Conversation about psychology in the middle 20th century

I shared this with colleage John Auerbach. It is a poem by B. F. Skinner

On Saturday, August 24, 2019,  John Auerbach, PhD responded:

Psychohistory always has its problems, among them that it is always difficult to say we understand someone’s adult character by what he or she wrote at age 10. Still it must be said that Skinner read Freud and took Freud very seriously and even applied to be an analytic candidate at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute.  The BPI, being full of twits (yes, really), turned him down.  But I mention all this because it gives me an excuse to note something about the mind of the author of this poem.  This author hates people who are pessimists (I think that this is a fairly reasonable inference) and, I suspect, would like to drive them out of the camp—to vote them off the island, to use a more modern expression.  And because I know what my 10-year-old self was like, I suspect that the author of this poem would have hated a 10-year-old like me and that I would have hated a 10-year-old like him.  Although my 61-year-old self actually a respects a large number of Skinner’s contributions, that 61-year-old self still thinks it is not surprising that Skinner, given the particulars of his biography, created a psychology that attempts to bypass mental states. 

John S. Auerbach, PhD

I wrote back: 

You recognized the reference ("particulars" of his biography). My impression was the same. There is a hint of hypomanic obliviousness in the poem, but given his age lets give the benefit of the doubt that it was the extroverted scout culture working its hand. He also disses someone as "insane." So at least at age ten, he is not much interested in the varieties of different people, or their internal life. Nor was he later. What was Frazier's line from Walden Two that what is love but positive reinforcement? All criticism aside, Skinner is among the most influential people of the 20th century.

He did have much in common with Freud--both positivists, determinists, both looking to the past, both big theorizers. 

Speaking of camping, introversion, pessimism, and outdoor activities there is a very funny story by Vladimir Nabokov called "Cloud, Castle, Lake", about an introvert forced to go on a camping trip" written in 1941 and first published in Atlantic.

Interesting that behaviorism was defined so much by Anglo names--Watson, Skinner, Miller, Tolman, Guthrie. Was that just the demographics of the time and who had the means and power to rise? Or was there something in the Anglo style of thinking that tended to dismiss the mind, or view humans in more engineering or economic terms? 

Damon

On Sunday, August 25, 2019, 11:30:18 PM CDT, John Auerbach wrote:

Interesting point on ethnicity and psychology.  For a control group, here is a list of great Jewish psychologists, although truth be told some are psychiatrists and some are philosophers:  http://www.jinfo.org/Psychologists.html

On this list, the main fields would be psychoanalysis (but of course), humanistic psychology, existential psychology, Gestalt psychology (not to be confused with gestalt psychotherapy, although Fritz Perls is on the list), cognitive psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, and neuroscience.  

Here are the names on this list that, to my observation, are definitely affiliated with behaviorism:  Richard Herrnstein, Leonard Krasner, Arnold Lazarus, Perry London, Walter Mischel, Julian Rotter, Andrew Salter, Martin Seligman, Leonard Ullman, and Joseph Wolpe.  I might have missed a few on the list, but not many.  Note, however, that none of them are in the founding generations of behaviorism and that they constitute a distinct minority on the list.  

This list also contains the names of two of the founders of cognitive psychotherapy, which of course we should never confuse with cognitive psychology or cognitive science:  Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis.  

Behaviorism, at least in its founding generations, was the creation of American White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, although note that Neal Miller and his colleague John Dollard were heavily influenced by psychoanalysis and even had been analyzed.  OTOH, nearly all of the Jewish psychologists on this list are interested in the issue of mind.  

On Aug 25, 2019  I responded.

You may have more insight than me, John. about whether its a real or spurious line of thought. 

Indeed, you can extend the conceit. The engineering, steel, and economic fields were being developed in Anglo Saxon areas. From that center came the founding fathers of behaviorism. Skilled but possibly detached England and German sensibilities, inventing the apparatus for imperializing the world. Is this the style of invention, thinking, and ambition that would coincide with behaviorism.

The Jews meanwhile saw a different version of humanity. The excelled in arts, writing, psychology, helping sciences, finance, those areas where intellect must touch humans. 

Would it be fair to say that, number three, the Nordics dominate the cognitive side of psychology--Piaget, Ulrich Niesser, Pavlov s-s work, and Luria.

I suppose its time to make a manifesto for Florida Psychologist. Establish the essence of our diverse talents into a field. 

Pessimistically,

Damon

Dr. Auerbach replied

Really complex issue for the morning.  However, Pavlov was Russian, Piaget was Swiss French and therefore in the Rousseauan developmental tradition, even if more intellective than Rousseau was in his views, Ulric Neisser, one of the founders of cognitive science, was half-Scandinavian but also half-Jewish, and Alexander Luria was a Russian Jew, Lurie and Luria being two of the oldest Jewish surnames extent, so both he and Neisser were part of the same Ashkenazi Jewish culture that dominated psychology from its second generation on.  Also Piaget and Luria were protégés of Sabina Spielrein.  Spielrein had been Jung’s first psychoanalytic patient—that, too, is an interesting story that I will skip for now—but Spielrein, who later analyzed Piaget and was only the second woman in Freud’s Vienna circle, was a Russian Jew, so from the same culture as all of the other figures I have mentioned.  

I would agree with you on the technocratic impulse in behavioral psychology.  I think, however, that Nordic or Scandinavian psychology and psychiatry are rather like their German cousins.  Phenomenological and biological schools are heavily represented, but because there were so few Jews in Scandinavia, psychoanalysis not so much.

 I wrote

Had you been reading Tolman at the time. I think Tolman, on the other coast, was where purposive psychology was taking shape. Eventually, there was a drift more into cognitive psychology. Possibly that was the trajectory of Shepp, John's advisor, who started out with animal learning but over time started looking at cognitive  factors. 

John replied

I spent some time reading the bios of these folks—Spence, Hull, and Tolman—on Wikipedia, so that of course makes me an expert.  It is amazing that Hull escaped a traumatizing childhood more or less intact.  I wonder if he developed a mathematical form of behaviorism in order to avoid dealing with painful emotion.  Regardless, his drive-reduction theory of behavior was quite congruent with Freud’s.  One can easily see the connections between his theories and the behavioral reformulation of Freud created by his Yale proteges and colleagues John Dollard and Neal Miller.  Edward Tolman, meanwhile, as is well known, was a cognitive theorist avant la lettre, but what is less well known is that he almost lost his faculty position at Berkeley for refusing to sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath.  It was not that Tolman was a Communist; it was that he opposed loyalty oaths as contrary to academic freedom. He won his legal case, and the California loyalty oath was overturned.  Ironically enough, Clark Kerr, Berkeley President and the main villain of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement despite having been a social activist himself in the 1930s, insisted just a year before the FSM began that Berkeley name its Psychology building in honor of Tolman, in part because of Tolman’s successful opposition to the loyalty oath.  Go figure.  

As for his intellectual roots and therefore his cognitivism, Tolman had been influenced by Gestalt psychology, especially Kurt Koffka and Kurt Lewin (pronounced Levine in German, in case anyone reading this does not get it).  One way we might understand this Hull-Tolman divide is that, if we look at Freud’s views, Hull’s ideas were consistent with drive theory, but Tolman’s ideas were consistent with Freud’s views on ego and meaning, although more so with the various phenomenological schools (e.g., Gestalt) than with Freud.  I think one of the most interesting questions in modern clinical psychology is how exactly cognitive-behavioral therapy is linked to 21st century cognitive science.  That is something I might post on about a length later, but my view is that certain radical behaviorist models, such as the Functional Analytic Psychotherapy of Kohlenberg and Tsai, are much closer to current developments in psychoanalytic theory, with our focus on implicit and procedural aspects of attachment relationships, and also much closer to the modern emphasis in cognitive science on embodied cognition than is the cognitive therapy of Beck and Ellis, which focuses mainly on explicit and declarative cognition.  I never thought I would have more in common with Skinner, with his hatred of pessimists and his denial of mental states but who had a theory that can understand process and pragmatic aspects of behavior, than with Beck and Ellis, both of whom started out as psychoanalysts and both of whom therefore thought mental states were important, so go figure.   

When I knew Bryan Shepp, my undergraduate thesis adviser, about 40 years ago, he was studying integral and separable stimulus dimensions in cognition and was therefore on the way to the modern emphasis on implicit, rather than explicit, processes.  He used to say that the two greatest psychologists were Freud, who had a theory of emotion and drive but who had little to say about cognition, and Piaget, who had a theory of cognition but who had little to say about emotion or drive.  I thought he was right.

I replied

Those fusty figures, with their feuds that seem arcane today, are interesting to think about. Where would they be today, given the same talents and propensities? Might there be regression to the mean, with Hull an Associate Professor at Marguette University, Tolman a semiotics adjunct at Santa Cruz, and Spence the director of gender studies at Illinois State University, with Janet Spence in a role with the APA. 

Wikipedia seems better and better. Certainly better than reading encyclopedias. We can talk about the psychologists conceptually instead of alphabetically-Ferenzi, Freud, Galton, Guthrie, Horney, Hull,

Your ability to conceptualize with great writing (a potential Marquis!) is a pleasant diversion from the mundane tasks of a workaday psychologist in a provincial town. Though remote in time, those conceptualizations serve a number of uses. One is that feuds are evanescent. Fervid beliefs over time mutate and change until hardly recognizable. How many understand today the disputations between, say Skinner and Breland. What relevance is it? One lesson is that theories have uncertain outcomes. You note that in your own position, there is more kinship with Skinner than Beck--the irony of that switch. I find the same in most theory bound issues. Politically, you consider yourself a radical then find after a while you have entered the camp of the counter-revolutionaries, or vice versa. If you recall, In The Name of the Rose by Italian semiotician Umberto Eco, the monks argue heatedly about whether Christ wore a purse at his waist. The argument was fueled by concerns that monasteries were getting too rich. Can you imagine! Or as you might say, go figure.

That Piaget's theory is weak on drive, to me, has a kind of aesthetic superiority of the more drive oriented theorists, whatever the science behind the conceptualizations. As a structuralist, Piaget seems to believe (and I am not highly familiar with his work), that the underlying structures innately unfold. With those cognitive psychologists who emphasize declarative cognition, a certain legitimacy is given to inner events. Internal workings are relevant actions. 

I only read in retrospect the brouhaha when Verbal Behavior was published by BF. Skinner. His notions were poised against Chomsky's theory of transformation grammar. Chomsky was like Piaget, influenced by structuralism. The linguistic structures arose, I assume, without effort. His theories seemed to knock the tar out of Verbal Behavior. There was more elegance there. I liked Skinner and Freud as an undergraduate, though over time have drifted more to the declarative cognition side. Again, go figure.

Yahoo/Sent

•