Cybernetic Psychology And Mental Health

This book explores the cultural importance of cybernetic technologies and their relationship to human experience through a critical theoretical lens. Bringing several often-marginalized histories of cybernetics, psychology, and mental health into dialogue with one another, Beck questions common assumptions about human life such as that our minds operate as information processing machines and our neurons communicate with one another. Rather than suggest that such ideas are either right or wrong, however, this book analyzes how and why we have come to frame questions about ourselves in these ways, as if our brains were our own personal computers. Here, the rationality underlying information theories in psychology is followed to its logical conclusion, only to find it circles back to where it began: engineered methods of human control. After tracing a series of recent developments in this vein across fields related to mental health, Beck highlights emerging psychosocial alternatives by incorporating recent work of scholars and activists who have already begun creating collective support networks in radical ways. Their work overlaps fruitfully with ideas from those, including Gilbert Simondon and Fernand Deligny, who foresaw many of the current problems with how information theories have been coupled with psychology and mental health care. This book is fascinating reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students across psychology, mental health programs, and digital media studies, and academics and researchers with a theoretical interest in the philosophy of technology. It’s also an interesting resource for professionals with a practical interest in organizing care services under the data-driven imperatives of contemporary capitalism.

- The field of Cybernetics is emerging in a number of fields. - Offers insights into the applicability of Cybernetic Psychology across different areas and contexts. - Will be of cross disciplinary interest, including practitioners and scholars in Mental Health and Education.

This important book examines how the growing field of cybernetic psychology - the study of the creative complexity of the mind - can be applied to a range of different realms, tapping into the unconscious potential within us all. Cybernetic psychology integrates theories from various schools of thought, bringing them together in one unified theory. First developed and described by Danish author and psychotherapist Ole Vedfelt. It can be used in therapeutic practice, in relation to learning and pedagogics, and as a tool for better leadership. The 15 chapters within this volume apply the theory to these as well as other areas, including ecology, creativity, mindfulness and scientific enquiry itself. Insightful and wide-ranging, the book will appeal to psychotherapists and those working within mental health, as well as students and researchers across Education, Psychology and beyond.

In almost 60 articles this book reviews the current state of second-order cybernetics and investigates which new research methods second-order cybernetics can offer to tackle wicked problems in science and in society. The contributions explore its application to both scientific fields (such as mathematics, psychology and consciousness research) and non-scientific ones (such as design theory and theater science). The book uses a pluralistic, multifaceted approach to discuss these applications: Each main article is accompanied by several commentaries and author responses, which together allow the reader to discover further perspectives than in the original article alone. This procedure shows that second-order cybernetics is already on its way to becoming an idea shared by many researchers in a variety of disciplines. Contents: Prologue: A Brief History of (Second-Order) Cybernetics (Louis H Kauffman & Stuart A Umpleb)Mapping the Varieties of Second-Order Cybernetics (Karl H Müller & Alexander Riegle)Part I: Exploring Second-Order Cybernetics and Its Fivefold Agenda: Second-Order Cybernetics as a Fundamental Revolution in Science (Stuart A Umpleby)Obstacles and Opportunities in the Future of Second-Order Cybernetics and Other Compatible Methods (Allenna Leonard)Connecting Second-Order Cybernetics' Revolution with Genetic Epistemology (Gastón Becerra)Shed the Name to Find Second-Order Success: Renaming Second-Order Cybernetics to Rescue its Essence (Michael R Lissack)Beware False Dichotomies (Peter A Cariani)Second-Order Cybernetics Needs a Unifying Methodology (Thomas R Flanagan)Viva the Fundamental Revolution! Confessions of a Case Writer (T Grandon Gill)Author's Response: Struggling to Define an Identity for Second-Order Cybernetics (Stuart A Umpleby)Cybernetics, Reflexivity and Second-Order Science (Louis H Kauffman)Remarks From a Continental Philosophy Point of View (Tatjana Schönwälder-Kuntze)Finally Understanding Eigenforms (Michael R Lissack)Eigenforms, Coherence, and the Imaginal (Arthur M Collings)Conserving the Disposition for Wonder (Kathleen Forsythe)Author's Response: Distinction, Eigenform and the Epistemology of the Imagination (Louis H Kauffman)Cybernetic Foundations for Psychology (Bernard Scott)Wielding the Cybernetic Scythe in the Blunting Undergrowth of Psychological Confusion (Vincent Kenny)To What Extent Can Second-Order Cybernetics Be a Foundation for Psychology? (Marcelo Arnold-Cathalifaud & Daniela Thumala-Dockendorff)The Importance — and the Difficulty — of Moving Beyond Linear Causality (Robert J Martin)Obstacles to Cybernetics Becoming a Conceptual Framework and Metanarrative in the Psychologies (Philip Baron)The Social and the Psychological: Conceptual Cybernetic Unification vs Disciplinary Analysis? (Eva Buchinger)Second Thoughts on Cybernetic Unifications (Tilia Stingl de Vasconcelos Guedes)Cybernetics and Synergetics as Foundations for Complex Approach Towards Complexities of Life (Lea Šugman Bohinc)Author's Response: On Becoming and Being a Cybernetician (Bernard Scott)Consciousness as Self-Description in Differences (Diana Gasparyan)On the Too Often Overlooked Complexity of the Tension between Subject and Object (Yochai Ataria)Where Is Consciousness? (Urban Kordeš)Theorizing Agents: Their Games, Hermeneutical Tools and Epistemic Resources (Konstantin Pavlov-Pinus)How

Energy Psychology: Explorations at the Interface of Energy, Cognition, Behavior, and Health, Second Edition introduces the exciting new paradigm of energy psychology and presents the latest research on the subject. This second edition begins by tracing the roots of energy psychology and contrasting them with contemporary approaches, and the