In the 17th century, one of the most prominent philosophers of all time, René Descartes, put forward his view of the relationship between the mind and the body. Urban (2018) states that, in Descartes’s view, matter is spatial, and it possesses attributes confirming it, while mental entities have no such attributes. For one, the mind, as a mental entity, cannot be characterized by space; its primary feature, as per Descartes, is consciousness (Urban, 2018). However, the body is undoubtedly a spatial entity: it occupies space and has physical attributes; therefore, the mind and the body are essentially different. The difficulty that this difference brings is the impossibility of the interaction between the two due to the contradiction involved. The body occurs in space, while the mind does not, and for them to interact, a non-spatial entity is to act on a spatial one, which seemed inconceivable to the philosopher.
Descartes’s perception of the mind-body relationship plays an essential role in influencing the contemporary practice of psychology. For one, many specialists today use the philosopher’s idea to demonstrate how far science has gone because, in the view of modern psychology, the mind and the body are inextricably connected. Today it is a proven fact that not only does the mind impact one’s ways of thinking and feeling, but also the way the body feels sometimes. Another way that Descartes’s view affects psychology is that it prompts professionals in the field to study the notion of both the mind and the body being entities of the physical world. This idea was put forward by scientists and philosophers, and psychologists work on establishing their point of view on this matter. Finally, driven by Descartes’s explanation of his mind-body relationship theory, specialists tend to ensure to distinguish between the brain and the mind in their practice since these are, in fact, two distinct entities.
Reference
Urban, E. (2018). On matters of mind and body: Regarding Descartes. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 63(2), 228-240.