Mental health and transcendence in antiquity and today: Comment on Graiver (2021).

Abstract

I am sympathetic to Inbar Graiver's (2021) claim that modern Western psychology can benefit from a dialogue with history and would emphasize that her article points toward two distinct ways this is so: first, on the basis of historiographical representations of individual experience; second, on the basis of the history of concepts. I also accept her generalization that modern psychology and psychiatry have often focused on pathology and that among the key reasons for this is the biomedical assumption that "an organism is healthy to the extent that it is not diseased" (pp. 7-8). (I am more diffident about the degree to which Freudian psychoanalysis remains responsible for this today. 1 ) Insofar as Western psychologists do attempt to theorize a universal model of "mental health," Graiver rightly highlights the danger they will not perceive their own culturally specific presuppositions. Though I am no expert in Christian monastic hagiography or theorizations of "the health of the soul," I am sure both can contribute to illuminating some of these presuppositions.This article also raises many questions for me. For the sake of brevity, I will address only two of them. The first concerns the general conceptualization of "mental health," whereas the second focuses on the roles of relationality and transcendence in mental health. Mental HealthAs Graiver (2021) says, it is precisely because discourses of "mental health" are "overlaid with specifically modern ideas and values" (p. 2) that theories and representations from other times and places can provide critical distance. But I would describe the view from this critical distance differently than Graiver does.Let me begin with the Greek and Roman material. I am not sure that it is helpful to focus on medical texts to understand "mental health" in the ancient world. Graiver (2021) claims that "ancient medical writers hardly discussed the mental qua mental" and that the physician Galen (129 -201 CE) was the first to integrate "psychological and ethical aspects of health" (p. 3). But Galen's psychology is heavily indebted to the philosopher Plato (427-327 BCE), whose Timaeus discussed at length how "states of health and diseases, both virtues and vices" arise through the interaction of mental activities, bodily