The theory that soul and body run side by side without touching, named by Steiner in 1917 and rejected: the soul creates the body.
Psychophysical Parallelism in Anthroposophy is the name Rudolf Steiner gave to a theory he rejected: the claim that soul processes and bodily processes run alongside one another like two parallel streams, each accompanying the other and neither causing anything in the other. Steiner named it in the lecture of 18 October 1917 in Basel, printed in Freedom, Immortality and Social Life (GA 72), and attributed it to Wilhelm Wundt, Hermann Ebbinghaus and Friedrich Paulsen, the leading experimental psychologists of the German universities. He set it against a second error, the notion that the body is a tool the soul plays like an instrument. Against both he argued that the physical human being is a creation of the soul, formed in the small processes of perception and memory as much as in growth. The counter-doctrine belongs to the etheric or formative region, the sacral zone of Thalira's chakra mapping, where soul work becomes body.
Psychophysical parallelism was the respectable position in German psychology when Steiner spoke in Basel in 1917. It let researchers keep the soul without asking it to do anything. Steiner treated that convenience as the problem. If the soul never acts on the body, he asked, what formed the body in the first place, and what forms it again each time we perceive?
In Steiner's Own Words
According to this idea, all possible bodily processes are supposed to take place independently of each other. Without the soul acting on the body as a cause or the body acting back on the soul, the life of the soul is supposed to run parallel to the bodily processes, like two parallel streams running side by side. One always accompanies the other, but one does not affect the other. Wundt, Ebbinghaus, a whole number of psychologists, Paulsen – I could name many – subscribe to this strange theory of parallelism.
What it Means Today
The truce Steiner objected to did not end with Wundt's generation. It was rebuilt in the 1990s as the working arrangement between neuroscience and the study of experience: brain measurements on one side, reports of experience on the other, correlation permitted, causation left unstated. Francisco Varela, the Chilean biologist who had developed the theory of autopoiesis with Humberto Maturana, treated that arrangement as an obstacle rather than a method. In his 1996 paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem, he argued that first-person description has to be trained, disciplined and made public, so that it can constrain the third-person data instead of merely running beside it. He called the requirement mutual constraints. Six years later the program produced evidence: Antoine Lutz, Jean-Philippe Lachaux, Jacques Martinerie and Varela published a study in PNAS in 2002 in which subjects' own trial-by-trial reports of readiness and distraction sorted the phase-synchrony patterns appearing in their EEG traces. The reports were not decoration on the recording. They organised it.
Thalira synthesis: Steiner and Varela dismantle the same fence from opposite sides. Varela asks that the report be trained until it does real work on the measurement. Steiner asks the earlier question, which is what the soul was doing to the body long before any measurement began. Read together they mark two halves of one repair, and Steiner's answer in GA 72, that the physical is a creation of the soul, names which direction the traffic mostly runs.
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