50 Psychology Classics (25 page)

Just after the 150th anniversary of his birth, can we be sure of saying anything definite about Freud's legacy? Though his “discovery” of the unconscious changed the intellectual and imaginative landscape, perhaps his greatest contribution was to make psychology fascinating to the average person. It was the possibility he gave of seeing into our
own
minds that made his ideas so compelling.

Born as Sigismund Freud in 1856 in Freiburg, Moravia (now known as Pribor, Czech Republic), Freud was the first of five children of parents Jacob and Amalia, who had come from Western Ukraine. The family moved to Leipzig in 1859 and then Vienna a year later
.

Sigismund's parents recognized his intelligence from early on, giving him an education in the Latin and Greek classics and a separate room to study in. He was set to study law at the University of Vienna, but changed his mind at the last minute and enrolled in 1873 as a medical student. After graduating in 1881 he became engaged to Martha Bernays and worked at the Vienna General Hospital, specializing in cerebral anatomy. Later he worked under J. M. Charcot at the Saltpetriere Hospital in Paris, and with Austrian psychologist Josef Breuer, with whom he wrote
Studies on Hysteria
(1893)
.

After the death of his father in 1896, Freud entered a period of deep reflection, study, and self-analysis, and began work on
The Interpretation of Dreams.
Within a few months of its publication
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
came out, which introduced the idea of verbal mistakes (“Freudian slips”) that reveal the unconscious mind. In 1902 the first meetings of the “Wednesday Group” of like-minded Jewish professional men were held, and Freud was made a professor of psychopathology at the University of Vienna. In 1905 he published
Three Essays on the History of Sexuality
and
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.
Psychoanalysis grew into an international movement, with its first major meeting in 1908
.

In 1920, the Freuds' second daughter Sophie, pregnant with her third child, died in a flu epidemic. Writings from this decade include
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920),
The Ego and the Id
(1923), an
Autobiography
(1925), and
The Future of an Illusion
(1927), which aimed to debunk religion. Freud's long essay
Civilization and its Discontents
(1930) crystallized his ideas about human aggression and the “death instinct.” With Albert Einstein he wrote
Why War?
in 1933
.

After the Nazi regime's annexation of Austria in 1938 and its banning of psychoanalysis, Freud and family relocated to London. A lifelong heavy smoker of cigars, he died of cancer in 1939
.

“Only if we expand and reformulate our view of what counts as human intellect will we be able to devise more appropriate ways of assessing it and more effective ways of educating it.”

“In my view, it is fine to call music or spatial ability a talent, so long as one calls language or logic a talent as well. But I balk at the unwarranted assumption that certain abilities can be arbitrarily singled out as qualifying as intelligence while others cannot.”

In a nutshell

Many different forms of intelligence are not measured by IQ testing.

In a similar vein
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Creativity
(p 68)
Daniel Goleman
Working with Emotional Intelligence
(p 130)
Jean Piaget
The Language and Thought of the Child
(p 222)

When Harvard psychology professor Howard Gardner wrote
Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences
over 20 years ago, the general public largely accepted the idea that intelligence could simply be measured through an IQ, or Intelligence Quotient, test. A high IQ meant you were smart and were given certain opportunities in life, and a low IQ meant you were a bit slow, with your opportunities restricted accordingly.

Gardner's book popularized the idea that the logical-mathematical or “general” intelligence normally measured by IQ tests might not actually be a good measure of a person's potential. IQ testing may have been reasonably effective at predicting how well you did on school subjects, but not great at gauging your ability to compose a symphony, win a political campaign, program a computer, or master a foreign tongue. Gardner replaced the question “How smart are you?” with a wiser, more inclusive “
How
are you smart?”

We intuitively know that how well we do in school does not determine our success in life, and everyone knows very brainy people who have not amounted to much. Similarly, we would find it hard to believe that the achievements of figures such as Mozart, Henry Ford, Gandhi, or Churchill were merely the result of “high IQ.”
Frames of Mind
, while going against conventional wisdom, actually gives us an appreciation of intelligence close to what we already know: that we each have different ways of being intelligent, and that success comes from refining and utilizing these intelligences across a lifetime.

Gardner claims that all human beings possess a unique blend of seven intelligences through which we engage with the world and seek our fulfillment. These “frames of mind” include two that are typically valued in traditional education, three that are usually associated with the arts, and two that he calls “personal intelligences.”

This involves appreciation of language, the ability to learn new languages, and the capability to use language to accomplish certain goals. Those high in this intelligence may be good persuaders or storytellers, and can use humor to their advantage. Writers, poets, journalists, lawyers, and politicians are among those likely to have high linguistic intelligence.

This is the capacity to analyze problems, carry out mathematical operations, and approach subjects scientifically. In Gardner's words, it entails the ability to detect patterns, reason deductively, and think logically. Along with linguistic intelligence, it is what IQ tests mainly measure. Logical-mathematical intelligence is often associated with scientists, researchers, mathematicians, computer programmers, accountants, and engineers.

People with musical intelligence actually think in terms of sounds, rhythms, and musical patterns. It encompasses skill in the performance, composition, and appreciation of musical patterns. Typical occupations employing this intelligence include musicians, disc jockeys, singers, composers, and music critics.

This involves the ability to control and coordinate complex physical movements, to express ourselves in movement. This can include body language, mime, and acting, as well as the full range of sporting pursuits. Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence is expected to be particularly high in sports people, dancers, actors, jugglers, and gymnasts, but also professions where balance and coordination are vital, such as firefighting.

This is the ability to perceive objects in space accurately, to have an idea of “where things should go.” Sculptors and architects need a high degree of spatial intelligence, as do navigators, visual artists, interior designers, and engineers.

Interpersonal intelligence is the capacity to understand other people's objectives, motivations, and desires. It is instrumental in building relationships. Educators, marketing executives, salespeople, counselors, and political figures are examples of individuals with high interpersonal intelligence.

This is the ability to understand the self with a heightened awareness of our feelings and motivations. This intelligence helps us to develop an effective working model of ourselves and use our self-understanding to regulate our lives. Writers and philosophers tend to have this intelligence in abundance.

Gardner's theory presents a huge challenge to established educational models, because if we accept the idea that each person combines a unique array of intelligences, we require a carefully tuned educational system to enable their potential to be realized. Gardner admits that psychology cannot directly dictate education
policy, and that further study is required to prove the existence of multiple intelligences in the first place. Yet his general inference is that an education system that takes account of the specialness of each child cannot be a bad thing.

Will we always be measured in terms of “IQ,” or will Gardner's ideas overthrow current systems of intelligence testing, such as America's famous SAT test for college entry? Most people don't realize that intelligence testing has been with us for over 100 years, with the first attempts at measurement devised by French psychologists Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon in 1905. It is a relatively easy and cheap way to sort large numbers of people according to “merit,” and has become well established as a result. Yet the idea of multiple intelligences will not go away as long as people feel their true worth has not been recognized.

What ultimately matters is not a supposedly objective test of intelligence, but our own beliefs about whether we are capable of something and our discipline to follow through. Gardner calls this the “ability to solve problems within our environment.” The people we most admire are smart in certain ways, they have refined their way of thinking and doing to an unusual extent. More than raw intelligence, they have
judgment
.

Perhaps the lesson of Gardner's book, therefore, is that we should stop worrying about how we measure up to some arbitrary standard of brain power, because the really smart people are those who know exactly what they are good at and live their life around that knowledge. There is a big distinction between simply possessing mental, physical, or social abilities, and actually deploying them to achieve success.

Born in 1943, the son of refugees from Nazi Germany, Howard Gardner initially went to Harvard University to study history. After a year at the London School of Economics, he entered Harvard's developmental psychology doctoral program in 1966, and subsequently became part of the research team for Project Zero (a long-term study of human intellectual and creative development). His interest in human cognition was influenced by his tutor Erik Erikson (see p 84)
.

Gardner is currently Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education; adjunct Professor of Neurology at Boston University School of Medicine; and Co-Director of Harvard's Project Zero. He has received many honorary degrees and awards
.

Other books include
The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach
(1991),
Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice
(1993),
The Disciplined Mind: Beyond Facts and Standardized Tests
(1999), and
Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds
(2004)
.

“Before we can decide whether to accept people's claims about their happiness, we must first decide whether people can, in principle, be mistaken about what they feel. We can be wrong about all sorts of things—the price of soybeans, the life span of dust mites, the history of flannel—but can we be wrong about our own emotional experience?–

In a nutshell

Due to way the brain works, our predictions of how we will feel in the future are not always accurate, and that includes what will make us happy.

In a similar vein
Barry Schwartz
The Paradox of Choice
(p 248)
Martin Seligman
Authentic Happiness
(p 254)

As a boy, Daniel Gilbert loved poring over a book of optical illusions, such as the Necker cube and the famous vase/faces picture (as on the cover of this book). What amazed him was how easy it was for the eyes and the brain to be fooled.

When, many years later, he became a psychologist, he was interested in the regular mistakes and exercises of “filling in” that our brain makes in order to provide us with a quick picture of reality. Just as we could make predictable mistakes with our eyesight, he found, we could also with our
foresight
. That is, we spend most of our time doing things that we hope will make us happy in the future, but our understanding of that future and how we will feel when we get there is far from reliable.

Though people have been puzzling over the question of foresight for thousands of years, Gilbert claims that
Stumbling on Happiness
is the first book to bring together ideas from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and behavioral economics to provide an answer. This is quite a complex area of psychology in which the author is pre-eminent, yet he spins the material into a fascinating and often fun read. With a style reminiscent of Bill Bryson, there are at least one or two chuckles per page.

Gilbert notes that most psychology books have somewhere in them the phrase, “Human beings are the only animals that…” In his case, he fills in the sentence by saying that we are the only animals that are able to think about the future. Squirrels may
seem
like they can do this in the way that they put away acorns for the winter, but in fact it is just their brain's recording of a reduction in hours of daylight that prompts them to do this. There is no awareness, only a biological instinct. Humans, however, are not only aware of the future, we are veritable “anticipation machines” focused on what is to come almost as much as we are on what is now. How did this happen?