Mental Health and Transcendence in Antiquity and Today: Comment on Graiver (2021)

I am sympathetic to Inbar Graiver's (see record 2021-21903-001) 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. ) 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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).