The Ecological Paradigm of Mind and Its Implications for Psychotherapy

Abstract

As the result of a tremendous cross-disciplinary effort, the past 20 years have witnessed huge advances in our understanding of the brain and of the brain's relationship to the mind. A new paradigm of the mind—an ecological paradigm, as Gregory Bateson called it in 1973—has fallen into place. The authors have begun to have a scientific, biologically grounded explanation of how the human brain–mind system works. Despite the likely relevance of this paradigm for psychotherapy, its uptake in the clinical literature has been uneven to date. Accordingly, this article aims to pique the interest of the psychotherapeutic community in the ecological paradigm as a whole, in hopes of stimulating wider discussion and research into its clinical aspects and consequences.