Arnold Mindell (1940 to 2024), an American physicist turned Jungian analyst, founded Process Work, also called process-oriented psychology. He brought to psychotherapy the idea that body symptoms, dreams and slips of the tongue are faces of one meaningful process, a way of following that process instead of interpreting it, a map of the ‘edges’ where people stop and the ‘channels’ through which experience arrives, and the use of the same awareness with groups, conflicts and people in comas. He drew openly on shamanism, and his idea of primary and secondary processes is part of Therapeutic Shamanism’s own teaching.
Who was Arnold Mindell? #
A scientist who became a psychotherapist. He was born in Schenectady, New York, on 1 January 1940, studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gaining a master’s degree in applied physics in 1964, and went on to research at the ETH, the technical university in Zurich.1 In Zurich he turned to psychology, qualifying as a Jungian analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute in 1970 and becoming a training analyst there in 1977.2
From the late 1970s he developed his own approach, and in 1982 he and his colleagues founded the first school of Process Work in Zurich. In 1989 the Process Work Center of Portland, Oregon, now the Process Work Institute, was founded, and around 1990 he moved there from Switzerland with his wife and co-teacher Amy Mindell. He wrote twenty-three books on Process Work, and by 2024 there were more than twenty Process Work schools around the world. He died on 10 June 2024 in Yachats, Oregon.3
Paul Francis counts Mindell among the people he admires and who have inspired and taught him.4
What was new about his approach? #
Bringing physics and psychology together, and bringing the body into analysis. Frustrated that physics and psychology used separate languages, Mindell looked for a more neutral way to describe what happens to people, as processes, channels of information, flows of signals and edges, refusing to treat matter and psyche as separate.5 In Zurich, as a Jungian, he also felt the need to bring movement and bodywork into his work.6
The result was a way of working that follows a person’s experience wherever it is trying to go, instead of steering it or explaining it. Whatever turns up, a pain, a dream, a mood, a sudden gesture, is treated as part of a process with its own intelligence, to be followed with awareness. The fuller account, with Mindell’s own words, is in What can Process Work offer shamanic work?
What is the dreambody? #
Mindell’s name for the meeting place of body and dream. He noticed that the same message could appear in a client’s dreams at night and in their physical symptoms by day, and he came to see symptoms as potentially meaningful and purposeful, not only as things to be got rid of.7 This did not mean making light of illness; a chronic symptom, he said, is an ally only in theory, and left to itself it hurts.8 From the dreambody came work with people near death and in comas, and work with people in extreme states in psychiatric settings.9
What are primary and secondary processes, edges and channels? #
Three of the tools he gave psychotherapy. The primary process is what a person knows about and identifies with; the secondary process is what happens to them without their meaning it, and it is often why people feel they want to change but find it so hard to do.10 An edge is the point where a person says “that I cannot do, or will not do”, the boundary of their identity, where something new is trying to come through.11 Channels are the routes experience takes: seeing, hearing, body feeling, movement, relationships and the world around us. Each of us lives mostly in a few of them, and what troubles us often arrives through the ones we do not use.12
Primary and secondary processes are part of Therapeutic Shamanism’s own teaching. Someone may ask to be healed whilst another part of them, which they are unaware of, has an investment in the illness; until that part is made conscious and its concerns are addressed, treatment of any kind, shamanic healing included, is likely to fail.13 See What are child, orphan, fort-holder and protector parts? and What does it mean to work therapeutically with process, parts and resistance?
How did he take psychotherapy beyond the individual? #
Into groups, organisations and conflicts. Mindell called this worldwork, “the politics of awareness”, and named its attitude deep democracy, which makes room for every level of experience in a group, not only its facts, positions and roles.14 He looked honestly at rank and privilege, and drew a distinction between leaders and elders: “The leader follows a plan; the elder honours the direction of a mysterious and unknown river.”15 He traced this work back to the shamanic circle, writing that “Shamanic dreaming is our common past”.16 See What do tribe and belonging mean, and what is the shaman’s role in a community?
How does his work relate to Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely, and with a difference. Mindell drew on shamanism throughout his life, from comparing a therapist’s inner work in a session to the shaman who goes into trance to help the client, to books such as The Shaman’s Body.17 Like Therapeutic Shamanism, Process Work refuses to push anything away, listens to the body and dreams, and respects the parts of a person who are not yet ready to change.
Where Therapeutic Shamanism goes further, it does so in shamanic terms. Much psychotherapy tends to reduce everything to the human level: it treats the spirits met in the inner world as sub-personalities, parts of the psyche, and journeys as imagination, where shamanism knows them as real, independent beings and real places. And much of the pain people bring to therapy is caused by disconnection from nature and the more-than-human, which a therapy focused only on human relationships and inner human processes cannot heal.18 See What can shamanism offer Process Work?
