence of such a self altogether. Either way, it needn’t matter for her research on the brain. Maybe information exists, and maybe egos don’t exist, but it isn’t even worth discussing because those things are irrelevant to the model and, therefore, uninteresting to that branch of psychology. The same could apply for a practitioner of any of the other approaches: working with one type of entity neither implies nor excludes that any or all of the other entities exist.
Each approach works with its own limited set of entities that are connected within its model, and no psychologist works with a single bag containing brains, minds, information, subjective experience, hormones, symbols, consciousness, genes, black boxes, drives, toxins, needs, behaviours, neurotransmitters, and superegos. Even where the same thing, such as the “mind”, turns up in two different cosmologies, it might have a very different place, and even a different ontological nature, in that cosmology: depending on the cosmology, the mind might be an emergent property of the brain; it might be a primary entity in itself; it might be a vehicle for the id, ego, and superego; and so on.
Ultimately, then, a question such as “what is the mind” depends on the cosmology that is being used, where the mind is located within the set of entities that constitutes the cosmology, and the uses to which the cosmology is put. The cosmologies may or may not be mutually compatible, and it may or may not be possible to integrate some or all of them into a single system. But what ultimately matters to psychologists and to people who turn to psychologists, is whether the cosmology can be put to good use to get a handle on whatever is called “mind” — whether it’s to cure someone’s madness, to make someone happy, to correct someone’s behaviour, to enhance someone’s intelligence, to deepen someone’s self-understanding, to make someone buy something, and so on.
Object-based and person-based models
There is one major difference between the cosmologies underlying the models. The biological, cognitive and behavioural models treat their entities as objects — taking the brain, the information or the visible behaviour and treating it in isolation — while the psychodynamic and humanistic approaches treat patients as persons; this is especially and consciously the case with the humanistic approach. It thus comes as no surprise that introductory textbook presentations of the five approaches always mention the “non-scientific” nature of the psychodynamic and humanistic approaches as among their weaknesses. The latter two approaches, in the past few decades, have become increasingly marginal in academic psychology (and have often been relegated to the more feminized, caring disciplines and allied professions of social work and counselling, which enjoy less prestige). Ironically, mainstream psychology — ostensibly the science of the person — does everything it can to avoid dealing with persons.
In spite of these trends and tensions, introductory texts on American academic psychology, which define the boundaries of what is legitimate knowledge in the discipline, always present these five (or more) approaches as respectable branches of psychology, and stress that each has its advantages and weaknesses. Depending on what you are researching or what practical purpose you are trying to accomplish — or simply depending on your personal preferences — you might choose to adopt one approach instead of another. Psychologists are not prevented from identifying as a common profession even though they don’t agree about the most basic questions concerning what the mind is, how it can be known, and what you can do with it.
See here for the next essay on Models of the Soul: Vitality, Personhood, Consciousness and Spirituality.
This essay and the Re-Assembling Reality Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9061 Science and Religion: Questioning Truth, Knowledge and Life, with the support of the Faith and Science Collaborative Research Forum and the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
