Liquid States of Mind

April 26th, 2006 Fred McVittie

William James (1892) famously uses the term ‘Stream of Consciousness’ to describe the unbroken succession of images which seems to characterize the flowing, river-like experience of wakeful awareness. He also writes of the ‘oceanic’ feelings associated with religious experience (1902), an entailment picked up by Freud (1973) and Clement (1994) and which also figures in first-person accounts of certain varieties of peak experience; a feeling of unbounded unity with the wider cosmos and an apparent dissolution of the boundary between self and world .

These two images, the stream and the ocean, can be seen as complementary features in an ontology, or rather a ‘hydrography’ of consciousness; at one extreme the subject is defined by the path of their individual stream; delineated, bounded, and temporal. At the other extreme the subject dissolves into a larger substrate, an all-encompassing, atemporal ocean. These two terms for particular radically different states of consciousness are entailments of an extended metaphor in which the operation of the mind is compared to the behavior of a liquid.

The metaphor does not just allow for these two entailments, but structures a range of discourses related to consciousness from the fields of psychology, technology and phenomenology. These include Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow (1990; 1997) immersion (Grau 2004), thought ripples (Greenfield 2001), and absorption (Gurwitsch 1979).

This deployment of a liquid metaphor in talking of consciousness has a long history and extensive current (sic.) use. Water, particularly, features significantly in many of the world’s religions and in mythological texts as a medium for describing cognitive states or processes which would otherwise be inconceivable, the most familiar of these probably being the Greek legends surrounding Lethe and Mnemosyne, the rivers of forgetting and remembering. Drawing on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory of Lakoff and Johnson (1999) and others, this metaphor can be shown not to be arbitrary and contingent, but as providing a consistent, coherent structure whereby the abstract notion of consciousness is made conceivable and articulate.

Clement, C. (1994). Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. New York, Harper & Row.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York, HarperPerennial.

Freud, S. (1989). Formulations Regarding The Two Principles in Mental Functioning. The Freud Reader. P. Gay. New York, Norton: 301-306.

Grau, O. (2003). Virtual art: from illusion to immersion. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Greenfield, S. A. and T. F. T. Collins (2005). A Neuroscientific Approach to Consciousness. Amsterdam, Elsevier B.V.

Gurwitsch, A. (1979). Human Encounters in the Social World. Pittsburgh, PA, Duquesne University Press.

James, W. (1981). The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

Posted in Clement, Catherine, Conference Abstract, Consciousness, Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi, Flow, Freud, Sigmund, Greenfield, Susan, Gurswitch, Aron, James, William, Liquid, Metaphor, Phenomenology, Psychology, Religion | No Comments »

Flying through the Space of Thought

June 23rd, 2006 Fred McVittie

The kind of processes we refer to when we arrange out thoughts, and the type of psychological gestures we make in order to move through our thoughts, suggests that cognitive organisation makes heavy use of a metaphor of space. The metaphor of the mind as a kind of spatially extended domain is one of the most important and robust mental structures. This space of thought roughly corresponds to Cartesian or Newtonian space, a fact which is evidenced in the language we use to talk about the contents and processes of our minds (streams of consciousness etc) and also in techniques for cognitive enhancement such as mnemonic systems like the method of loci, which uses the construction of elaborate storage spaces, so-called ‘memory palaces’, to enable easy retrieval of facts and ideas.

A significant departure from this schema is our ability to make intuitive leaps, or simply to allow our thoughts to hop from one topic to another without apparently crossing any intervening space. A number of subsidiary metaphors attempt to explain this phenomenon; William James, in addition to referring to the ’stream of consciousness’ also describes consciousness rather as a bird in flight. He says, ‘Our psychic life has rhythm: it is a series of transitions and resting-places, of “flights and perchings”‘ (PP 236). Also, a common feature of Buddhist meditation teaching is an attempt to tame the ‘monkey mind’, the tendency of consciousness to jump uncontrollably from one branch of knowledge to another. Both these metaphors invoke an image of space which, whilst still Cartesian, is not empty and unstructured but is somewhat like a forest. A space in which knowledge forms grow, interpenetrate, and spread, allowing a smooth linear passage from one to the next, but also a space through which it is possible to swing and swoop, catching knowledge on the fly.

Baby swifts leave their nests at a few weeks old, launching themselves on their first flight without any tuition or preparation. They then spend the next two years of their lives on the wing. It may be interesting to speculate on the possibilities of maintaining extended periods of flight in cognitive space. Staying airborne, like the swift, in the spaces between one idea and another.

Posted in Buddhism, James, William, Knowledge, Meditation, Metaphor, Mind, Space | No Comments »

Liquid Love

July 7th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The various states of consciousness alluded to using the metaphor of a liquid are comprehensive and consistent, from the ’stream’ of individual consciousness at one end to the ‘oceanic’ experience of non-individuated ego loss at the other. In between these states a range of states and conditions are similarly articulated using this metaphor, including flow, immersion, absorbtion, etc. These states are not only rational and logical however, but are also heavily informed by, or rather constructed with, emotional content and responses. The ‘oceanic’ feeling identified by William James is a notable example. Initially associated with the overpowering divine adoration of religious experience, this concept was reframed by Freud in terms of that other great first love, a baby’s ecstasy of embrionic and amniotic immersion within the body and the ego of the mother prior to partition, birth, and the individuating rigours of childhood. In both readings, one religious and the other ontogenic, the metaphor of a vast ocean stands in not only for undividedness, but for undivided love. Immersion and dissolution in this ocean is a kind of death, not of the body but of the ego, and we see miniature versions of this death, this dissolution, in the small death of sexual orgasm (in French le petit mort), and in the sacrificial ego loss when we are drowned in romantic love.

Posted in Feeling, Freud, Sigmund, James, William, Liquid, Love, Metaphor | No Comments »

The Changing Status of ‘Psychology’

July 14th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The history of psychology as a science is very brief. It is usually thought to have begun being considered as a body of material knowledge, apprehensible by scientific means, with the work of William James. The status of psychology as a science, whilst subject to great debate and much fluctuations in esteem, continued throughout the 20th century. Prior to its embrace by science, any consideration of those entities and processes we now think of as the subject of psychology; identity, consciousness, dreams, rapture, mental illness etc.; were part of the discourse of philosophy and/or religion. Even throughout psychology’s time in the light of science there have been elements of psychological theory and practice, the work of Wilhelm Reich for example, and some would say all of psychoanalysis, which have been distinctly non-scientific. Because of the ill-defined, and largely non-experimental nature of psychology however, these practices have never been completely excluded from discourse in the way that heretical physics or heretical chemistry would be. Instead, psychology has been a bastard science, drawing information and knowledge from where it can, even if some of these places would be off-limits to scientists following more stringent maps to knowledge. As these practices continue into the 21st century there seems to be some evidence that psychology as a term is losing some of the scientific patina of respectability that it acquired post-William James, and is rediscovering its roots in philosophy and mysticism. University college courses and institutions are finding that ‘psychology’ is not a good recruiter of those students who want to study serious science, so we see college departments sprouting schools of ‘brain science’ and quietly losing the ‘p’ word. Also, there is an increasing use of the word ‘psychology’ to be used in contexts or to refer to concepts where it would not have been used previously. The writer Ken Wilbur for example, refers to his theories as ‘integral psychology’. This work, exemplifying as it does an ambition to pull together knowledge from across the disciplines of science, religion, and philosophy (east and west), and give this bastard knowledge a good name, would in all likelihood not have been able to qualify as ‘psychology’ without the reversion in meaning that the term has had. In fact, in earlier works outlining broadly the same ideas, Wilbur tended to call these ideas ‘philosophy’ and avoided the use of the other ‘p’ word.

Posted in History, James, William, Philosophy, Psychology, Reich, Wilhelm, Wilbur, Ken | No Comments »