Philosophy and Psychology: The Bridge

This is a post that has been in the draft bin for some time. It's not on any of the stuff I post on a lot recently, although I guess it could be related. I would certainly like to think of all of my thoughts on things psychological and philosophical and literary as being coherent and consistent amongst themselves and fitting into some larger coherent system, but this post didn't arise from thinking on any of the literary issues on which I have been dwelling lately. It came about from copy-editing a piece in a journal called Nova et Vetera (English edition, which is not the same thing as simply an English translation of the French edition; the French edition started in the 1920s; the English edition begun in 2002 is based on the model and the philosophy of the French edition but is entirely independent of it).

Anyway, the journal is Thomist/neo-Thomist in orientation, and the article that gave rise to this thought was by a Dominican priest named Romanus Cessario. He does lot of work in the area of the relation between psychology and the faith (so, things like spiritual direction), and so this particular article at least mentioned somewhere (it may have been the main topic or it may have been a closing "continuing project" idea; it's been a little bit since I edited it) the idea  of building a bridge between philosophy and psychology.

So I started thinking on this in a way analogous to the bridges I so love biking over in NYC. Particularly the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges over the East River, in order to do the rise and fall (the uphill half makes the downhill half feel so nice), they can't start right at the edge of the shore on one side and go just to right on the shore at the other side. They have to start the inclines a good way back inland, and so you get areas like "two bridges" on the Manhattan side and "DUMBO (down under Manhattan bridge overpass)" on the Brooklyn side. So, I thought of philosophy and psychology and the bridge between them in this vein wondering what the section were that went back into the


So, the original is: Philosophy----------Psychology

Philosophy is rational thought, discursive reason, so just on the other side of it further, inland is theology as thought, its rational propositional content. But further back than theology as thought is theology as "Word of God," as revelation. And furthest inland, the actual land itself is God, pure spirit.

On the psychology side, because we are talking of matters of the ego and, therefore, of a soul capable as self reflexivity, we're talking of the rational soul first, psychology as mind, as mental. But behind this, further inland now on the psychology side, is psychology and "body" in the holistic sense of "soma," and then just further is the psychology of "flesh" (see my discussion of body/soma and flesh/sarx in my post on Tolkien's Incarnational imagination). Even further inland on this side, we get to psychiatry as distinct from psychology, distinct because of its focus on the organic rather than the behavioral.  And finally we come to pure materialiaty, in modern terms.


So, the whole is:
God--Theology (revelation)--theology (thought)--philosophy (rational thought)---[bridge]---psychology (rational soul)--psychology (body, flesh)--psychiatry--materiality.

Thus, the bridge between philosophy and psychology stands at the center of the whole bridge between God and material creation as a whole. Of course, this bridge was already traversed in the Incarnation. It's just interesting to see what the elements are. In a sense, the bridge Cessario is talking about is that between the human understanding of it starting from the two acts of human understanding, philosophical and psychological.


It's also a bit like the crucible of alchemy, which has white on the top side for pure spirit and black on the bottom for pure matter. On the horizontal plane, as I read it, it is all soul because red sulfur on the left is animal soul, and quicksilver on the right is rational soul, which makes human soul the bridge between spirit and matter, the Incarnation as the bridge between God and creation.

Just some thoughts.