Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (99 page)

Beginning in the 1950s, Freud and Jung came in for increasingly severe criticism, for being unscientific, and for using evidence only when it suited them.

Not that other forms of psychology were immune to criticism. In the same year that Wittgenstein’s posthumous
Philosophical Investigations
appeared, Burrhus F.
Skinner, professor of psychology at Harvard University, published the first of his controversial works. Raised in the small Pennsylvania town of Susquehanna, Fred Skinner at first wanted to be a writer and studied English at Hamilton College, where Robert Frost told him that he was capable of ‘real niceties of observation.’ Skinner never developed as a writer, however, because ‘he found he had nothing to say.’ And he gave up the saxophone because it seemed to him to be ‘the wrong instrument for a psychologist.’
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Abandoning his plan to be a writer, he studied psychology at Harvard, so successfully that in 1945 he became a professor.

Skinner’s
Science and Human Behavior
overlapped more than a little with Ryle and Wittgenstein.
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Like them, Skinner regarded ‘mind’ as a metaphysical anachronism and concentrated on behavior as the object of the scientist’s attention. And like them he regarded language as an at-times-misleading representation of reality, it being the scientist’s job, as well as the philosopher’s, to clarify its usage. In Skinner’s case he took as his starting point a series of experiments, mainly on pigeons and rats, which showed that if their environment was strictly controlled, especially in regard to the administration of rewards and punishments, their behavior could be altered considerably and in predictable ways. This demonstration of rapid learning, Skinner thought, was both philosophically and socially important. He accepted that instinct accounted for a sizeable proportion of human conduct but his aim, in
Science and Human Behavior,
was to offer a simple, rational explanation for the rest of the behavioral repertoire, which he believed could be done, using the principles of reinforcement. In essence Skinner sought to show that the vast majority of behaviors, including beliefs, certain mental illnesses, and even ‘love’ in some circumstances, could be understood in terms of an individual’s history, the extent to which his or her behavior had been rewarded or punished in the past. For example, ‘You ought to take an umbrella’ may be taken to mean: ‘You will be reinforced for taking an umbrella.’ ‘A more explicit translation would contain at least three statements: (I) Keeping dry is reinforcing to you; (2) carrying an umbrella keeps you dry in the rain; and (3) it is going to rain…. The “ought” is aversive, and the individual addressed may feel guilty if he does not then take an umbreda.’
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On this reading of behavior, Skinner saw alcoholism, for example, as a bad habit acquired because an individual may have found the effects of alcohol rewarding, in that it relaxed him in social situations where otherwise he may have been ill at ease. He objected to Freud because he thought psychoanalysis’s concern with ‘depth’ psychology was wrongheaded; its self-declared aim was to discover ‘inner and otherwise unobservable conflicts, repressions, and springs of action. The behavior of the organism was often regarded as a relatively unimportant by-product of a furious struggle taking place beneath the surface of the mind.’
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Whereas for Freud neurotic behavior was the symptom of the root cause, for Skinner neurotic behavior was the object of the inquiry – stamp out the neurotic behavior, and by definition the neurosis has gone. One case that Skinner considers in detail is that of two brothers who compete for the affection of their parents. As a result one brother behaves aggressively toward his sibling and is punished, either by the brother or the parents. Assume this
happens repeatedly, to the point where the anxiety associated with such an event generates guilt in the ‘aggressive’ brother, leading to self-control. In this sense, says Skinner, the brother ‘represses’ his aggression. ‘The repression is successful if the behavior is so effectively displaced that it seldom reaches the incipient state at which it generates anxiety. It is unsuccessful if anxiety is frequently generated.’ He then goes on to consider other possible consequences and their psychoanalytic explanations. As a result of
reaction formation
the brother may engage in social work, or some expression of ‘brotherly love’; he may
sublimate
his aggression by, say, joining the army or working in an abattoir; he may
displace
his aggression by ‘accidentally’ injuring someone else; he may
identify
with prizefighters. For Skinner, however, we do not need to invent deep-seated neuroses to explain these behaviors. ‘The dynamisms are not the clever machinations of an aggressive impulse struggling to escape from the restraining censorship of the individual or of society, but the resolution of complex sets of variables. Therapy does not consist of releasing a trouble-making impulse but of introducing variables which compensate for or correct a history which has produced objectionable behavior. Pent-up emotion is not the cause of disordered behavior; it is part of it. Not being able to recall an early memory does not produce neurotic symptoms; it is itself an example of ineffective behavior.’
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In this first book, Skinner’s aim was to explain behavior, and he ended by considering the many controlling institutions in modern society – governments and laws, organised religion, schools, psychotherapy, economics and money – his point being that many systems of rewards and punishments are already in place and, more or less, working. Later on, in the 1960s and 1970s, his theories enjoyed a vogue, and in many clinics ‘behavior therapy’ was adopted. In these establishments, symptoms were treated without recourse to any so-called underlying problem. For example, a man who felt he was dirty and suffered from a compulsive desire to collect towels was no longer treated for his inner belief that he was ‘dirty’ and so needed to wash a great deal, but simply rewarded (with food) on those days when he didn’t collect towels. Skinner’s theories were also followed in the development of teaching machines, later incorporated into computer-aided instruction, whereby pupils follow their own course of instruction, at their own pace, depending on rewards given for correct answers.

Skinner’s approach to behavior, his understanding of what man is, was looked upon by many as revolutionary at the time, and he was even equated to Darwin.
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His method linked Ryle and Wittgenstein to psychology. He maintained, for example, that consciousness is a ‘social product’ that emerges from the human interactions within a verbal community. But verbal behavior, or rather
Verbal Behavior,
published in 1957, was to be his undoing.
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Like Ryle and Wittgenstein, Skinner understood that if his theory about man was to be convincing, it needed to explain language, and this he set about doing in the 1957 book. His main point was that our social communities ‘select’ and fine-tune our verbal utterances, what we ‘choose’ to say, by a process of social reinforcement, and this system, over a lifetime, determines the form of speech we use. In turn this same system of reinforcement of our verbal behavior helps shape our other
behaviors – our ‘character’ – and the way that we understand ourselves, our consciousness. Skinner argued that there are categories of speech acts that may be grouped according to their relationship to surrounding contingencies. For example, ‘mands’ are classes of speech behavior that are followed by characteristic consequences, whereas ‘tacts’ are speech acts socially reinforced when emitted in the presence of an object or event.
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Essentially, under this system, man is seen as the ‘host’ of behaviors affected by the outside, rather than as autonomous. This is very different from the Freudian view, or more traditional metaphysical versions of man, that something comes from within. Unfortunately, from Skinner’s point of view, his radical ideas suffered a withering attack in a celebrated – notorious – review of his book in the journal
Language
in 1959, by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky, thirty-one in 1959, was born in Pennsylvania, the son of a Hebrew scholar who interested his son in language. Chomsky’s own book,
Syntactic Structures,
was also published in 1957, the same year as Skinner’s, but it was the review in
Language
and in particular its vitriolic tone that drew attention to the young author and initiated what came to be called the Chomskyan revolution in psychology.
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Chomsky, by then a professor at MIT, just two stops on the subway from Harvard, argued that there are inside the brain universal, innate, grammatical structures; in other words, that the ‘wiring’ of the brain somehow governs the grammar of languages. He based much of his view on studies of children in different countries that showed that whatever their form of upbringing, they tended to develop their language skills in the same order and at the same pace everywhere. His point was that young children learn to speak spontaneously without any real training, and that the language they learn is governed by where they grow up. Moreover, they are very creative with language, using at a young age sentences that are entirely new to them and that cannot have been related to experience. Such sentences cannot therefore have been learned in the way that Skinner and others said.
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Chomsky argued that there is a basic structure to language, that this structure has two levels, surface structure and deep structure, and that different languages are more similar in their deep structure than in their surface structure. For example, when we learn a foreign language, we are learning the surface structure. This learning is in fact only possible because the deep structure is much the same. German or Dutch speakers may put the verb at the end of a sentence, which English or French speakers do not, but German, Dutch, French, and English
have
verbs, which exist in all languages in equivalent relationship to nouns, adjectives, and so 0n.
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Chomsky’s arguments were revolutionary not only because they went against the behaviorist orthodoxy but because they appeared to suggest that there is some sort of
structure
in the brain that is inherited and that, moreover, the brain is prewired in some way that, at least in part, determines how humans experience the world.

The Chomsky-Skinner affair was as personal as Snow-Leavis. Skinner apparently never finished reading the review, believing the other man had completely – and perhaps deliberately – misunderstood him. And he never replied.
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One consequence of this, however, was that Chomsky’s review became more
widely known, and agreed with, than Skinner’s original book, and as a result Skinner’s influence has been blunted. In fact, he never denied that a lot of behavior is instinctive; but he was interested in how it was modified and could, if necessary, be modified still further. His views have always found a small but influential following.

Whatever the effects of Chomsky’s attack on Skinner, it offered no support for Freud or psychoanalysis. Although conventional Freudian analysis remained popular in a few isolated areas, like Manhattan, several other well-known scientists, while not abandoning Freudian concepts entirely, began to adapt and extend them in more empirically grounded ways. One of the most influential was John Bowlby.

In 1948 the Social Commission of the United Nations decided to make a study of the needs of homeless children: in the aftermath of war it was realised that in several countries large numbers of children lacked fully formed families as a result of the men killed in the fighting. The World Health Organization (WHO) offered to provide an investigation into the mental health aspects of the problem. Dr Bowlby was a British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who had helped select army officers during the war. He took up a temporary appointment with the WHO in January 1950, and during the late winter and early spring of that year he visited France, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, Great Britain, and the United States of America, holding discussions with workers involved in child care and child guidance. These discussions led to the publication, in 1951, of
Maternal Care and Mental Health,
a famous report that hit a popular nerve and brought about a wholesale change in the way we think about childhood.
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It was this report that first confirmed for many people the crucial nature of the early months of an infant’s life, when in particular the quality of mothering was revealed as all-important to the subsequent psychological development of a child. Bowlby’s book introduced the key phrase maternal deprivation to describe the source of a general pathology of development in children, the effects of which were found to be widespread. The very young infant who went without proper mothering was found to be ‘listless, quiet, unhappy, and unresponsive to a smile or a coo,’ and later to be less intelligent, bordering in some cases on the defective.
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No less important, Bowlby drew attention to a large number of studies which showed that victims of maternal deprivation failed to develop the ability to hold relationships with others, or to feel guilty about their failure. Such children either ‘craved affection’ or were ‘affect-less.’ Bowlby went on to show that studies in Spain during the civil war, in America, and among a sample of Copenhagen prostitutes all confirmed that delinquent groups were comprised of individuals who, more than their counterparts, were likely to have come from broken homes where, by definition, there had been widespread maternal deprivation.
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The thrust of this research had two consequences. On the positive side, Bowlby’s research put beyond doubt the idea that even a bad home is better for a child than a good institution. It was then the practice in many countries for illegitimate or unwanted children to be cared for in institutions where standards of nutrition, cleanliness, and
medical matters could be closely monitored. But it became clear that such an environment was not enough, that something was lacking which affected mental health, rather in the way that vitamins had been discovered to be lacking in the artificial diets created for neglected children in the great cities of the nineteenth century. And so, following publication of the WHO report, countries began to change their approach to neglected children: adoptions were favoured over fostering, children with long-term illnesses were not separated from their parents when they went to hospital, and mothers sent to prison were allowed to take their young babies with them. At work, maternity leave was extended to include not just the delivery but the all-important early months of the child’s life. There was in general a much greater sensitivity to the nature of the mother—child bond.
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