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There are many definitions of psychological-mindedness available through a web search, and these include a capacity for self-reflection, interest in and knowledge about feelings, insight into one’s motives, and so on. None of the definitions I found seemed all that psychological to me. To me, psychological-mindedness is the capacity to examine yourself with the accuracy, intelligence, curiosity, empathy, and humor that fosters attachment and growth when it is deployed by one person toward another. Psychological-mindedness means seeing yourself the way really good therapists see their patients, the way pretty good parents see their kids—“really good” versus “pretty good” because it is easier to look at kids than adults with affection, insight, and whimsy.
What’s psychological about this definition is that, like psychological-mindedness itself, it requires a view of the person as manifold, as populated by many figures, or wishes, or internalized relations, or response repertoires. It’s a definition that presupposes internal conflict. The opposite of psychological-mindedness is the claim that the person speaks for the entirety of his or her psyche. A healthy society is one with a loyal opposition; an unhealthy society is one that claims that its leader speaks for everyone (a quasi-literal “dictator”). A healthy society is one whose hegemony of powerful interests is still at least vaguely concerned with the good of the populace; an unhealthy society is one whose hegemony is concerned only with its own interests. The same goes for the individual, but to understand that point, you have to be able to think analogously or metaphorically. The fundamental instance of analogic thinking with respect to psychological-mindedness is that I am like others and not a special case. The deepest version of this says, I am like ALL others; world literature shows the truth of this statement when it reveals its characters’ inner lives.
Perhaps the most important effect of psychological-mindedness is that the person tends not to externalize conflict. If he is rough with himself, he deals with himself rather than experiencing you as being rough with him and denouncing you. If he gets into a tussle with you, he wonders if he is really in a tussle with himself and roping you into it. If his mother screamed at him when he made a mess, he separates the problem of dealing with his mother from the much knottier problem of dealing with the part of himself that watches what he does, ready to scream. The problem with battering, say, is often not what to do—everyone knows what to do. The problem is how to muster the victim’s aggression to implement the decision. If she is inundated with a message that it’s not her fault, it often is translated to, “There’s nothing you can do about it,” predictably making her less depressed for the moment but more anxious (anxiety being the feeling of not knowing what to do). Doing something about her situation requires aggression, the very attribute being demonized by her supposed rescuers. But the deeper problem is often that she is beating herself up, and that’s a batterer she can’t divorce.
A professor corrects a student and the student gets in a huff, or cries, or attacks the professor, or goes on a sort of strike, refusing to listen any further. Perhaps the professor actually likes to humiliate students, and the thing to do is to avoid him. But maybe the professor is just trying to teach, and the conflict is internal, between the student’s exorbitant self-expectations and the evidence that these have not been met. The psychologically-minded professor examines with an open mind what his real motives are (education or humiliation or both), consulting colleagues, for example. The psychologically-minded student wrestles with her self-expectations, not with the professor. Psychological-mindedness thus requires the ability to step back, to observe oneself, which is another way of saying it requires overall mental health. In therapy, this stepping back is done together, as the dyad seeks to make sense together, as the intersubjectivists say, of what went on between them. If a therapist isn’t psychologically-minded, he can’t step back from the patient’s conflicts or from his conflicts with the patient to provide a work space, or even better, a play space, to observe and understand the conflicts.
Originally, psychological-mindedness was an attribute of patients that predicted readiness for or success in therapy. The assumption was that all the therapists were psychologically-minded, an assumption that is no longer valid. It used to be that the culture of clinical training was one in which you lost face if you claimed mastery over yourself, and one in which you gained face if you wondered if the bumps in the road of your training and the therapies you conduct might be a function of your own personality. Now, it’s largely the opposite. Nowadays, categorical thinkers claim to know, and no one laughs in their faces. Trainees say, “I was just stressed out,” and no one says, “It looks to us like you don’t have the makings of a psychologist.”
Psychological-mindedness means finding the human condition, in all its variety, in oneself. Those who cannot see themselves in some human roles find others to play those roles so the individual can play a counterpoint. If your therapist is not psychologically-minded, you will become in that relationship a specimen rather than a person. He will tend to export aspects of himself he doesn’t like and find them in you, seeing you as fragile compared to his resilience, confused compared to his assuredness, or emotional compared to his rationality.
Soon, I will write about some of the pressures on your therapist to relinquish psychological-mindedness.
