Mind and Body in the Guardian again

https://www.theguardian.com/society...ween-mental-and-physical-illness-fails-us-all

Nice Guardian journalist chatting to her chum Simon.

All about how dreadful mind-body dualism is.
Which of course it is - and mind-body dualism (aka Cartesian interactionism) is the basis of what she is recommending!

 

Why always the Guardian? It feels like half of all the BPS drivel is published there.

Isn’t the Guardian a centre-left, feminist, mainstream news source. Why all the BPS? Is it because they accept opinion pieces from all sorts of people?

 

Freudian hogwash has always been speciality of the centre left.

 

This is what people need to know: there is such a massive prize here, if only we can have an honest, adult conversation about the full range of things that drive illness, and then take appropriate action to make it better.”

Oh, the irony.

 

It seems to have penetrated the entire mainstream.

But looking historically it’s striking (but also very little talked about) how intertwined psychosomatics was with facism, and in a convoluted way, with eugenics too.

 

Although Freud and, I am pretty certain, Engel, were Jewish.
I suspect that the whole field may be an offshoot of a North/Central European pattern of thinking called Continental Philosophy, which is mostly hot air. The same sort of story continues with the idea that our experience of the world can be explained by the mind being 'embodied' or 'embedded' in the world.

 

How liberal publications accept such patently dangerous and pseudoscientific narratives is beyond me:

“Mapping the measurable state of the muscle that is the heart, for instance, on to the symptoms the patient is experiencing often shows a poor correlation. This gap, Edwards says, is where the rest of the person is: their system of consciousness, plus ‘their emotional and mental health, psychosocial factors – environment, support and so on – and many other things. [It is] a huge untapped source of possible improvement in symptoms for people who are ill, and by ignoring it in research and clinical practice we are directly making people more sick than they need to be.’”

 

Wikipedia on Continentalc Philosophy. It sounds very familiar. My bolding.

1. Continental philosophers generally reject the view that the natural sciences are the only or most accurate way of understanding natural phenomena. This contrasts with many analytic philosophers who consider their inquiries as continuous with, or subordinate to, those of the natural sciences. Continental philosophers often argue that science depends upon a "pre-theoretical substrate of experience" (a version of Kantian conditions of possible experience or the phenomenological "lifeworld") and that scientific methods are inadequate to fully understand such conditions of intelligibility.[17]
2. Continental philosophy usually considers these conditions of possible experience as variable: determined at least partly by factors such as context, space and time, language, culture, or history. Thus continental philosophy tends toward historicism (or historicity). Where analytic philosophy tends to treat philosophy in terms of discrete problems, capable of being analyzed apart from their historical origins (much as scientists consider the history of science inessential to scientific inquiry), continental philosophy typically suggests that "philosophical argument cannot be divorced from the textual and contextual conditions of its historical emergence."[18]
3. Continental philosophy typically holds that human agency can change these conditions of possible experience: "if human experience is a contingent creation, then it can be recreated in other ways."[19] Thus continental philosophers tend to take a strong interest in the unity of theory and practice, and often see their philosophical inquiries as closely related to personal, moral, or political transformation. This tendency is very clear in the Marxist tradition ("philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it"), but is also central in existentialism and post-structuralism.
4. A final characteristic trait of continental philosophy is an emphasis on metaphilosophy. In the wake of the development and success of the natural sciences, continental philosophers have often sought to redefine the method and nature of philosophy.[20] In some cases (such as German idealism or phenomenology), this manifests as a renovation of the traditional view that philosophy is the first, foundational, a priori science. In other cases (such as hermeneutics, critical theory, or structuralism), it is held that philosophy investigates a domain that is irreducibly cultural or practical. And some continental philosophers (such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or later Heidegger) doubt whether any conception of philosophy can coherently achieve its stated goals.

 

I thought continental philosophy was just a qualifier for coming from continental europe (where philosophy has a history very much intertwined with literature and fiction) while analyic was more about methodology of using quasi-mathematical axiomatic and logical system in philosophy.

 

Yes. The Wikipedia page elaborates on that.

 

If anyone who knows how makes an archive link to this one I’ll give you the appreciation that you deserve.

I’ll not give the Guardian even a single solitary click for this.
But that probably doesn’t matter because I don’t need to read this article, I can probably just guess the content. Going by the kind of stuff this outlet tends to pump out on such topics
…. and others.

After all there’s a reason someone made a whole website called dump the guardian.

 

https://www.removepaywall.com/searc...ween-mental-and-physical-illness-fails-us-all

if it doesn’t work, click on “option 2” at the top

 

archive.is is the strongest paywall-remover. It’s slow, though. Just FYi

 

The site I used (removepayall.com) is basically a search engine for urls in various sites including archive.is and mirrors. It’s quite handy.

 

I didn’t know that! Thak you!

 

Here’s a Wayback link as well: https://web.archive.org/web/2025012...ween-mental-and-physical-illness-fails-us-all

 

First paragraph (as far as I have got)



“Some years ago Camilla Nord suffered such persistent pain at the site of an old injury that doctors thought she would need major surgery – a joint replacement in her foot. To delay this for a few months, they injected the foot with steroids. Steroids wear off – but nearly a decade later, the pain was still much reduced. To Nord, whose day job is running the Mental Health Neuroscience Lab at the University of Cambridge, this was fascinating. Not all of her pain, it seemed, came from her foot.”

Is this a joke?
I guess she’s not a medical doctor?
Still surely she has heard about self resolving injuries, temporary pain due to re-injury, or transient inflammation?
Or just stuff whatever?

I said my grandmothers name and the clouds parted at that exact moment. It’s a sign that she is watching me from heaven. Or it’s not. Either way I haven’t made a discovery. I have had an experience and felt something.

Seems like the woman in this article wants us to accept that she had an experience of a very much more mundane variety, and that this actually amounts to, she made a discovery.

Despite the fact that millions of people with damage to their bodies before her had helped to provide scientists with the all the biological explanation necessary inform this woman that she didn’t in fact experience a mystical (re?)unification of her foot and mind, resulting in an otherwise unattainable spontaneous recovery from inflammation and pain.


But when you’re bullshiting people for a living it does help if you fill in a personal backstory. One that makes you come across more as more open and relatable. As back up since your dubious claims may meet with some scepticism along the way and it’s rude to question people’s personal revelatory experiences isn’t it?

 

Thank you!