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A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors in Psychology and the Science in Society
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Wesleyan University The Honors College
Middletown, Connecticut April, 2009
i
Over the past few months I’ve been asked a number of questions about my thesis. A common question has been: “Well, are you being mindful while writing about mindfulness?” I’d like to take this opportunity to thank a few people whom, without their support, I would have been rather mindless through the process.
First, I must thank my advisors Jill Morawski and William Johnston for not only pushing me to think critically, but for providing me an opportunity to work between disciplines. I had heard rumors prior to this year that working with two advisors can be fairly challenging. However, my experience has been quite the opposite and my time with you both has been engaging, informative and inspiring. When I look back on my years at Wesleyan, I know memories of our meetings will be some of my fondest.
I would like to express my gratitude to my writing tutor Kacey Wochna and housemate Sawyer Greene for reading drafts of my thesis and for giving me insight and encouragement along the way. To everyone at the Center of Humanities, thank you so much for the advice and kindness I received during my time as fellow in the fall. I am also indebt to the Inter-Library Loan Service. Thank you for handling what must have seemed like an endless list of requests.
Lastly, to my mother and father for the wisdom, love, and support that made this project possible. I dedicate this project to you both.
From yoga classes at local gyms, to neuroscientific research on meditating Buddhists, there can be no doubt that Eastern styles of meditation have had an increasing influence on Western culture within recent years. Even Jon Stewart’s popular television show “The Daily Show” ironically references the movement in a regular comic feature called the “Moment of Zen.” While there is a long tradition of Eastern meditative practices in the United States, the extent to which it has become a cultural force today has not been seen since the heyday of the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In its most current incarnation, however, the influences of meditation go far beyond a youthful and rebellious counterculture to the very mainstream of society, including the biomedical establishment. This thesis examines one of the more popular meditative practices being used in the medical world today called mindfulness meditation. The goal of my study is to critically examine this movement, asking w hy has mindfulness come to popularity now and what can understanding its emergence reveal about the production of psychological knowledge today? The word “mindfulness” as used in mindfulness meditation, is a translation of the term sati from the Indo-Aryan language of Pali, although it
has not always been the preferred translation into English.^1 Sati was described by the historical Buddha in discourses attributed to him known as the Anapanasati Sutra and the Satipathana Sutra. In the variant of mindfulness meditation in twenty-first century Western culture, much of the practice has been stripped of its historically Buddhist context. Instead, it has been adapted to secular, universal and medical practices. Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center describes mindfulness as the awareness that emerges through attending to the present moment from a nonjudgmental perspective. By shifting preoccupation away from the past and future, practitioners of mindfulness “drop in to” the “actuality of the lived experience.”^2 An example of a mindfulness technique used in MBSR is the body-scan, during which participants direct attention and awareness towards various areas of their bodies. Other techniques include sitting meditation, Hatha yoga, diaphragmatic breathing, among others. Kabat-Zinn often writes that
(^1) Alternative translations have included “self-possession,” “attention,” “concentration of mind development,” and “bare attention.” The translation to the English term mindfulness was first used byRhys Davids in The Questions of King Milinda I at the turn of the 20th century. A half century later, Nyanoponika Thera’s used the same term in his textalong with Thich Nhat Hahn’s Miracle of Mindfulness The Heart of Buddhist Meditation and Daniel Goleman’s The Varieties of the. These texts, Meditative Experiences the term sati in the West; see Dryden, W., & Still, A. (2006). “Historical aspects of mindfulness and, set the stage for the popular usage of the term mindfulness as a translation for self-acceptance in psychotherapy.”3-28. Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy 24 (1): (^2) Kabat-Zinn, J. (2003). “Mindfulness-based intervention in context: past, present, and future.” American Psychological Association 12 : 148.
United States alone.^5 The influence of mindfulness in the world of psychotherapy is also evident in the growing number of therapists and counselors who teach and use mindfulness themselves as one of several tools in the course of therapy.^6 The clinical effects of mindfulness meditation have caught the attention of evidence-based researchers. A recent search on the abstracts database PsychInfo received 1266 hits for the search term “mindfulness.” 7 In fact, more than seventy scientific articles on mindfulness meditation were published in scholarly journals during the year 2007 alone. The efficacy studies on mindfulness meditation have explored its usefulness for treating Eating Disorders, Depression, Psoriasis, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Anxiety Disorder, Fibromyalgia, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Boderline Personality Disorder, and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.^8 This list is just the tip of the iceberg. In many ways, mindfulness meditation has become a kind of panacea for contemporary ills. Despite a wealth of literature on how to engage in mindfulness meditation, there are few histories of mindfulness meditation. The histories that
(^5) “Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society: Stress Reduction Program” University of Massachusetts Medical Center http://www.umassmed.edu/content.aspx?id=41252.; [Broacher]: 1; (^6) There is reason to believe that DBT and ACT centers are also expanding, but there is limited statistical evidence available; (^7) Search completed on April 11 Personal communication th 2009 , Dr. Daniel Guerra, October, 2008. http://ovidsp.tx.ovid.com/spa/ovidweb.cgi?&S=AOBFFPEDCIDDPBDFNCGLKDJJJKPFAA00&SELECT=S.sh%7c&R=1&Process+Action=display. (^8) Baer, R. A. (2003). “Mindfulness training as a clinical intervention: A conceptual and empirical review.” Clinical Psychology: Science and Practic e 10 : 125-143.
do exist take the approach of naïve naturalism, a view that tends to trace a history of popular theories and theorists. By contrast, critical histories consider the social and cultural contexts and explore the relationship between power and knowledge. Rather than implying blame, the word critical is used in the sense of opening up the possibility for analytical perspectives. Critical histories investigate the past as a way to think differently about the present. However, nearly no critical histories exist in the literature on mindfulness.^9 As a critical history my thesis proposes that the emergence of mindfulness is intimately tied to modern notions of self and represents a turn towards a thought style that has deep roots in the American psychological tradition, that is, one that turns itself towards the space between the two dominant thought collectives of the past century and a half in psychology. Drawing on his experiences as a clinical bacteriologist and immunologist, Polish physician Ludwik Fleck posited that training, preconceptions, and anticipations can shape how objects are thought of in scientific inquiry and that scientific facts are constructed within “thought collectives” consisting of individuals who share similar “thought styles.” 10 This study proposes that modern psychology has negotiated between two particular thought collectives, those that champion mechanistic thought styles, and those that privilege
(^9) For an exception see Barker, K. (2007). "Self-healing in late-modernity: The case of mindfulness." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York City 11, 2007. , Aug (^10) Fleck, L. (1935/1979). Genesis and development of a scientific fact. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.
turn, explores the impetus for its recent popularity, and hypothesizes on the waxing and waning of mechanistic and subjectivist thought styles in the history of psychology more generally. This chapter will explore how directions in the production of psychological knowledge are intimately tied to developments in culture, particularly popular conceptions of self. Furthermore, that psychology is currently caught in a paradigm that negotiates between mechanistic and subjectivist thought styles due to this relationship.
In looking back to the work of William James and the humanistic psychologists, this chapter aims to better understand the common threads to these turns away from mechanistic psychologies and towards more subjectivist thought styles. The goal is not, however, to establish a direct intellectual lineage between the two and mindfulness. Examining the social and cultural contexts of these two turns offers clues for understanding that which influences mindfulness today.
William James as a Subjectivist Turn By the turn of the twentieth century, the nascent field of psychology was attempting to establish itself on equal scientific footing with physics, chemistry, and astronomy. Many psychologists attempted to replicate the design of these fields by privileging “objective” experimental methods. In 1879, German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt opened the first laboratory committed to experimental psychology at a university in Leipzig, Germany. Wundt posited that consciousness can and should only be observed through the manipulation of internal conditions so that they can be witnessed externally. For example, in the controlled conditions of the laboratory, Wundt conducted experiments on how subjects responded to physical stimuli of varying
subjectivism. The historian George Mandler notes that the duality of Wundt’s approach, one that used both formalized experimentation and geisteswissenschaft , characterized the nineteenth century German split between democratic and radical idealism on one side and Prussian militarism and radical rationalism on the other.^12 Wundt battled these opposing forces in his own life, which was very much reflected in his psychology. In this sense, the tensions between subjectivist and mechanistic approaches contributed to the very birth of modern psychology. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, a professor at Harvard named William James was grappling with some of the very same concerns as Wundt. James came to believe that the emerging rigidity and mechanistic emphasis within experimental psychology were sending the field off course. Psychologist Edna Heidbreder writes that, while other psychologists at the time were intent on “making the new psychology a science,” James was concerned that “the new science be psychology.”^13 In 1890, James addressed this concern in The Principles of Psychology, which shook the very ground that the new scientific psychology was standing on. The American Psychological Association has described James’s groundbreaking text as “without question the most literate, the most provocative, and at the same time the most intelligible book on psychology that has ever appeared in English or in any
(^1213) Mandler, G. (2007). A history of modern experimental psychology. Cambridge, The MIT Press. Heidbreder, E. (1933). Seven psychologies. New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts: 152.
other language.”^14 One of the more subjectivist leaning section in Principles is James’s writing on the stream of consciousness. While other psychologists of his era were attempting to explain why consciousness exists, James sought to describe consciousness for the perspective of the lived experience. Regarding the positivistic pursuits of his peers he wrote that consciousnesses, “certainly follows or accompanies our brain states, and of course their special forms are determined by our past experiences and education… [however] we have not the remotest inkling of an answer to give” as to the question of why consciousness exists. 15 For James, determinism is impossible and, therefore, explanation should be discounted in favor of description.^16 James held that deconstructing mental life by reducing mental states to physical brain states treats the individual as if it is “completely without any power of modifying… Inert, uninfluential, a simple passenger on the voyage of life.” 17 He described a then current mechanistic conception of the human mind as follows: An influential school of psychology, seeking to avoid haziness of outline, has tried to make things appear more exact and scientific by making the analysis more sharp. The various fields of consciousness, according to this school result from a definite number of perfectly definite elementary mental states,
(^14) MacLeod, R. (1969). William James: unfinished business. Washington, D.C., American Psychological Association: iii. (^15) James, W. (1899). Talks to teachers. Boston, Geo.H. Ellis Co. (Inc.): 20. (^16) James, W. (1884). "The dilemma of determinism" in James, W. (1884). Will to believe. Unitarian Review. (^17) James, W. (1879). "Are We Automata?" Mind 4 : 1-22.
“distances and prices, populations and drainage-arrangements, door-and window-fastenings.” Another traveler will recount “the theaters, restaurants, and public halls,” while a fourth might “perhaps have been so wrapped in his own subjective broodings as to be able to tell little more than a few names of places through which he passed.”^21 In selecting specific objects of attention, each experiences a different reality. In his theory on the stream of consciousness, James moved away from a static and quite literally mechanistic conceptualization of mind, that of “links on a chain.”^22 Instead, James writes, “consciousness then does not appear chopped up in bits…it is nothing jointed; it flows…In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.” 23 In turning away from determinism to more experiential ways of knowing, James called for psychology to consider what could be called more subjectivist thought styles. However, James maintained certain mechanistic assumptions. In his view, subjective ways of knowing were quite difficult to realize accurately. In fact, not only did James teach a course in experimental psychology at Harvard during his early years with the university, but he established the Harvard laboratories, and, in doing so, pioneered the laboratory methods of German psychologists in America. Nevertheless, James felt that highly objective
(^2122) James, W. (1890/2007). Principles of psychology. In Cosimo Classics: 286. 23 Ibid: 239Ibid: 239.
approaches and their mechanical accounts of mental life missed the genuine questions that ought to be asked in a science of mental life; ambitions, worries, and love were just as much part of experience as the topics being examined in the new scientific psychology such as stimulus response and the reflex arc. Unsatisfied with the limitations of both subjective and objective ways of knowing, James introduced the idea of lived experience as a way of knowing in the psychological sciences with a postulate that came to be known as radical empiricism. He posited that experience includes both “particulars” and “relations between particulars,” and that meaning comes from explanations that include both; understanding an object is more than just explaining an object’s deterministic state, rather it must also include the object in relation to the subject. James writes, “The relations that connect experiences must be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system.”^24 James called for an urgent need to “return to life” to “non-conceptual” thought and to “lived experience” in the empirical methods of experimental psychology so that the relations between subject and object can be better addressed.^25 His radical empiricism was pluralistic, willing to include a number of methods from logical analysis to the observation of mundane everyday experience.
(^24) James, W. (1904) “A world of pure experience” in McDermott, J.J. (1977). The writings of William James: A comprehensive edition (^25) James, W. (1904). "The continuity of experience," in McDermott, J.J. (1977)., Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 195. The writings of William James: A comprehensive edition. Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 297.
person does, thinks, or feels has a specific and identifiable cause that can be determined from earlier experiences. 29 By the second decade of the twentieth century, the behaviorists limited their concerns to outward behaviors and eliminated the role of thoughts and feelings from experimental psychology. To behaviorist John B. Watson psychology should no longer use terms like “consciousness, mental states, mind, content, introspectively, verifiable, imagery, and the like,” rather, psychology could work on the premise of “stimulus and response…habit formation…habit integrations and the like.” 30 By mid century, cognitive psychologists revived interest in internal states, but in considering the mind to be a computer processor they treated mental life in much the same mechanistic ways that James had earlier described so negatively. As a result, subjectivist ways of knowing became stigmatized as a biased way of studying mental life. Subjectivist approaches as therapy was a different story, for self-examination and contemplation was an integral part of traditional Freudian psychoanalysis and many schools of psychotherapy thereafter. What the scientific community rejected during these early years was the notion of subjectivism as a valuable way of producing legitimate psychological knowledge.^31
(^2930) See Freud, S. (1901/2005). The psychopathology of everyday life. Digireads Publishing. 167.Watson, John B. (1913). “Psychology as the behaviorist views it.”^ Psychological Review^^20 : 166- (^31) Other late nineteenth and early twentieth century psychologists continued to believe that introspection could be a valuable way of knowing. The Englishman Edward Bradford Titchener’sintrospective psychology, known as structural psychology, posited that the mind was comprised of sensations or images of sensations. He believed that the most basic sensations could be understood
To the extent that he felt that psychology needed to examine the relations between particulars, James can be understood as a subjectivist turn. However, noting that are indeed particulars, James did not give up all mechanistic assumptions. In this sense, James might be understood as an individual who stood in the space between two thought collectives, those of mechanized thought styles and subjectivist thought styles. Because James’s radical empiricism suggests that the power to produce knowledge should not solely be in the hands of those who have access to those tools that are considered objective, James was popular among those with antiauthoritarian and pro-individualistic orientations. In this sense, James can be said to be drawing from uniquely American currents. 32 Religious philosopher Louis Dupre writes, “Those authors [fans of James], raised in the hard school of a pioneering country where a man had to find things out for himself, deemed it necessary to acquire experience before interpreting it. Nor did they, as ‘empiricists’ of the past, restrict experience to sense perception and its interpretation. Those men let no one tell them what was, and what was not ‘meaningful’ as experience.”^33 At the time of James’s life, late nineteenth century New England was a place where many religious believers alienated by their parents religions, as
through a systematic dissection of experience via introspection. See Titchener, E. B. (1897). of Psychology. New York, Macmillan. An outline (^32) Danziger, K. (1990). Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. New York, Cambridge University Press: 23. (^33) Dupre, L. (1972). The other dimension: A search for the meaning of religious attitudes. New York, Doubleday: 42.
