The legitimization process of mindfulness as a therapeutic practice in the psychology field

• Grant number: 22/16300-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: March 01, 2025
• End date: February 29, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Christiano Key Tambascia
• Grantee: Giovanna Paccillo dos Santos
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 25/17064-9 - Mindfulness, Buddhism and Mental Health: processes of compatibilization, legitimation, and subjectivation in Brazil and the United Kingdom, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

This project aims to understand the process of creating mindfulness meditation as a therapeutic practice that claims scientific legitimacy in the psy field. Mindfulness is a practice of guidance in the present transformed into an eight-week protocol by molecular biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn, with therapeutic goals. Since then, the practice has been used in hospitals and offices, while its proponents strive to legitimize it in these areas. This project seeks to understand how proponents build this legitimacy in three places: 1) in scientific research, 2) in training courses, and 3) In the dissemination media. In this scope of interest, I highlight two movements to which they will have a greater emphasis on this research: the creation of a science and the use of scientific grammar about mindfulness, which prioritizes the use of neurosciences as a convincing strategy, and the strategic removal of the Buddhist component of practice. This project hypothesizes that the adequacy of mindfulness to a scientific language propagated on the various fronts where mindfulness is present is a fundamental part of its proponents' strategies to legitimize it as therapeutic. With this, this project also seeks to think about the relationships between religion and science, psy field, and neurosciences engendered in this process, as well as these relationships reconfigure notions of body and person, nature and culture.