Two Minds Blog

In my  Nursing Research paper laying out Two Minds Theory (TMT), I argued that a person’s sense of self is connected to the Narrative System, which "usually involves conscious thought, expressed in language or imagery" and "involves the sense of a continuous self." I might now revise this a bit.  Certainly, the Narrative Mind involves language (as opposed to the Intuitive Mind's focus on emotions, sensations, memories, "gut feelings" about truth, etc.). And definitely, the Narrative Mind's operations are normally accessible to us for reflection whereas the Intuitive Mind's workings are not. In my original paper I followed Freud , who identified the Narrative Mind with "I" ( ego meaning "I" or "myself", das ich in German), and the Intuitive Mind with "the other" ( id meaning "it," in German das es ). This dichotomy fits with Western thought dating back at least to Plato, who suggested that reaso...

  You've probably noticed how few things in life you can actually control. Can you control what happens in the world around you? Nope, there's new evidence against that every day. What happens in your own life? No, the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" come for us all. What your spouse does, or your kids? Good luck with that. Well, how about your own behavior? You can control what you do and how you react to events, right?  Well, maybe. Two Minds Theory suggests that behavior is not under your conscious  control. In the original theory diagram  (also reproduced below), notice that any new environmental event sets off a reaction going down two tracks -- the Narrative Mind on top, the Intuitive Mind on the bottom -- but the tracks never rejoin at the end. Only the lower track, the Intuitive Mind, has an arrow leading to behavior. Unlike Leventhal's model , where both the cognitive and the emotional track have arrows pointing to the endpoint of the diagram, i...