My personal journey about "a practical theory of suffering" and "Bayesian updating" is involving the study and practice of Coherence Therapy.
I'm looking forward at better understanding this "Vasocomputation", seems it could integrate in interesting ways with the framework of Coherence Therapy.
Full title: A Proposal for the Unification of Psychotherapeutic Action Understood as Memory Modification Processes
Abstract: a person’s “memory” is the stored form of all types of acquired personal knowledge, including both knowledge of personal experiences (episodic memory) and knowledge of patterns perceived in the world (semantic memory), such as the knowledge that staying safe around one’s rage-prone, alcoholic parent urgently requires never expressing any views or feelings of one’s own. This article explores the possibility of (a) understanding most, if not all, psychotherapeutic action as a reconfiguration of knowledge held in memory and (b) identifying each of the distinct, fundamentally different endogenous mechanisms, or types of processes, that can modify memory therapeutically. In this way, a potential means of unifying psychotherapy emerges, enabling us to identify how any particular therapeutic process influences symptom production through its memory modification effects. Memory neuroscience has identified mechanisms of memory modification sufficiently for the proposed explorations to be pursued fruitfully at this point. The resulting unification scheme consists of two qualitatively different, main modes of memory modification, each with submodes. This scheme can account for the full range of therapeutic outcomes, from partial, unstable, relapse-prone symptom reduction to transformational change, defined here as the enduring cessation of a symptom and its underlying theme of emotional distress. Case vignettes illustrate the fundamental modes and some submodes of therapeutic memory modification. Viewed through this unification framework, diverse therapy systems no longer seem to belong to different worlds. Rather, their distinctive techniques and methodologies become a rich array of options for tailoring memory modification and therapeutic change uniquely for each person.
Coherence Therapy is based on its core principle of symptom production and symptom coherence. A symptom or problem is produced by a person because he or she harbors at least one unconscious construction of reality—one set of reality-defining themes, purposes, meanings, and frames—in which the symptom is compellingly necessary to have, despite the suffering or trouble incurred by having it. Conversely, when there is no longer any construction within which the presenting symptom is necessary to have, the person ceases producing it.
At the start of therapy, of course, the symptom is viewed by the client as having no coherence at all. The client regards the symptom as senseless, valueless, something involuntary and victimizing, laden with negative meanings about the self or others (e.g., bad, sick, stupid, crazy, deficient). This set of initial, predictable views of the symptom is referred to in Coherence Therapy as the client’s anti-symptom position—“anti” meaning simply against having the symptom. However, clinical experience shows that this is an incomplete account of the client’s emotional relationship to the symptom.
Coherence Therapy is based on the empirical finding that the coherence of the symptom—how it is necessary to have—is inevitably present in a very separately held, unconscious position of the client. We refer to this as the client’s pro-symptom position—“pro” in the sense of being for having the symptom. The themes and purposes in this pro-symptom construction of reality comprise the deep sense and strongest emotional significance of the symptom in the client’s world of meaning. To find the client’s pro-symptom position is to find the emotional truth of the symptom.
The principle of symptom coherence should not be narrowly construed as merely a function-of-the-symptom model. It is far more comprehensive than that and applies to the production of functionless as well as functional symptoms. Which type the symptom is becomes apparent in Coherence Therapy empirically and non-speculatively as the symptom-necessitating construction is revealed.
I'm looking forward at better understanding this "Vasocomputation", seems it could integrate in interesting ways with the framework of Coherence Therapy.
Thanks for sharing!