Last week I went to a mind-blowing 2 day lecture on the subject of "Why Psychotherapy Works" by Dan Siegel, a leading figure in the field of inter-personal neuro-biology and the author of Mindsight, The Mindful Brain, The Mindful Therapist and other titles. Of course, before this event, I couldn't explain what I mean by mind-blowing - I can now!
The first and most powerful thing Dan gave us was his definition of the mind. We all talk about it a lot, but what is it? As one of his psychiatrist colleagues put it to him, "we use this word simply as a placeholder for the unknown". To Dan Siegel the mind is:
(1) "A self-organising emergent process for regulation..." A terrible but well-established (and accurate) phrase borrowed from the field of complex systems theory (mathematics). The process continuously develops from the interaction of elements of the system, and loops back to regulate further interactions of these elements;
(2) "...of the flow of energy and (hence) information..." Again, not using energy to have some vague and mystical meaning, but referring for example to electrical energy passing along neurons in the brain, chemical energy used to transfer information across synapses, and kinetic energy used to transfer information from one person to another (in sound waves etc);
(3) "...within the body (brain and elsewhere) and relationships." This is the most elegant piece of the definition - once you accept the idea of looking at the mind in terms of energy and information flows, it is obvious that these do cross from one person to another. Psychologists (and coaches) have long understood the importance of relationships to the developing and adult psyche (ie the mind), but most other "scientific" approaches to the mind have excluded relationships by putting a hard boundary at our skin.
This definition alone (given in the first session before coffee on the first day) made the event worthwhile. But after coffee, Dan gave us his other fundamental definition, to answer the question: What is a healthy mind? He says that a well-functioning mind is one that is well integrated, not just metaphorically but structurally / physically. Things are integrated if they are both differentiated and linked - avoiding being either rigidly connected or chaotically disconnected. This is another wonderfully elegant definition - simple, yet incredibly powerful when you apply it to explain both what can go wrong and how you can improve things.
Using these two definitions as building blocks, the rest of the two days was a tour de force - bringing in ideas from fields as diverse as mindfulness meditation and quantum theory (for once talking about this with an accurate understanding - it's a pet hate of mine how many people use and abuse the ideas of quantum theory). Please do google Daniel Siegel to explore his work in more detail. Enjoy!
