The Myth of the Isolated Mind

In the West, we tend to conceive of “mind” as an individualized entity—something on the “inside” of us, somehow identifiable with the brain. This view lies beneath all mainstream psychology, psychiatry, and much of psychotherapy. Yet, it is not a conclusion reached through empirical science; rather, it is a philosophical presupposition underpinning the psychological science we conduct. It is a metaphysical, not a scientific, standpoint, and one that can be traced back to René Descartes’ mind-body dualism of the 17th century.

Descartes separated off the mind from the body, as well as the mind from the world, withdrawing all mental life into an entirely separate domain from everything physical. This philosophical move profoundly shaped Western philosophy and, later, the new discipline of scientific psychology emerging in the 19th century. While his “substance dualism” was largely abandoned, what persisted of the Cartesian model was the cardinal belief in the mind as a self-contained “monad” of experience categorically separated from the outside world. This premise allowed mental life to be studied in isolation, detached from its social and relational contexts, and thereby rendered suitable for empirical and quantitative science. Our experience of others and the world “outside,” as such, were thereby configured as internal phenomena—contained within us, in our minds or brains—at the outset.

With the advent of Freud, this model of mind reached its zenith, and following his unparalleled influence, it became thoroughly embedded in the Western psyche. Although Freud’s early theory (Freud, 1896) was essentially based on a social-environmental model of “mental disorder” (seeing traumatic experience with others as being at the roots of the psychological and emotional distress he encountered), this didn’t fit with the prevailing zeitgeist, and striving to fit psychoanalysis into the new scientific psychology, among other reasons, he abandoned it.

Psychoanalysis and Freud’s fame took off when he shifted his model from a socially defined one to one defined by internal conflict, which ultimately located the sources of distress inside a private, internal world. Freud’s theory thereafter was built around a categorical division between a subjective “internal world,” where the problems lay, and an “objective” external world that was largely neutral. Psychotherapy as a discipline followed suit.

Cutting a very long story short, mainstream models of mind and mental distress since that time—whether psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, or psychiatric in nature—all assume the very same philosophical foundation, which I will call the individualistic model of mind. It assumes that the mind (understood as somehow identifiable with our individual brains) is a singular entity somehow inside of us and that the psychological and emotional distress we encounter is caused and characterized by problems located within the individual, conceived variously in terms of internal conflicts, cognitive distortions, or psychological dysfunctions.

Following this, we have been led to think of our psychological and emotional distress as something having gone wrong inside of us. Indeed, this is implicit in the very term “mental disorder,” which carries this explicit meaning in the DSM, Western psychiatry’s “Bible.” All of this follows from a philosophical standpoint, one that has its roots in Descartes.

The relational model of mind offers a radically different vision of mind, as well as of mental distress. Although it was formally developed within psychoanalysis—as relational psychoanalysis—in the 1980s and 1990s, it draws on a broad psychoanalytic lineage dating back to Freud’s time, as well as 20th-century phenomenology and its profound and decisive rejection of Cartesianism. Subsequently, 'Relational Turns' went on to taken place for most other psychotherapy approaches. In this model, the mind is not understood as an individual, private entity but as fundamentally social and open to the world, emerging through relational and interpersonal dynamics and thereafter constituted by them.

The relational model amounts to an inversion of the individualistic model: Rather than the individual being primary and the social-interpersonal world secondary, the relational world is primary and the individual mind is a secondary, derivative expression of it. This shift has profound implications. With the individual no longer viewed as the foundational unit of mind, psychological and emotional distress is no longer assumed to stem from within the individual. Instead, as the person is always already immediately embedded in relationships and the interpersonal world, distress is understood to arise primarily out of interpersonal and social experiences. The person-in-context—the individual as embedded within a network of relationships—therefore becomes the focus of what is considered to be the causes of psychological distress and what is needed in response.

Therapeutic approaches grounded in this model move decisively away from the narratives of internal pathology that we are accustomed to and focus on the immediacy of lived, relational experiences in the world. In place of internal conflicts, dysfunctions, or distortions, relational and social adversity and trauma—i.e., forms of abuse, emotional abandonment, neglect, or invalidation—are understood as playing the central role in psychological distress, especially those occurring during our formative years when we are most psychologically vulnerable and dependent. Following this, the provision of a particular kind of facilitative interpersonal encounter (in which there can be some form of “relational repair”) takes the place of “fixing,” “correcting,” or providing “insight into” internal processes gone awry.

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The relational model of mind and the approaches based on it are not just philosophical reimaginings. They are supported by robust empirical evidence from developmental psychology, attachment theory, and infant research. Decades of studies have demonstrated that infants are not experientially isolated beings at all, as Descartes and later Freud had assumed, but are born open and attuned to the emotions and states of their caregivers and engage in intimate intersubjective exchanges with them from the very beginning.

These interpersonal experiences have, moreover, also been shown to be central to psychological development and later “mental health.” So revolutionary and decisive was this notion that it led pioneering infant researcher, Colwyn Trevarthen, to write, “the story of human infancy told by philosophers and medical and psychological sciences has been rewritten” (2010; p.145). What is true of the child is true of our foundations.

Yet, despite the compelling evidence, the individualistic model continues to dominate. Why? Well, our mental health systems—and the mainstream models employed within them—are deeply embedded in Western cultural ideals of individualism, built upon the notion of the autonomous, self-sufficient individual. These systems maintain the belief that distress is an internal problem, to be fixed from within, because it fits with the overarching thrust of Western individualism and the capitalist ideology that surrounds it.

The relational model doesn’t just undermine the individualism inherent in psychology and psychiatry; it challenges the very societal structures that uphold it. If the mind is inherently social and relational, it means confronting the societal, systemic, and relational conditions that generate suffering. From the relational standpoint, the mental health system itself becomes part of the problem, perpetuating a narrow, individualized focus that obscures broader social realities. These are no small realities.

Much more than an alternative framework, the relational model contains within it a call to radically rethink our assumptions about the mind, psychological and emotional distress, and healing; it redirects attention from individual problems toward the relational and social dynamics behind them. Ultimately, the relational approach suggests that healing is not about repairing something broken within a person, but about transforming the social and interpersonal world in which people exist. This shift carries profound implications for how we understand, respond to, and support mental health, something which this new blog hopes to unpack through a series of posts.