Chapter 19: Internationalizing the Teaching of Consciousness

Consciousness is one of the oldest topics of inquiry in academic psychology. For instance, in the USA, William James (1890) explored it both in Principles of Psychology, one of psychology’s first textbooks, and in his influential book on altered states of consciousness, Varieties of Religious Experience (James, 1902/2002; Rich, 2004a). In Europe, Sigmund Freud (1900) and the psychoanalysts made states of consciousness—and the unconscious—a central theme of their work. In addition, Leipzig’s Wilhelm Wundt, who is often credited with founding psychology’s first research laboratory in 1879, also must be considered to have explored consciousness when he utilized his well-known method of collecting self-report observational data that tapped into the phenomenology of research participants’ experiences. With the rise of behaviorism in the 20th century USA, however, consciousness studies as a psychology subdiscipline became relatively neglected, and from the last third or so of that century, when consciousness was examined, frequently it was by scholars in cognitive science (e.g., Dennett, 1992; Piaget, 1976), neuroscience (e.g., Damasio, 1994; Rich, 2000), or complementary and integrative medicine (e.g., Barnett, Shale, Elkins, & Fisher, 2014; Field, 2009). Of course, if one considers that consciousness has been examined by many thinkers outside of psychology and outside of the USA and Europe, the tradition may be said to date back thousands of years, especially to such cultural areas as India and to Asia more generally (e.g., Rao, 2001), and the relevant scholarship broadens considerably to include work in related disciplines, such as anthropology, philosophy, cognitive science, history of religions, medicine, and related healing modalities. Today, most introductory psychology textbooks in the USA include one chapter on consciousness, though only a few stand-alone comprehensive course texts devoted to the psychology of consciousness exist (e.g., Blackmore, 2011; Farthing, 1992; Wallace, Oswald, & Fisher, 2011).