Extended mind, extended person, extended therapy?

Guy Shennan

Abstract

Solution-focused (SF) brief therapy has always drawn on ideas from philosophy, with Derrida and Wittgenstein being particu- lar influences on Steve de Shazer. More recently, connections have been made with embodied and enactive approaches, and this article is intended as a contribution to these discussions. Its entry point is a consideration of accounts of personal identity and personhood and of possible implications for these accounts arising from work taking place in the field of embodied cognition. This is a wide field and two aspects of it are considered in particular: the sensorimotor account of perception developed by O’Regan and Noë, and the extended mind thesis of Clark and Chalmers. It is argued that these embodied and extended accounts entail a holistic and extended view of personhood and personal identity. A discussion follows concerning how this might inform our ideas about therapy and other change work and about connections with SF in particu- lar. The conclusion that is tentatively reached is that embodied and extended concepts of personhood require an accompany- ing extension of our ideas of change work so that this spreads beyond talking, beyond the clinic or office and beyond the indi- vidual.

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