Unraveling the World-Knot

A trenchant critique of mind-body dualism in medicine that shows a path to integration through multilevel systems thinking.

This book presents a cutting-edge account of the interplay of bodily, psychological, and social processes in health and illness. It will interest anyone curious to learn how our capacities for self-understanding, storytelling, and imagination can transform the experience of symptoms and suffering.The relation of mind and body is a longstanding puzzle in philosophy. This book explores how mind-body problems show up in contemporary biomedicine and psychiatry through dualistic models and metaphors that shape clinical practice. It discusses how the resultant tensions and contradictions that plague healthcare can be resolved. This begins with disentangling the knots that constitute the mind-body problem and applying ideas from systems biology, cognitive science, and anthropology to understand mind, consciousness, and agency as processes that emerge from embodied engagements with a social world. The text takes the reader on a journey across diverse clinical situations to consider: the power of multilevel systems theory; problems of knowledge, truth, and explanation in psychiatry; the mechanisms of placebo effects and hypnotic suggestion; the role of stories in constructing the self; the power and limits of imagination; and the prospects for an integrative view of the person in health and illness.