Overview

Evolutionary psychology explains why some mental illnesses developed, but to answer questions about how to improve our mental well-being in the face of these challenges--how the mind works to heal itself-we should look to more recent changes in mentality. In The Self-Healing Mind, mental health counsellor and anthropologist Brian J. McVeigh postulates that around 1000 BCE, population expansion and social complexity forced people to learn ""conscious interiority""--a package of cognitive capabilities that culturally upgraded mentality. He argues that the mental processes that help us get through the day are the same ones that can heal our psyches. Adopting a common factors and positive psychology perspective, McVeigh enumerates and defines these active ingredients of the self-healing mind: mental space, introception, self-observing and observed, self-narratization, excerption, consilience, concentration, suppression, self-authorization, self-autonomy, and self-reflexivity. McVeigh shows how these capabilities underlie the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic techniques and interventions. Though meta-framing effects of psyche's recuperative properties correct distorted cognition and grant us remarkable adaptive abilities, they sometimes spiral out of control, resulting in runaway consciousness and certain mental disorders. This book also addresses how maladaptive processes snowball and come to need restraint themselves. With insights from counseling, psychotherapy, anthropology, and history, The Self-Healing Mind will appeal to practitioners, researchers, and anyone interested in neurocultural plasticity and how therapeutically-directed consciousness repairs the mind.

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9780197647868

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Reviews

Brian McVeigh has taken the insights of the unsung genius of 20th Century Psychology, Julian Jaynes, and brilliantly applied them to improving our mental well-being. Conscious interiority is the deep mechanism of self-healing and the secret of successful therapy. A must read for clinical therapists and positive psychologists. * Martin E. P. Seligman, Director, Positive Psychology Center, and Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania * I have never read anything quite like this. Brian J. McVeigh takes on the daunting task of integrating a vast treasure trove of resources drawn from positive psychotherapy, common factors of therapeutic change, and a Jaynesian theoretical paradigm. He provides a guide to psychotherapists and their patients to help them explore, understand, and manage real life concerns as they navigate an even murkier internal landscape. * Al Pfadt, PhD, Retired Research Scientist, New York State Institute for Basic Research * The Self-Healing Mind coherently joins elements of healing and well-being that have long been considered disparate. By integrating the evolution of consciousness with an expansive and multicultural range of psychotherapeutic strategies, McVeigh has created a refreshingly accessible, comprehensive, and practical model for helping people help themselves. * Laurence Irwin Sugarman, M.D., F.A.A.P., A.B.M.H., Rochester, New York *

Author Information

Brian J. McVeigh has an MA in anthropology, an MS in counseling, and a PhD in anthropology. He is a licensed mental health counselor in private practice and a scholar of Japan and China where he lived and taught for 16 years. For ten years he taught in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. The author of 16 books, he has an interest in how humans adapt, both through history and therapeutically. His current projects include The Psychology of Ancient Egypt: Reconstructing a Lost Mentality.

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