How Can We Help If We Have No Proven Theory of the Mind?

Psychology and psychiatry strive to help people with difficulties in life and mental illness without a single theory of the mind, and it is a riddle still to be solved.

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Healthcare in mental health is still wandering in what William Blake would have called "the forest of the night." Why do I say that? Although it seems apparent that there must be a theory that is the foundation for all mental health services, there is one major gap: it lacks a theory of the mind. If we do not know what the mind is and what constitutes it, it remains a philosophical idea on which we base so much, and yet we know so little.

Clinicians offer therapies based on their ideas of the mind, and they vary greatly. Psychiatrists medicate this mind without knowing. It's like walking on a seashore full of shells and hoping that it forms one thing: the mind. That may not be the best metaphor, but it's the one that comes to mind when I think of the mind and how intricate it must be, and how daunting it has to be if you are being honest with yourself. Honesty, after all, should be the basis for any health treatment and diagnosis, but how do we do that if we have no theory?

We have multiple multifactorial hypotheses about what makes up our mind. Hypotheses are not theories, they are guesses at what might exist in any area of…