The mind-body problem and hypothetical constructs in psychology

The Cartesian distinction between a cognizant mind and a material body has been highly influential in shaping the construction of procedures used in the study of the body image in the discipline of psychology. The research enterprise of a logical positivist psychology has transformed the original dynamic concept into a range of discrete variables suitable for so-called objective measurement. Significant for this transformation is the way that questions pertaining to the relationship between mind and body have been bypassed.

In 1969, Shontz acknowledged a serious dilemma posed by the mind-body problem for psychological research. He wrote:

No field of psychology is more plagued by the philosophical embarrassment known as the mind-body problem than is the study of perception of the personal body … Formal philosophical arguments on the mind-body problem have been developed for at least three hundred years. Generally speaking, they have either failed to provide a firm basis for the empirical study of body experience or they have labeled the mind-body problem meaningless and have discarded it altogether…. (p. 2). Modern psychology tends to bypass the philosophical confusion associated with the mind-body dispute and to proceed with the job of collecting data … The study of man therefore faces a methodological dilemma. It must first disassemble the organism for examination and then attempt the patently impossible task of artificially reconstructing it from the pieces. The belief that this method provides a satisfactory solution to the dilemma was considered by Krech and Crutchfield (1958) a profitable “scientific fiction”. The study of personal body perception must make use of this convenient fiction. If research were delayed until the mind-body problem is satisfactorily solved by philosophy, the pursuit of hard empirical facts would be indefinitely postponed (p. 3).

Shontz describes here the way psychology approaches the philosophical dilemma of the mind- body problem. The solution he identified, however, has not appeared to proffer greater clarity with respect to the body image but, as argued in Section 1.5.4, has encouraged widespread conceptual reduction of an otherwise tri-dimensional concept.

In defence of Shontz (1969), his later description of the role of measurement was more extensive. There he qualified and delimited its function in the study of the body image to the task of identifying specifically, the quality of experiences associated with the body image. He thus associated psychometry in body image research as serving descriptive aims, in the same way that “projective measures” target such experiences (Shontz, p. 181). As a researcher himself, Shontz was less concerned with statistical confidence, than with the construction of what he referred to as “a comprehensive theory” (Shontz, 1990, p. 157). By contrast, other researchers within the discipline of psychology since the 1960s have taken to the task of measurement and data collection in a way that implies that a manifold picture of the body image can be built simply from inter-correlational analyses. The present study contends, however, that more than thirty years of research have revealed that this pursuit serves a rather unscientific fiction. Rather than a manifold picture, it has generated plurality in the methods available for the measurement the body image, that have correspondingly spawned an array of constructs that are neither able to establish sound correlational relationships to each other or to one common criterion.

The most widely used model in the study of the body image, that is, the dichotomous model represented by anthropomorphic size estimations and the cognitive and affective ingredients in the evaluation of one’s appearance, is an offspring of this point of view. However, as Shipton (1999) has argued, that model has critical flaws since a range of perceptual instruments used in the assessment of anorexic patients not only measures perception, but can also reinforce an attitude within the anorexic patient that overly objectifies the physical body. In other words the dichotomous model can promote the objectification of one’s physical being as a thing, rather than permit observation of the psychological conditions underlying the disorder.

Schilder (1935/1978) was intently focussed upon the difficult topic of the relation between the mind and body. The dynamic framework presented in his monograph was an attempt to explore the mutual relation between the organic and psychological disorders of the central nervous system. His idea of dynamic construction reconceptualized the activity of apperception and reiterated its role in the organization of psychological conditions he identified from the psychoanalytic literature of his day. Schilder did not avoid the philosophical impasse generated

by the mind-body problem, but rather confronted it directly. He did this by taking advantage of his training in two different but related discourses on the central nervous system, psychoanalytic ideas and neurology. He also generated a framework built upon the indeterminacy of processes that contrasts acutely with the closed and strict parameters of the hypothetico-deductive model preferred by the logical positivist research in psychology.

It is the opinion here that the assumptions of logical positivism have created confusion in psychology about what body image is, and have left researchers in the discipline largely silent on how body image is psychologically constructed. This in some respect reflects what Ussher (2000) identified with respect to the influence of the hypothetico-deductive model. She argued that psychological researchers have tended to ignore theory and interdisciplinary or philosophical ideas, because logical positivist research methods prioritized by the discipline do not supply the conceptual tools needed to ascertain the significance of concepts reliant upon antecedent influences. It is thus pertinent to note that the failure of structural-functional research in psychology to recognize the activity of apperception in Schilder’s (1935/1978) work stems from the failure to consider the temporality and indeterminacy of processes in body image construction and, further, the dynamic characterizing those processes.