An Overdue Application of Quantum Mechanics to Field Psychology: A Case for a New Approach of Quantum Psychology
December 5, 2022
By Jennifer Finch, M.A., LPC, NCC, SEP
For as long as I can remember I have had a fascination with BIG science. For fun I read on topics such as astrophysics, chaos theory, especially the butterfly effect, and quantum entanglement. I watch documentaries on Infinity and space travel. I have read a collection of books by the whole Sagan family: Carl, his beautiful wife, Ann Druyan, and even his daughter Sasha’s uplifting debut book, “For Small Creatures Such as We.” I have been known to stay in during the evenings or on weekends and watch NASA Television Live. In graduate school my fellow classmates would often show up at my apartment to drag me away from Schrodinger’s “poetic” equation and would say things like, “those are just ‘suggested readings’ Jen, nobody actually reads them.”
I might have missed my calling as a cosmologist, astronomer or planetary scientist, yet still my life, my spiritual beliefs and my psychotherapy practice have been immeasurably influenced by quantum concepts. They bestow great meaning and purpose in an impermanent life.
I bewitchingly twirl these quantum ideas around in my head and often feel them emerge and play out in my body. For instance, the discovery that we, like the universe, and all atoms, are made of 99.99999999% space; is it strange to say that I have experienced my body being made of this space? When I contemplatively embody that I am this space, quite possibly the same space as the universe, I feel peaceful and enraptured in intense pleasure and joy. I can at once let go of my grip on everything. It is quite useful. Especially in grand degrees of stress, frustration, or pain. I am not solid. I am space. Everything can move through me. How utterly freeing.
In the last 15-20 years psychologists have just started to grapple with how quantum science could help us explain the human condition. We are of course 100+ years or so behind the physicists.
In the movie documentary, “Living with Ghosts,” Joe Dispenza, D.C., says it best “Many of the classical paradigms are beginning to break apart. Whether it’s the political model, the economic model, whether it’s the educational model, the religious model, the medical model, the environment. So many different systems are beginning to collapse because they can’t sustain themselves any longer. What if the concepts…are actually wrong? We can’t wait for science to give us permission to do the uncommon. We must do the uncommon and we have to do it repeatedly. Then we must have science come and study us.”
As a long-time practitioner, student and teacher of meditation, the community of meditators I know have practices that were established long before the science caught up to us. We took a leap of faith. We taught others from our own experiences. And, very importantly, we never took anyone’s word for it (an anti-guru approach). We didn’t worry about the science because we had absolute confidence that it would indeed catch up. And it delightfully did. Neuroscience discoveries are happening every single day that help others get on board. But guess what? The Buddha himself already knew that it worked, he didn’t need the science to be a believer. Maybe he would have been interested in the science of it all, I certainly am, but in my mind, I’d like to think he would have never cared. He, just like the rest of us leap-of-faith-takers, taught from what we had experienced. We didn’t necessarily need scientific conviction, because we knew things to be true on a much deeper level. We felt changed by our practices. We knew things to be possible without causal explanation.
In the same way, we can look to quantum mechanics to guide us in psychology, but my hypothesis is that we already feel what quantum physics shows us to be true. We have on many occasions crossed over the threshold and have been “quantified” in our daily lives.
Have you ever felt someone else’s mood? How can you explain this? Have you ever been told you were being too sensitive? Or downright crazy for feeling something you knew to be sincerely verifiable, but it couldn’t be understood? Not rationally anyway.
Do certain individuals make you feel “icky?” Or do you ever walk away from an encounter with someone who you thought gave off positive “vibes?”
How do we explain this?
Have you ever known something is about to happen, but cannot conjecture how? Not in an anxious, what if, worry sort of way; but in an incontestable, calm, and cavernous kind of way.
I am certain we all know these daily scenarios to be true because we have felt them. How can a mother innately know her child is in trouble although he/she/they might be miles apart? Subsequently she will pick up the phone to call and check in and discovers something difficult is in effect going on.
I turn my thoughts to quantum physics to help me explain what I felt as a child, and to provide comfort to my clients who also felt sensitive to their environments in their childhoods. Where most other psychological modalities have begun to feel achingly limited and Newtonian, quantum mechanics feels like a little biology of hope. I have in a sense outgrown most classical deployments of psychology. Significantly, I have matured beyond and surpassed in my human development as a psychotherapist, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR). I can no longer vouch for it. Not that I ever did defend it absolutely, because as a trained Bowens’ systems theorist one can never be a purest diagnostically. We look at the gamut, the whole nature AND nurture system, bio-psycho-social-spiritual. In my humbled opinion, it is a patronizing form of social control. Protecting and appeasing corrupt insurance companies, who contend myopically to make sense of what we cannot understand. The complexities of our human experience, how can we possibly categorize that and list it as an ICD-11 code?
Instead of these short-sighted approaches, I propose we extend more effort and energy and valid research into the inquiry of what we cannot see. The 99% space between. Moving forth to recognize what the physicists have seen for ages, and cultivate a robust practice in quantum psychology, a comprehensive understanding of who we really are. We, as humans, cannot be deduced to a category in an overly simplified personality test, or fit neatly into a box of attachment theory adopted by Neo-Freudian ideas that our parents screwed us up.
As a small child I could feel things. I had no way of proving beyond doubt if what I felt was true, but I just knew them to be so. I was a veracious and precocious youngster, and I told it like it is. To my detriment this got me into a LOT of trouble. Sadly, my true to life faithfulness slowly corroded to one where I learned to invalidate my experience.
After being told an infinity number of times, “don’t be so sensitive”, “don’t be so smart,” “bite your tongue.” I kept my unexplained experiences to myself. I spent decades hardening myself to block out what I felt. I couldn’t prove it anyway.
Interestingly, the word, “gaslighting,” was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year in 2022. It makes me wonder if we culturally stopped cutting ourselves off from our intuitive gut-knowing instincts, would gaslighting cease to exist?
Auspiciously I had an amazing mother who validated every step of my unexplained experiences, as she too “felt” things. My grandmother did too, per my mother’s report. My mother taught me to tread lightly. She knew people didn’t understand, and quite frankly she didn’t really either. To lock out my “intuitive” experiences, I chased the dragon of left-brained science. I reached even further into the quadrants of the brain to comprehend scientifically what IS absolute. Seeing IS believing, isn’t it?
Fortunately, I found a tribe in my adult years that understood down to the core that seeing is not necessarily believing. We can feel too to believe. My mom would have loved this tribe! I could once and for all defrost my “Magic Shell” coating and let go of the grip my left brain had on me.
I in a nutshell, to defrost, I had to undo and unlearn all my left-brained “knowing” to ironically gain access to my more authentic depths of right-brained “knowing.” Tear it down to build it up a framework.
And now, Quantum psychology principles help me retain a happy, integrated right + left brain. I can “know” more cohesively.
So, let’s rewind a bit, and take a quick glance into the history of quantum mechanics, to see if it can help us make sense of the non-sensical, the non-explainable, and the non-linear.
(* for the sake of simplicity a large portion of the following historical information was captured and adapted from Barbara Brennan’s book: Hands of Light)
In the 1600s, quantum mechanics began to emerge with classical mechanics discovered by Isaac Newton. Newton figured out the way the world worked according to a very simple set of rules. And this set of rules was so compelling that we still use it as a framework today. It is a framework in which physicists could “do” physics and everything else was just squeezed to fit into this model like Procrustes’ bed. Newtonian physics quintessential depicts that seeing IS believing. Things can be seen and directly measured. Oooooh how our ego, left brain LOVES this! The Newtonian lens of the universe is that it is made up of solid objects. Solid and seen planets mechanically revolve around the sun. We, then, can insist on seeing ourselves as solid objects. Everything is composed of fundamental building blocks called atoms. Atoms were also thought at that time to be composed of solid objects; a nucleus of protons and neutrons, with electrons revolving around the nucleus in the same way the earth travels around the sun. We are still taught this mechanical view today. And these laws are taken as the basic laws of nature. Everything is deduced to cause and effect. Like billiard balls on a pool table, we can SEE it, and we like it. Not only scientifically, but culturally and interestingly also religiously, if you study historical theology and the way religious leaders think. Literal, limited, but seemingly, (but grotesquely illusory), logical.
But can Newtonian physics explain the experiences of natural phenomena that cannot be seen? Like radio waves? Like energy-matter interactions, such as a radio playing music in response to invisible radio waves? It also hadn’t occurred to anyone yet that the experimenter or therapist him/herself affects the experiment or therapeutic outcomes. This is now widely proven.
Many of us still find Newtonian thinking very comforting and many of us prefer to see the world as solid and largely unchanging, and operating out of a definite set of rules that govern its functioning. It gives us the illusion that time, and our life expectancy is absolute (we don’t dare touch on topics such as life after death, or supernatural phenomenon). We all linearly align to the time constraints of a clock. And we run our daily lives on Newtonian mechanics.
So, help me explain this: if atoms are made of 0.000000001% matter, or particle, and 99.99999999% is nothing, just empty space, what is happening in that vast universe of space? We may think that we are a substantial person, we own a substantial house and a substantial car we are proud of, but in truth we, and all our materialistic items, are almost entirely empty space. This puts us in a rather disconcerting position. And one that we are not equipped to handle with a Newtonian, limited view.
We have no way to explain things we absolutely know and can feel, which is a form of direct knowing, but we can’t see. Like other people’s moods, or a mother knowing her child is sick although miles away. Or the twin effect (a fascinating article).
https://www.insider.com/identical-intertwined-twins-been-cleared-of-cheating-in-an-exam-2022-12
Even the theoretical physicists today, from a quantum perspective, believe the field is keeping all the attention on the particle. And if you ask too many questions in a graduate level physics class, you are told physics might not be for you. With great hope, there are a few brave trailblazers that are discovering that realities exist beyond the senses that are in that 99%. We are starting to see that common people like you and me are beginning to do the uncommon. We can begin to validate what we feel and reconnect back to our intuitive selves. Reclaim what Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls our “Soul Skins.”
To continue our history lesson of quantum mechanics, to help validate us even more, let’s talk about what came next. In the early 19th century, Field Theory, attributed to Michael Faraday and James Clark Maxwell discovered a new physical phenomenon that blew up Newtonian physics. Faraday investigated the electromagnetic phenomenon which led to the concept of a field. Rather than thinking about the electron as a solid point, moving in orbit like a planet in the solar system, he began discovering that the electron is more like a cloud, a wave in fact. They are waves of energy sending a sort of fundamental frequency. High frequencies like harmonics create different states on objects than lower energy states. We could finally explain how light could be emitted by atoms as a certain form. Each charge creates a disturbance or a condition in the space around it so that the other charge, when it is present, feels a force. Thus, the concept of a universe filled with fields that create forces that interact with each other was born. Star Wars is Truth!
Yes! Finally, there is a scientific framework that can begin to explain our ability to affect each other. Even at great distances. Other than just through sight or speech, we can regain our trust that we can feel and pick up on the energetic cues. Mothers often know when their children are in trouble, no matter where they are. Family system dynamics change when (fill in person of choice) is in the home versus when they are not. Why we still feel energetically bound and entangled with icky people, even when we do our absolute best to stop “thinking” about them (which is a Newtonian way of thinking).
Quantum entanglement was just proven. PROVEN. The Nobel Prize was just awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, who showed a mastery of entanglement. The gist is that when two particles enter a quantum relationship, then that relationship between them can exist even over long distances. In our human experience, we might enjoy and lean on these entangled relationships, like between a mother and a child. But we can begin to understand how we can work with the negative entanglements like between past relationships that still hold a tight grip on us despite our best efforts of moving on.
We are just now opening to this idea in the fields of healing, medicine, and psychology. We are just beginning to admit that we ourselves are composed of fields. We can sense another presence in the room without seeing or hearing them. We can understand our blink instincts of good or bad vibes, as Malcolm Gladwell tried effortlessly to show us in his radically foreword-thinking book, “Blink.” When we spout and shove messages like “be non-judgmental,” into students, patients, and church goers’ throats like an open fire-hydrant, we need to ask if this is severing us even more from our instinctual nature?
I am not saying to be more judgmental; we can always be open to be proven wrong, but we can learn to pay attention to our blink instincts and then act accordingly. And we can stop invalidating our experiences from our intuitive gut knowing.
So, what can we learn about our human condition by understanding quantum mechanics?
I hope in our future we can do better and be more open to the inquiry of understanding things we cannot see, nor immediately understand. We can stop labeling people as being “too sensitive” or “crazy.”
This isn’t far-out or far-fetched. We have studied prayer circles and the abundant research on the power of prayer for decades. Prayers directed with intention are forms of energy. Yes, even thoughts are categorized as energy. And they impact the outcome. Through the field.
All that empty space, the 99.99999999% was not studied for years. Even within academia and think tanks of theoretical physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, and astronomers. This could have something to do with the fact, that Einstein, the man who understood quantum mechanics better than anyone, didn’t accept it. He and Schrodinger (the cat in the box guy), said they wished they had nothing to do with this. The discovery that one photon could influence another photon at large distances, Einstein didn’t like this idea. He called it, “spooky action at a distance.” (Joe Dispenza from the film, “Living with Ghosts).
To conclude, I want to briefly mention a fabulous resource. One of my long-time mentors, Dr. Scott Miller, shares a podcast with his colleague Dr. Dan Lewis called “The Book Case.” (You can tune in wherever you get your podcasts.) They review two books in the episode: “The Most Important Book on Psychotherapy.” The first book is what many consider to be the most authoritative volume on psychotherapy: The Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change, 50th anniversary edition by Bergin and Garfield. And the second book chosen as a companion book to be examined in this context was a book by Deborah Blum called, “Ghost Hunters.” It is a wonderous tale of William James’ biographical story of his insatiable quest for scientific proof of life after death. He wanted to study what we cannot see, and what we cannot understand. Acclaimed by many to be the “Father of American psychotherapy,” he was outcast by his peers and academic institution of Harvard in the late 19th century for delving into the study of mediums. Undertaking this extraordinary quest, especially at that time, put his reputation on the line, but what he discovered raises fascinating questions. We need to pay attention to these today, now more than ever as we outgrow our current models and Newtonian ways of thinking.
Dr. Scott Miller states in the research that more of our population seeks advice from psychics than from therapists. Most people might find that to be alarming. To me, it makes perfect sense. As, I have been known on occasion to seek consultation from psychics, shamans, and healers of all sorts across the globe. This is a fascinating and perplexing discovery that we need to pay attention to. It raises questions to what exactly we are doing in this field of psychology.
As we turn to the field of quantum mechanics, which is ahead of the game by miles, and still a mysterious world that mystifies scientists, it provides comfort and hope. And, as mind-bending as it is, it might just be the best explanation of reality that we have.
I am not even touching the surface of what we can learn from quantum psychology. I haven’t even really mentioned Albert Einstein, an incredibly underrated scientist. I know that he is rated pretty highly and might have a reputation as being the man of the century, but by the time his time-space continuum was hashed out and applied to the rules of quantum mechanics around the 1920’s he was deemed to be a bit old and maybe even too conservative in his approach. He couldn’t keep up with the rapidly changing new physics. He was 48! So, stay tuned for more quantum psychology, and how we can use Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to help us explain a traumatized brain.
References
Living with Ghosts: documentary film:
https://www.livingwithghostsmovie.com/film
Gaslighting as Most Searched Word:
A Brief History of Quantum Mechanics by Sean Carroll:
“Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype,” Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“The Book Case,” podcast by Dr. Scott Miller and Dr. Dan Lewis
“Blink,” Malcolm Gladwell
“Neuroimaging During Trance State: A Contribution to Understanding Dissociation,” published in PLOS ONE, by Julio Fernando Peres
“Neuroimaging and mediumship: a promising research line: Archives of Clinical Psychiatry,” by Julio F. P. Peres and Andrew Newberg
