Sayyed Mohsen Fatemi

Questioning the Unquestionability of the Expert’s Perspective in Psychology

Psychology’s infatuation with precision, objectivity, universality, refutability, and verifiability brought about a focus on the legitimacy of the perspective of the knower namely the expert who, at the center of discourse of power, could collect and analyze the data and then embark on generalizing the information for the sake of generative theories. The article argues that mainstream psychology has mainly acted from the perspective of the observer and not perspective of the actor and this has largely silenced the reality of the actor. While focusing on the underlying components of the perspective of the expert, the article calls for questioning the unquestionability of the perspective of the observer and indicates how the process of questioning may help us understand the often concealed-to-oblivion dimensions of the actors.

From Kierkegaard to Langer (From Kierkegaard’s paradox to Langer’s psychology of possibility)

This paper presents the connection between Kierkegaard as a philosopher and Langer as a psychologist in opening up the possibility of dialogical interactions between philosophy and psychology. The paper demonstrates how both Kierkegaard and Langer transcend the pre-established parlance of the disciplinary paradigmatic analysis and invent new and interdependent multidisciplinary perspectives. Through numerous examples of their underlying viewpoints, the paper explores how the relation between psychological ontology and philosophical ontology may facilitate the process of a leap beyond epistemological propositions.

Langerian Mindfulness and Its Psychotherapeutic Implications: Recomposing/Decomposing Mindlessly Constructed Life Stories

Fatemi and Langer’s chapter of the book demonstrates how an enhancement of mindfulness in one’s life would lead to an increase of agency, empowerment and novelty. They explore the role of art and artistic expressiveness as an effective strategy to implement a mindful phenomenology of life. This chapter examines how mindlessness would impede the process of re-authoring one’s life and impose a self-limiting mental, emotional, behavioral and cognitive incarceration. The chapter illustrates the power of poetry and art in creating lively moments of an experimental mindfulness where people may go beyond the mundane discourse of disempowerment and helplessness and create a novel realm of being.

Critical Mindfulness of Psychology’s Mindlessness

This chapter argues that mainstream psychology has mainly acted from the perspective of the observer and not the perspective of the actor and this has largely silenced the reality of the actor. Psychology’s infatuation with precision, objectivity, universality, refutability, and verifiability brought about a focus on the legitimacy of the perspective of the knower namely the expert who, at the center of discourse of power, could collect and analyze the data and then embark on generalizing the information for the sake of generative theories. The chapter calls for questioning the unquestionability of the perspective of the observer and indicates how the process of questioning may help us understand the often concealed-to-oblivion dimensions of the actors.

Mindfulness and Performance: Peak Performance: Langerian Mindfulness and Flow

Performance, including sport performance, appears to transpire in a series of connected and sequentially related moments. The time-oriented context of performance is characterized by the interplay of complex array of behaviors consisting of emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological factors. Some studies have focused on the stress-oriented variables that are embedded within the manifestation of performance configuration (see, for instance, Craft et al., 2003). On the other hand, the analysis of a given performance may suggest that a performance may fall into a low, middle, or high level of excitement. At low levels, performance levels are slow, and at high levels, performance may suffer too since the performance is intensely overwhelmed by the excitement level. The Yerkes-Dodson Curve (Yerkes & Dudson, 1908) indicates that optimal task performance occurs at the mid-level of excitement or diffuse psychological arousal. In defining a peak performance, scholars have focused on special extraordinary features of a performance, which on the one hand embodies the previously achieved level of competencies and functionality and on the other hand exceeds and supersedes the quality of the past positive experiences in connection with the given task (see Privette 1981, 1983, 1991). An in-depth exploration of the constituents of a peak performance may highlight the interconnectedness of positive features in the wholeness of a performance, including relaxation, confidence, high energy, present-centered focus, extraordinary awareness, a feeling of being in control, and detachment from distractions (see Cohn, 1991; Garfield & Bennett, 1984). When it comes to sport performance, sport psychology has displayed an interest in exploring the relationship between positive self-talk, emotional regulation, and heightened performance (for instance, see Kornspan, Overby, & Lerner, 2004). In line with the sport psychology studies, Csikszentmihalyis (1975, 1979, 1990) conceptualization of flow has inspired the field with continued interest in looking into facilitating factors that can contribute to an enhancement of performance. Flow refers to those experiences in which you become so indulged in an activity that you lose awareness of everything else around you. You feel “in the zone,” and time flies. The activity itself becomes a reward in and of itself. Csikszentmihalyis model of flow, which was earlier called autotelic experiences, originated from his interviews with many people who experienced a full engagement in their activities, such as rock climbers and chess players.

Priming the Mind to See Its Double: Mindfulness in a New Key

In accordance with the distinction made by Bloom (Dev Sci 10:147–151, 2007) between two distinct cognitive systems—“one for dealing with material objects, the other for social entities” (p. 149), we propose two forms of mindfulness—non-relational and relational. Non-relational mindfulness is exemplified by Ellen Langer’s cognitive mindfulness, whereas relational mindfulness is best articulated by Chinese aesthetics. In this chapter, we invoke the physics notion of symmetry to explain relational mindfulness and also show that this framework is compatible with the Langerian formulation of mindfulness. We conclude with a study in which relational mindfulness was experimentally induced to test the hypotheses that (a) the capacity of the human mind to see its double beyond the social arena can be primed and (b) attunement with a virtual mind can reap unique mental health benefits such as tranquility and a sense of well-being associated with affiliative fantasies.