Peter Todd

Logical and empirical considerations of the mental in both its conscious and unconscious aspects, have tended to be strangled by the received wisdom of positivist philosophy. Furthermore, one major conceptual obstacle to research in such fields as psychoneuroimmunology, neuropsychoanalysis and into the "mind-matter anomalies" referred to by Atmanspacher (2007) has been a perhaps unconscious, narcissistic investment in a materialist epistemology of science.

This epistemology has remained the "metaphysical" foundation for conceptualizing disease exclusively within a classical, mechanistic medical model from which mentalistic phenomena were intentionally excluded by a priori definition of what nature and empirical propositions must be. Perhaps, charitably interpreted, positivist philosophers (with exceptions such as Herbert Feigl and later Karl Popper in "The Logic of Scientific Discovery") did not intend to assert synthetic a priori truths. Or to construct doctrines about nature rather than testable explanatory theories about it. However, such implicit assumptions have, I would argue, represented one important obstacle to conceptualizing disease within a multifactorial or biopsychosocial framework and hence to overcoming the anomalies with the traditional medical and Jenneur/Pasteur paradigms.

Decades of published, peer-reviewed studies in psychosomatic and psychoneuroimmunological research have revealed the vacuousness of relegating mentalistic concepts, including unconscious mental factors, to the disreputable limbo of "metaphysical" terms held to be beyond operational analysis and measurement. And therefore devoid of empirical meaning. Herbert Feigl's favourable and optimistic view of the future of psychoanalysis has been vindicated by the derivation of robust and useful scientific predictions which have run Popper's gauntlet of scientific criticism, including the falsifiability criterion, as I have pointed out in publications listed in my profile.

Put differently, mind is not usefully regarded in 21st century science as a mere epiphenomenal and causally inefficacious by-product of brain processes or as a metaphysical construct of interest only to philosophers as a target of derision as a legacy of Cartesian dualism. The eliminative materialism which characterised the past era of radical behaviourism in (mindless) psychology and biological psychiatry is an epistemological relic which, as such neuroscientists as John Eccles and Karl Pribram have argued, is no longer a useful and convenient fiction in understanding the brain, consciousness or cultural evolution. Empirical research in such fields as neuropsychoanalysis (Solms & Turnbull, Cortex, 2007) and psychoneuroimmunology has demonstrated the value of an epistemology of the complementarity of mind and matter, a dual aspect position rather than a reductionist one.

In the psychoneuroimmunology field, unconscious mental factors have been implicated in the progression of immunologically mediated and resisted diseases. Furthermore, psychoanalytic self-psychology may be a useful framework for conceptualizing both psychic and immune defence as well as bodily and self integration in HIV infection. The data supporting such notions and incorporating mental phenomena might be regarded as helping to extend and to complete the project begun by such scientific visionaries as the late Professor George Freeman Solomon, credited as the founder of psychoneuroimmunology!

Solomon's contribution to a multifactorial and biopsychosocial understanding of the role of "mind" in disease morbidity, outcome and mortality was courageous and pioneering.

Enlightening as the many philosophical postings on "Mind" have been, I am wondering whether some substantive, empirical research and scientific concepts could be added? For instance postings in the fields of neuro-psychoanalysis and psychoneuroimmunology as well as cognitive neuroscience?

Many thanks for the invitation. The laboratory measurement of immune system components such as CD4+Tcells and natural killer cells and of other biological mediators, including neuroendcocrines, neurotransmitters, cytokines and thymic hormones is vital to psychoneuroimmunological research in sophisticated multivariate studies relevant to morbidity and mortality.