Velmans, Max. 2003. How could images heal anything? In: A. A. Sheikh, ed. Healing Images: The Role of Imagination in the Healing Process. Amityville, New York: Baywood Publishing Company, pp. 53-71. ISBN 0895032082 [Book Section]

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Abstract or Description

Psychosomatic medicine assumes that the conscious mind can affect the body, and this is supported by evidence that the use of imagery, hypnosis, biofeedback and other ‘mental interventions’ can be therapeutic in a variety of medical conditions. However, there is no accepted theory of mind/body interaction and this has had a detrimental effect on the acceptance of mental causation in many areas of clinical practice. Biomedical accounts typically translate the effects of mind into the effects of brain functioning, for example, explaining mind/body interactions in terms of the interconnections and reciprocal control of cortical, neuroendocrine, autonomic and immune systems. While such accounts are instructive, they are implicitly reductionist, and beg the question of how conscious experiences could have bodily effects. On the other hand, non-reductionist accounts have to cope with three problems: 1) The physical world appears causally closed, which would seem to leave no room for conscious intervention. 2) One is not conscious of one’s own brain/body processing, so how could there be conscious control of such processing? 3) Conscious experiences appear to come too late to causally affect the processes to which they most obviously relate. The present chapter suggests a way of understanding mental causation that resolves these problems. It also suggest that “conscious mental control” needs to be partly understood in terms of the voluntary operations of the preconscious mind.

Item Type:	Book Section
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Psychology
Dates:	Date Event 2003 Published
Item ID:	26257
Date Deposited:	25 Apr 2019 09:13
Last Modified:	25 Apr 2019 09:13
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/26257

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