A historical perspective on mental health: Proposal for a dialogue between history and psychology.

Abstract

This contribution aims to promote a dialogue between history and psychology by outlining a direction for future research at the intersection of these disciplines. In particular, it seeks to demonstrate the potential contributions of history to psychology by employing the category of mental health in a historical context. The analysis focuses on notions of psychological health that were developed in late antiquity, especially the equation between "health of the soul" and dispassion (apatheia) within the Christian monastic movement. This theologically informed notion of what constitutes positive human functioning and well-being is examined in view of modern attempts, in mainstream and positive psychology, to define mental health. The optimism concerning the naturalness of virtue and the malleability of human nature that underlies late antique notions of "health of the soul" becomes noticeable in its absence once we turn to modern notions of mental health. It thus provides an illuminating counter-example against which to compare and analyze modern attempts to define mental health. A comparison of these alternative notions human flourishing offers an opportunity to reflect on and test the validity of contemporary attempts to define this condition in a culturally sensitive manner.

Mental health and transcendence in antiquity and today: Comment on Graiver (2021).

“…Alignment with divine thought and volition is also the goal of Stoic practical ethics (see the critical discussions in Lampe, 2016Lampe, , 2018. As Graiver (2021) acknowledges, Stoic and Platonic texts and teachers deeply influenced the Christian authors she discusses. What Christian psychology adds to Greek and Roman philosophy is not an aspiration that goes beyond impassivity and human nature, but the emphasis on "disinterested love" (p. 5).…”

“…For example, Jerome Berstein's post-Jungian vision of mental health is based on decades of therapeutic collaboration with Navajo healers. Because Graiver (2021) remarks that modern psychology is a "remote heir" to Christian conceptions and highlights "love of God and all humanity" (p. 5) as its aspirational apex, it is worth considering Bernstein's (2005, especially ch. 3) argument that Abrahamic attitudes toward nonhuman earthly beings are deeply complicit in today's psychosocial problems.…”

“…As Graiver (2021) says, it is precisely because discourses of “mental health” are “overlaid with specifically modern ideas and values” (p. 2) that theories and representations from other times and places can provide critical distance. But I would describe the view from this critical distance differently than Graiver does.…”

“…I am not sure that it is helpful to focus on medical texts to understand “mental health” in the ancient world. Graiver (2021) claims that “ancient medical writers hardly discussed the mental qua mental” and that the physician Galen (129–201 CE) was the first to integrate “psychological and ethical aspects of health” (p. 3). But Galen’s psychology is heavily indebted to the philosopher Plato (427–327 BCE), whose Timaeus discussed at length how “states of health and diseases, both virtues and vices” arise through the interaction of mental activities, bodily activities, and the balance and circulation of bodily humors 2 .…”

“…I am sympathetic to Inbar Graiver’s (2021) claim that modern Western psychology can benefit from a dialogue with history and would emphasize that her article points toward two distinct ways this is so: first, on the basis of historiographical representations of individual experience; second, on the basis of the history of concepts. I also accept her generalization that modern psychology and psychiatry have often focused on pathology and that among the key reasons for this is the biomedical assumption that “an organism is healthy to the extent that it is not diseased” (pp.…”