PCE 1
Running Head: PSYCHOTHERAPY COMPETENCY EXAM
Pscyhotherapy Competency Exam
Argosy University / Seattle
PCE 2
Introduction to Personal Philosophy and Practice of Psychotherapy
Personal Philosophy
Nature of Persons
Whether it be through the examination of one’s status with the gods in ancient Greece,
through communion with the personal god of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, by
understanding the underlying biological urges as portrayed by Freud or more recently via the
search for and building upon of ego strength, mankind has for millennia sought to answer
Socrates’s dictum of “know thyself” with an affirmative. Underlying these previous attempts
has always been an inferred notion that somewhere, whether found in the Platonic forms or in the
pineal gland, there existed a homunculus, a central thing or substance that people declared to be
the central “I” of human existence (Russell, 1945). Recently this ideological hope has gone the
way of other ideas once thought to be incontrovertible, washed away by Darwin’s world-
changing explication of evolutionary theory and recent advances in cognitive neuroscience
(Dennett, 1995). What has been left is a creature not of divine origin but wholly of nature,
subject to her whims, bound within her laws and ultimately knowable only through
understanding the workings of her evolutionary past.
This past has resulted in the DNA that currently exists in every human cell and memes,
replicable pieces of information for certain behavior within the brain, both of which operate
symbiotically with the so-called external environment (Blackmore, 2000). Genes and memes are
the means by which Homo sapiens has evolved through the millennia, the human software if you
will of the organism that has shaped and molded our bodies and our minds for the purpose of
their replication (Dawkins, 2006). Humans are therefore the vehicles by which genes and memes
replicate themselves, instantiated within individuals as phenomenological, or personally
PCE 3
perceived, experiences. Social patterns, familial struggles, and individual pathologies are all
essentially, though by no means simply, the result of the interworking of genes and memes
through their carriers (people) for the purpose of replicating themselves to the next generation
(Dennett, 1995).
In order to replicate, the host must survive long enough to ensure viable procreation.
Humans are survivors, the result of genetic and memetic influences shaping the organism into an
adaptive creature capable of dealing with the destructive stressors of the natural environment
(Dennett, 1995). This ability to adapt, or resiliency, ensures the continuation of genetic data but
also gives rise to a brain capable of hosting memetic data as well. It is the brain, a part of but not
apart from the body, that has since Freud been in the spotlight for humanity’s search for an
unchanging or transcendent substance that can be called the self or “I” (Flanagan, 2002).
The body/brain, a distinction existing only anatomically, is not merely a vehicle for
genes/memes but also an interactional device for them with the rest of reality beyond the skin.
While the basic evolutionary paradigm of variation, selection and replication (Blackmore, 2000)
is the backdrop for human development so it is that the particulars of that development and hence
the nature of the human being is unique to them. In other words, despite all creatures having
evolved within the same natural schema, the interactions humans have with the environment are
particular to their being or nature (Johnson, 1987). Hence, the body/brain of human beings is its
nature. Humans see blue skies, experience honey as sweet and have particular notions of beauty,
not because these exist as things to be grasped by the body/brain but they are brought about by
the body/brain’s interaction with the rest of reality. While Chalmers (1996) was correct in
saying that they are arisen properties, it was not true that they require a new set of criteria to
judge their epistemological, or knowledge, legitimacy. Rather, the basic schema of evolution, as
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