Consciousness (Critical Concepts in Psychology), Volume 4: New Directions: Psychogenesis, Transformations of Consciousness, and Non-reductive, Integrative Theories

This is the fourth volume of Velmans, M. (ed.) (2018) Consciousness(Critical Concepts in Psychology), a 4-volume collection of Major Works on Consciousnesscommissioned by Routledge, London. The introduction and 22 readings begin with a review of mental influences on states of the body and brain (psychogenesis), which are often thought of as theoretically problematic for conventional materialist theoriesof mind. The evidence is nevertheless extensive, for example in psychosomatic illnessesand studies of the physiological consequences of meditation, imagery, biofeedbackand hypnosis. Such effects are also central to developments in psychoneuroimmunologyand studies of placebos, dealing not only with how to control for such effects in clinical trials, but with how such effects operate, and how to harness them for the benefit of patients. The volume then surveys altered statesof consciousness, including the conditions for their emergence, their adaptive as well as maladaptive potential, and the influences of culture on how these are understood. The analysis deepens with reviews of the major ways in which consciousnesscan be usefully transformed, starting with the burgeoning literature on the nature and effects of meditation practices, including their effects on neural dynamics and the varied ways in which they have, in recent years, been incorporated into a range of psychological therapies, focusing particularly on mindfulness and its potential consequences for psychological health. The survey then turns to mystical experiences, which, of all the positive altered statesof consciousness, are perhaps the most extraordinary and transformative. Reported over millennia and recognized by William James to combine ineffabilitywith a noeticquality, their generation, effects and interpretation have, once more, become the subject of research. In this connection, we also review the resurgent interest in the use of drugs in the transformation of consciousnessfocusing particularly on recent research on the clinical and neurophysiological effects of major psychedelics such as psilocybinand LSD. It will be apparent that the four volumes of this Collection cover a vast range of phenomena that cannot comfortably be accommodated into a materialist, reductionist worldview, and so this volume (and the entire collection) concludes with a diverse sample of non- reductive, integrative theoriesthat offer unifying ways of understanding consciousness, drawing on information theory, neuropsychology, psychodynamics, physics, psychology, parapsychology, and philosophy.