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

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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

"That's a great deal to make one word mean": Reflections on prehistoric psychology.

Comments on the article by T. B. Henley (see record 2020-68859-001). Scholarly attempts to broaden the scope of the historical investigation of psychology are welcome. To the extent that Henley's article seeks to do just that, it provides an important corrective to the traditional approach. The question remains, however, whether the prehistoric developments presented in the article can indeed teach us something about the history of psychology (broadly defined), and more fundamentally, whether they can at all be described as "psychological" in any meaningful way. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Conversion and Self-Transformation in Christian Monasticism: A Cognitive Perspective.

Religious conversion involves changes in the convert's way of thinking and behaving. This paper focuses on the unique form that this transformative process took within the Christian monastic movement in late antiquity. Treating monastic conversion as a gradual process in which the convert is an active participant, it examines the ways in which monastic converts were able to intentionally promote such a change and influence its direction. This study draws on research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience on the cognitive underpinnings of self-transformation in order to reconstruct from the literary sources of Near Eastern monasticism the strategies and training methods that late antique monks employed in order to facilitate and sustain the transformation implicated in conversion.

The late antique history of psychology: The test case of introspection.

This article argues for the need to broaden the scholarly focus on the history of the modern discipline of psychology to include the history of psychological knowledge. It seeks to demonstrate the benefits to be derived from this endeavor by focusing on late antique psychology and presenting the novel methods of psychological investigation that emerged within the Christian monastic movement, especially introspection. Far from being a historically recent invention, I argue that introspection was systematically and self-consciously employed by late antique monks as a method for producing knowledge about the human mind. Yet rather than arguing for a simple continuity between late antique and modern introspective procedures, a comparison between early monastic introspective accounts and those of the founders of the modern psychology reveals profound differences in the interpretation and evaluation of introspective data; thereby, it allows one to address fundamental questions related to the nature of psychological knowledge and its relationship with culturally constructed categories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).