After graduating with a masters degree from MIT in 1961 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mindell moved to Zurich, Switzerland to continue his studies in physics, working on a PhD at the ETH (The European MIT). His first Saturday afternoon there, then a young man in Zurich for the first time, he was having a beer at an outdoor café outside the art museum (Kunsthaus)and he struck up a conversation with an older Swiss gentleman. They talked for four hours about the physics of consciousness. It was so much fun they agreed to meet again the follow Saturday. This continued. The gentleman turned out to be Franz Ricklin; a nephew of CG Jung; a famed, loved, and radical therapist in his own right; and head of the Jung Institute. The conversations continued, with them meeting sometimes at the Kunsthaus and sometimes at the Select Café on the river, and evolved into a therapeutic relationship. Arny dropped his plans to study physics and eventually became a Jungian analyst with a PhD in psychology, working also with Marie-Louise von Franz (who at that time was working on the relationship between psyche and matter) and Barbara Hannah.
Realizing that body experience was not yet integrated with dreamwork, Mindell became fascinated with links between body experience, particularly physical symptoms, and how they are mirrored in dreams. In 1972, he received a PhD from the Union Institute for his work on synchronicity. In 1977, he became a Jungian training analyst. Mindell published his research in his first book, Dreambody: The Body’s Role in Revealing the Self in 1982. His findings led Mindell to investigate how the dreaming mind produces unconscious or "double signals" in us while we are in relationship to others. He found that bringing those signals from the background to the foreground made interpersonal communication easier.
Eventually Arny had become a senior Jungian analyst and a teaching analyst with his own private practice and an enviable reputation for being an interesting, powerful, effective, and wild therapist. In addition to his local clientele, a swarm of young students came from the US to study with him, their interest in part sparked by his books and also by support for Arny’s work from Professor Ben Thompson at Antioch University. Eventually Arny’s new ideas grew into new ways of working, and process oriented psychology (aka processwork) was born. Process work focuses on following signals and sensory grounded information, seeing them as signposts to discovering meaning in disturbances, body symptoms, and relationship troubles.
Broadly, process work combines elements of gestalt, Jungian, and somatic psychologies, indigenous traditions, physics (for its quantum concepts and ideas of non-locality and entanglement), and the eastern philosophies of Buddhism and Taoism. This discoveries led to ground breaking work in the development of process oriented psychological interventions in psychiatry.
His interest in relationships evolved into the study of conflict in large groups. He discovered that the dreaming processes he had identified on the individual and dyadic relationship level were also helpful in working out problems in large, socially diverse groups of people. In groups, the process was carried not only by individuals, but by ‘roles’ which could be occupied by any individual in the group. ‘Ghost roles’ were roles implied by the group’s behavior, but with which no individual would identify.
After writing a series of books on these discoveries, Mindell became interested once again in physics and went back to the study of tiny, subtle signals which are ordinarily ignored in more classical psychological approaches. With his partner and wife Amy Mindell, Mindell began to explore new methods of working with people locked in comatose, vegetative and near death states of consciousness. Recently his interest in quantum physics has propelled him to explore the interconnections of psychology with theoretical physics, and to find new ways of working with subtle states of consciousness. He developed an extensive body of research and techniques using field, wave and vector concepts to understand preverbal, pre-dream-like states of awareness. He has also developed an extensive array of techniques for integrating field and wave concepts with indigenous philosophy and practice in earth based psychology and the ProcessMind concept.
Mindell is actively involved with a large international learning community that researches, studies and teaches process work. He works with individuals, groups and cities to understand one another and process their issues. Mindell says of his own motivation, “I am still in love with the idea of nature, and following the Tao seems to remain the haunting and romantic background to all I do.”
