Lecture 12: Rival Psychologies of the Mind PDF

Lecture 12 Rival Psychologies of the Mind I n this course, we’ve been tracing the history of thought on bodies and minds, always with an eye to contemporary scientific results. Psychology, as the science of the mind, is clearly a major part of that history. There are three claimants to the title...

Lecture 12 Rival Psychologies of the Mind I n this course, we’ve been tracing the history of thought on bodies and minds, always with an eye to contemporary scientific results. Psychology, as the science of the mind, is clearly a major part of that history. There are three claimants to the title of father of psychology: William James, Sigmund Freud, and Wilhelm Wundt. All three developed their theories in the infancy of psychology as a discipline in the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20 th century. All three have influenced the trajectory of psychological theory and research to the present day. This lecture contrasts the work of James against that of Freud, and then compares both to Wundt’s work. William James ●● William James’s foundational work, The Principles of Psychology, was published in 1890. It had taken 12 years to write and was about 1,200 pages long. The publisher encouraged him to publish a shorter version, which was released in 1892 as Psychology: the Briefer Course. ●● For James, the primary concern of psychology is the issue of consciousness. This central focus dictates both his methodology and the core of his theoretical contribution. James does not take Freud as his intellectual sparring partner in his major work. It is rather the British empiricists he is arguing against: Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. 120 M ind - B ody P hilosophy ●● According to the empiricists, the mind acquires individual ideas, sensations, or impressions from sensory experience and then combines them into higher units in consciousness. For example, if we combine the idea of a horn with the idea of a horse, we come up with a unicorn. ●● James sees that synthetic approach as fundamentally unscientific. He claims that a genuine science must be built on the phenomena of experience, and experiences don’t come in atomic bits and pieces. The phenomena of experience always come as a whole. According to James, we have to start with what we directly know, with “total concrete states of mind.” ●● The psychology that James envisages is a scientific psychology based on data of a particular kind: introspective data. The target is an understanding of consciousness, and consciousness can only be revealed to us from our own subjective experience in introspection. ●● Four immediate characteristics of consciousness guide James’s examination. 1 Every state of consciousness is a personal consciousness; every state of consciousness is owned by someone. With the ownership of every state of consciousness comes privacy: Every mind keeps its thoughts to itself. 2 Within each personal consciousness, states are always changing. 3 Consciousness is sensibly continuous. You go to sleep and wake up, but your consciousness is sensed as a continuation of what went before. 4 Attention focuses and shifts within consciousness. Sigmund Freud ●● In an early work, Freud says that any psychological theory must meet the demands of natural science. But he also says it must explain the puzzling things that we know in consciousness. L E C T U R E 12 — R ival P sychologies of the M ind 121 ●● This is a break: James tracks consciousness as the fundamental on introspection as the primary tool. Freud attempts to explain things about consciousness. According to Freud, the mental is three realms: the conscious, the preconscious—that which can from memory—and the unconscious. fact, relying the puzzling divided into be retrieved ●● Given that map of mental territory, Freud develops a theory of basic forces, outlined like a cast of mythological characters. The id is the locus of inborn biological instincts or drives. The ego, developed from the id in infancy, is the id’s interface with reality. The ego attempts to bring the demands of the id into accord with the demands of the external world. The superego develops in early childhood as we incorporate internally the social constraints of parental influence. ●● Freud used his theory in the treatment of patients. His writing is framed in terms of cases or generalizations from cases in which he attempts to treat hysteria, paranoia, and neuroses. The treatment protocol develops into psychoanalysis, a combination of talk therapy, free association, and dream analysis. The conceptual framework proliferates to include Oedipal complexes, Electra complexes, and so on. ●● Despite Freud’s insistence throughout his career that his goal was a science of psychology, his approach is closer to the therapeutic model of medicine. Freud himself resisted the use of controlled experiment. He seemed happy to see perceived success in individual cases as a vindication of broad theories. James versus Freud ●● James and Freud arrived at very different foundations for very different sciences. What did they have to say about each other? ●● Despite the fact that they were contemporaries, it is very difficult to find passages in which James mentions Freud by name or the reverse. Instead, they mention an approach or position which clearly is to be taken as that of the opponent. On both sides, the mention is always is sharp and critical. 122 M ind - B ody P hilosophy ●● James totally rejects the concept of an unconscious mental state. The existence of an unconscious flies in the face of any attempt to build a science of mentality grounded first and foremost in conscious introspective experience. ●● James says the attempt to introduce unconscious mental states “is the sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology, and of turning what might become a science into a tumbling-ground for whimsies.” That is a strong rejection of Freudian theory. ●● For his part, Freud minces no words in condemning the other side: “Whereas the psychology of consciousness never went beyond this broken sequence of events … the view that held that what is mental is itself unconscious enabled psychology to take its place as a natural science like any other.” Attacks ●● Freudian psychology, in particular, came under increasing attack as pseudoscientific. A prime mover in that attack was Karl Popper. Popper wasn’t primarily concerned with when a theory is true because he knew that even the best scientific theories might turn out to be wrong. He wanted to know what made a theory scientific to begin with, whether true or not. ●● Popper’s demarcation criterion was falsifiability: A theory is scientific only if it is falsifiable. Popper’s cases of pseudoscience included Marxism and psychoanalysis. Those theories seem to be able to explain the results of social movements or individual psychology in every case, no matter what happens. That is the whole problem. ●● A Marxist can find what he takes to be confirming evidence on every page of the newspaper. And whether a man tries to save a drowning child or drowns a child himself, the Freudian can explain it in terms of repression or some other notion. For a Freudian, every conceivable case can be explained in Freudian terms. L E C T U R E 12 — R ival P sychologies of the M ind 123 ●● Popper’s falsifiability criterion has left a lasting impression. In a critique of Freud, author Richard Webster suggests that psychoanalysis may be the most complex and successful pseudoscience in history. ●● However, if Freudian psychoanalysis is seen not as a single unified theory but as a collection of different theories, that critique may go too far. A number of philosophers and psychologists have come to the conclusion that at least some Freudian concepts are falsifiable, even if others may not be. ●● After extensive examination, both the psychologist Hans Eysenck and the philosopher Adolf Grunbaum came to the conclusion that Popper’s blanket statement was wrong. At least some aspects of Freudian theory are empirically testable. Even so, Eysenck claims that Freud managed to set back the study of psychology and psychiatry by 50 years or more. ●● James’s reputation has not done much better. The psychologist Gregory Kimble took a critical look at James’ major work, The Principles of Psychology, on the 100 th anniversary of its publication. He concluded that he couldn’t find a single principle in it. Wilhelm Wundt ●● Although Freud and James have both been named as fathers of psychology, their theories have not fared particularly well. It is the third figure—Wilhelm Wundt, also spoken of as a father of psychology—who is a far clearer precursor of academic psychology as it developed through the 20 th century. ●● The object of Wundt’s investigations were “the elements of consciousness.” His background theory was in the tradition of the British empiricists. Wundt was looking for elements of sensation as they compounded into higher ideas. ●● Unlike James’s personal introspection and unlike Freud’s clinical practice, Wundt’s approach was experimental. Like James, Wundt took introspection to be the route into consciousness. But he was acutely aware that the attempt to focus on one’s own mental state may change the mental state. 124 M ind - B ody P hilosophy ●● Because of that, Wundt didn’t rely on verbal introspective reports but on a subject’s simple signals regarding subjective experience—the pressing of a key when a sound was heard, or when a light reached a particular point on the screen. He tested reaction times and discrimination thresholds. His experimental contexts called for stimuli that could be strictly controlled and strictly repeated with a number of subjects. ●● In Wundt’s work, unlike that of James and Freud, one has real psychological experiments, many of which are indistinguishable in format from psychological experiments performed today. ●● In the course of the 20 th century, at least in academic psychology, the influence of both James and Freud was swamped by experimental psychology in the tradition of Wundt. During his career, Wundt trained 116 graduate students, including many Americans. It was at precisely this time that psychology became popular, with new academic positions in rapidly expanding American universities. Behaviorism ●● In Wundt’s wake developed the most powerful movement in 20 th-century psychology: behaviorism. With behaviorism, the shift is clearly away from both Freud and James and toward the experimental psychology of Wundt. ●● Behaviorism carries Wundt’s insistence on a science fundamentally tied to experiment and objective observation. Wundt tried to track consciousness and envisaged the behavior of his subjects as a report of introspective experience. Behaviorism went much further, restricting study to only what is observable under controlled conditions. ●● If science demands that we stick to what is strictly observable in the lab, and only behavior is strictly observable, the scientific psychology we seek will be a science of behavior. With the rise of behaviorism, consciousness loses its central place. With the rise of behaviorism, consciousness seems to lose any place. L E C T U R E 12 — R ival P sychologies of the M ind 125 ●● Experimental psychology guided by behaviorism ruled most of the 20 th century, with John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner as major figures. ●● Of course, no movement occurs without a counter-movement. In the 1960s, a cognitive revolution began as a revolt against the reign of behaviorism. Critical to that revolution was Noam Chomsky, who argued that analysis of verbal behavior in terms of the behaviorists’ stimulus and response wasn’t going to be enough to explain the complex and structured ways that humans use language. ●● We will have to go “inside” in order to understand the cognitive factors running behind the observed behavior. In the merging of a number of fields, cognitive psychology came into its own and morphed into what is now known as cognitive science. ●● As the 20 th century began to shift to the 21st, still another revolution occurred: the neuroscience revolution. With the explosion of new techniques for brain imaging and brain intervention, cognitive science has joined forces with biology, medicine, and genetics. 126 M ind - B ody P hilosophy Suggested Reading Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychoanalysis.” James, “The Stream of Consciousness.” Popper, “Science: Conjectures and Refutations.” Questions to Consider 1 Freud says that a memory, a thought, a realization, or a fear can slip from consciousness to unconsciousness, but still continue to guide your behavior. Give an example from your own experience. 2 James emphasizes the continuity of consciousness—the stream of consciousness. Contemporary critics claim that consciousness is actually quite fragmented, with gaps in time, attention, and content. Which account do you think is right? Could they both be right? L E C T U R E 12 — R ival P sychologies of the M ind 127