• Source: Boundaries of the mind

      • Boundaries of the mind refers to a postulated personality trait concerning the degree of separateness ("thickness") or connection ("thinness") between mental functions and processes. Thin boundaries have been linked with open-mindedness, sensitivity, vulnerability, creativity, and artistic ability. It has been postulated that people with thin boundaries tend to confuse fantasy and reality and have a fluid sense of identity, leading them to merge or lose themselves in their relations with others. People with thick boundaries are said to differentiate clearly between reality and fantasy and between self and other, and tend to prefer well-defined social structures.
      The concept was developed by psychoanalyst Ernest Hartmann from his observations of the personality characteristics of frequent nightmare sufferers. The construct has been particularly studied in relation to dream recall and lucid dreaming.


      Thin and thick boundaries


      Ernest Hartmann proposed that people who suffer frequent nightmares have distinctive personality characteristics which he described as "unguarded", "undefended", "vulnerable", "artistic", and "open". People with such characteristics seemed to him unable to screen out frightening images and feelings originating in their dreams. They also seemed to lack barriers between their own identity and those of others, or between their own beliefs and unconventional ideas. Hartmann proposed that such people have "thin" boundaries between their mental processes and argued that thinness or thickness of boundaries was "a broad dimension of personality and an aspect of the overall organization of the mind." He considered the concept to be similar to William James's concept of "tender-mindedness" and to Blatt and Ritzler's "permeable ego boundaries". The construct is measured with the Boundary Questionnaire which assesses thinness of boundaries in relation to a variety of areas, including boundaries between sleeping and waking, thoughts and feelings, and persons, places, and values. People with thick boundaries tend to see the world in "black-and-white" terms, whereas those with thin boundaries tend to be more aware of "shades of gray". Women tend to have thinner boundaries than men, and boundaries tend to become thicker with age.


      Measurement


      The Boundary Questionnaire consists of 145 five-point scales covering the following 12 areas:

      Additionally, a total score (SumBound) reflecting boundary thinness was derived by summing the ratings of 138 items.


      Relationship to other personality traits


      The Boundary Questionnaire has been related to the Five Factor Model of personality, and "thin boundaries" are mostly associated with openness to experience, particularly the facets of openness to fantasy, aesthetics, and feelings, although some of the content was correlated with neuroticism, extraversion, and low conscientiousness. Scores on the questionnaire are also positively correlated with absorption, transliminality, hypnotisability, and suggestibility. Thin boundaries are also associated with the Feeling and Intuition scales of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.


      Psychopathology


      It has been suggested that persons diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder or with borderline personality disorder tend to have thinner boundaries than the rest of the population, whereas people with obsessive-compulsive disorder tend to have thicker boundaries. On the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, thin boundaries have appeared to be associated with high scores on the paranoia scale, and in males with high femininity and low defensiveness. Thin boundaries in males have therefore been linked to willingness to accept "feminine" aspects of the self, whereas men with thick boundaries may tend to believe that "men are men, women are women".


      Dreaming


      One study reported that people with thin boundaries have more frequent dream recall, have more nightmares, and may also have longer, more intense dreams, with more bizarre content. Additionally, people with thin boundaries appeared to value their dreams more, especially in terms of their meaningfulness and creative aspects. A finding that people with thin boundaries were more likely to report having had childhood nightmares led the authors to suggest that boundary thinness may be relatively stable across the lifespan.


      New age beliefs


      Adherence to new age beliefs and practices, such as yoga, reiki, divination, and astrology, have been linked with thin boundaries as well as with measures of schizotypy and magical thinking. New age beliefs and thin boundaries may be related through such shared factors as a sense of "connectedness", holism and emotional sensitivity, as well as a thinking style defined by looseness of association.


      See also


      Hyperphantasia
      Personal boundaries
      Fantasy-prone personality
      Schizotypal personality disorder


      References




      External links


      Papers by Ernest Hartmann
      Dr. Ernest Hartmann personal website [1]

    • Source: Boundaries of the Mind

      • Boundaries of the Mind (2004) is a thorough treatment of the role and conceptualization of the individual in psychology, by author Robert A. Wilson, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Alberta.


      Structure


      It is the first book in a planned three-volume set, entitled The Individual in the Fragile Sciences. The second volume examines the individual in biological sciences and the third, the individual's role in social sciences.
      The book is divided into four parts:

      Part I motivates the study of the individual in psychology, provides a framework for contrasting nativist and empiricist views and provides a history of psychology that traces its gradual independence from physiology and philosophy to a subject in its own right.
      Part II spans topics for which Wilson is already well-known: the individualism–externalism debate, narrow and wide content, and the metaphysics of realization.
      Part III explores the consequences of this radical form of externalism from the perspective of various research programs in psychology: memory, development, and theory of mind. Wilson applies his externalist framework to stake out his own conception of consciousness, the TESEE acronym: Temporally Extended, Scaffolded, Embodied, Embedded.
      Part IV closes the book with a discussion of the cognitive metaphor in the biological and social sciences.


      Approach


      TESEE is an approach to the processes of awareness/introspection, meta-representation and attention. It is continuous with the embedded and embodied approach to memory, cognitive development, and theory of mind.
      Its complicated processes of awareness extend beyond the immediate subject in space and time. They exploit information-rich external bits of language and navigation equipment (the scaffolds) and rely on dynamic relations between the subject's body and the environment in which it is located.
      This approach can be extended to phenomenal consciousness, arguing that a phenomenal property is not an intrinsic property of experience but rather a feature of the representation of its objects. As such, phenomenal properties inherit their importance from the intentional contents to which they apply. According to representationalists such as Fred Dretske, William Lycan, and Michael Tye - phenomenal consciousness is externalistic. Thus Wilson thinks that this global externalism goes both too far and not far enough.
      TESEE conceptions of vision and visual consciousness relies on the sensorimotor theory of visual consciousness of philosophers Alva Noë and Susan Hurley, and psychologist J. Kevin O'Regan, arguing that vision, like touch, involves active and dynamic exploration of the contingent features of the environment.


      Second book


      The second book is Genes and the Agents of Life: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences (Biology) published in 2005.


      References


      Review by L. A. Shapiro, University of Wisconsin, Madison
      Review by Ray Rennard


      External links


      sample in pdf version

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