Dualism Essay

Yes, dualism has an impact on what psychologists do in their profession. At the beginning, Cartesian dualism defined mind and body as two independent entities, which also refer to the epiphenomenalism and ontology, whereas, with time passing by, the interaction in the pineal gland between mind and body, was proposed by Rene Descartes as interactionism. It is Cartesianism that combined both dualism and voluntarism together. Moreover, voluntarism regards some human behaviors are unpredictable because of the free will, which can influence some aspects of the behaviors (Kukla & Walmsley, 2006). In contrast, determinism is opposite to voluntarism and stands for the absolute Science-Law-principle, which believes that science law can predict everything that happens in the world,

Skinner, whose parts of theories were involved with dualism, either mind or body. In spite of no shortage of psychological theories in twentieth century, there are several potential problems with dualism. Among the theories from these psychologists, for instance, the behaviorism, which emphasized solely on behaviors and believed the psychological disorders could be cured only by physical treatments, was proposed by B.F. Skinner. Hence, Skinner was a deterministic materialist. However, there are still a number of disorders that related more to the mental health domain, like phobia, cannot be treated by modifying behaviors only, but some mental interventions. What is more, the psychoanalytic theory from Freud, whose treatments were associated with the analyses of the changes along with a person’s entire development, was an example of a mind-emphasized theory and the psychoanalytic theory believed mental states are not identical to physical states, but that they’re still entirely predictable on the basis of nonphysical laws of the mind. And Freud was a deterministic dualist (Kukla & Walmsley,