The Story of Psychology Read online

  Morton Hunt

  THE STORY OF

  PSYCHOLOGY

  Morton Hunt has been a freelance writer specializing in the behavioral sciences since 1949. His articles have appeared in many national magazines, including The New Yorker and The New York Times, and have won him numerous prizes including the Westinghouse A.A.A.S. Award for best science article of the year. He has written twenty-one books, the best known of which are The World of the Formerly Married (about the lives and psychology of separated and divorced people), The Universe Within (cognitive science), and the earlier edition of this present book. He lives in Gladwyn, Pennsylvania, with his wife, writer and psychotherapist Bernice Hunt.

  A L S O B Y M O R T O N H U N T

  The Natural History of Love

  Her Infinite Variety:

  The American Woman as Lover, Mate and Rival

  Mental Hospital

  The Talking Cure

  (with Rena Corman and Louis R. Ormont)

  The Thinking Animal

  The World of the Formerly Married

  The Affair: A Portrait of Extra-Marital Love

  in Contemporary America

  The Mugging

  Sexual Behavior in the 1970s

  Prime Time: A Guide to the Pleasures and Opportunities

  of the New Middle Age (with Bernice Hunt)

  The Divorce Experience (with Bernice Hunt)

  The Universe Within:

  A New Science Explores the Human Mind

  Profiles of Social Research:

  The Scientific Study of Human Interactions

  The Compassionate Beast: What Science Is Discovering

  About the Humane Side of Humankind

  How Science Takes Stock: The Story of Meta-Analysis

  The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the

  Scientific Study of Human Nature

  To Bernice,

  for reasons beyond counting

  READER

  I here put into thy hands what has been the diversion of some of my idle and heavy hours; if it has the good luck to prove so of any of thine, and thou hast but half so much pleasure in reading as I had in writing it, thou wilt as little think thy money, as I do my pains, ill bestowed.

  JOHN LOCKE, “The Epistle to the Reader,”

  An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: Exploring the Universe Within

  A Psychological Experiment in the Seventh Century B.C. 1

  Messages from the Gods

  The Discovery of the Mind

  PART ONE: PRESCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY

  1 The Conjecturers

  The Glory That Was Greece

  The Forerunners: Alcmaeon, Protagoras, Democritus, Hippocrates

  The “Midwife of Thought”: Socrates

  The Idealist: Plato

  The Realist: Aristotle

  2 The Scholars

  The Long Sleep

  The Commentators: Theophrastus, the Hellenists, the Epicureans, the Skeptics, the Stoics

  Roman Borrowers: Lucretius, Seneca, Epictetus, Galen, Plotinus

  The Patrist Adapters: the Patrists, Tertullian, Saint Augustine

  The Patrist Reconcilers: the Schoolmen, Saint Thomas Aquinas

  The Darkness Before Dawn

  3 The Protopsychologists

  The Third Visitation

  The Rationalists: Descartes, the Cartesians, Spinoza

  The Empiricists: Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, the Empiricist-Associationist School

  German Nativism: Leibniz, Kant

  PART TWO: FOUNDERS OF A NEW SCIENCE

  4 The Physicalists

  The Magician-Healer: Mesmer

  The Skull Reader: Gall

  The Mechanists

  Specific Nerve Energy: Müller

  Just Noticeable Differences: Weber

  Neural Physiology: von Helmholtz

  Psychophysics: Fechner

  5 First Among Equals: Wundt

  As Good a Birth Date as Any

  The Making of the First Psychologist

  The Curious Goings-on at Konvikt

  Wundtian Psychology

  Sic Transit

  6 The Psychologist Malgré Lui: William James

  “This Is No Science”

  Adorable Genius

  Founding Father

  Ideas of the Pre-eminent Psychologizer

  Jamesian Paradoxes

  7 Explorer of the Depths: Sigmund Freud

  The Truth About Freud

  The Would-Be Neuroscientist

  The Hypnotherapist

  The Invention of Psychoanalysis

  Dynamic Psychology: Early Formulations

  Success

  Dynamic Psychology: Extensions and Revisions

  But Is It Scientific?

  Decline and Fall—and Revival

  8 The Measurers

  “Whenever You Can, Count”: Francis Galton

  Galtonian Paradoxes

  The Mental Age Approach: Alfred Binet

  The Testing Mania

  The IQ Controversy

  9 The Behaviorists

  A New Answer to Old Questions

  Two Discoverers of the Laws of Behaviorism: Thorndike and Pavlov

  Mr. Behaviorism: John B. Watson

  The Triumph of Behaviorism

  Two Great Neobehaviorists: Hull and Skinner

  The Impending Paradigm Shift

  10 The Gestaltists

  A Visual Illusion Gives Rise to a New Psychology

  The Rediscovery of the Mind

  The Laws of Gestalten

  Out-of-Reach Bananas and Other Problems

  Learning

  Failure and Success

  PART THREE: SPECIALIZATION AND SYNTHESIS

  Introduction: The Fissioning of Psychology— and the Fusion of the Psychological Sciences

  11 The Personality Psychologists

  “The Secrets of the Hearts of Other Men”

  The Fundamental Units of Personality

  Measuring Personality

  Making Order out of Chaos

  Learned Personality

  Body, Genes, and Personality

  Late Word from the Personality Front

  12 The Developmentalists

  “Great Oaks from Little Acorns Grow”

  Grand Theory and Nontheory

  A Giant, and a Giant Theory

  Cognitive Development

  Maturation

  Personality Development

  Social Development

  Development from A to Z

  13 The Social Psychologists

  No Man’s Land

  A Case of Multiple Fatherhood

  Closed Cases: Cognitive Dissonance, the Psychology of Imprisonment, Obedience, the Bystander Effect

  Ongoing Inquiries: Conflict Resolution, Attribution, Others

  The Value of Social Psychology

  14 The Perception Psychologists

  Interesting Questions

  Styles of Looking at Looking

  Seeing Form

  Seeing Movement

  Seeing Depth

  Two Ways of Looking at Vision

  15 The Emotion and Motivation Psychologists

  Fundamental Question

  Somatic Theory

  ANS and CNS Theory

  Cognitive Theory

  Patchwork Quilt

  16 The Cognitivists

  Revolution

  Revolution No. 2

  Memory

  Language

  Reasoning

  Is the Mind a Computer? Is a Computer a Mind?

  New Model

  And the Winner Is—

  17 The Psychotherapists

  Growth Industry

 
Freud’s Offspring: The Dynamic Psychotherapists

  The Patient as Laboratory Animal: Behavior Therapy

  All in the Mind: Cognitive Therapy

  A Miscellany of Therapies

  But Does It Really Work?

  18 Users and Misusers of Psychology

  Knowledge Is Power

  Improving the Human Use of the Human Equipment

  Improving the Fit Between Humans and Their Jobs

  The Use and Misuse of Testing

  Covert Persuasion: Advertising and Propaganda

  Psychology in the Courtroom

  Beyond the Fringe

  19 Psychology Today

  Portrait of a Psychologist

  Portrait of a Science

  Schism

  Psychology and Politics

  Status Report

  Notes

  Notes

  References

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE:

  Exploring the Universe Within

  A Psychological Experiment in the Seventh Century B.C.

  A most unusual man, Psamtik I, King of Egypt. During his long reign, in the latter half of the seventh century B.C., he not only drove out the Assyrians, revived Egyptian art and architecture, and brought about general prosperity, but found time to conceive of and conduct history’s first recorded experiment in psychology.

  The Egyptians had long believed that they were the most ancient race on earth, and Psamtik, driven by intellectual curiosity, wanted to prove that flattering belief. Like a good psychologist, he began with a hypothesis: If children had no opportunity to learn a language from older people around them, they would spontaneously speak the primal, inborn language of humankind—the natural language of its most ancient people—which, he expected to show, was Egyptian.

  To test his hypothesis, Psamtik commandeered two infants of a lower-class mother and turned them over to a herdsman to bring up in a remote area. They were to be kept in a sequestered cottage, properly fed and cared for, but were never to hear anyone speak so much as a word. The Greek historian Herodotus, who tracked the story down and learned what he calls “the real facts” from priests of Hephaestus in Memphis, says that Psamtik’s goal “was to know, after the indistinct babblings of infancy were over, what word they would first articulate.”

  The experiment, he tells us, worked. One day, when the children were two years old, they ran up to the herdsman as he opened the door of their cottage and cried out “Becos!” Since this meant nothing to him, he paid no attention, but when it happened repeatedly, he sent word to Psamtik, who at once ordered the children brought to him. When he too heard them say it, Psamtik made inquiries and learned that becos was the Phrygian word for bread. He concluded that, disappointingly, the Phrygians were an older race than the Egyptians.1

  We today may smile condescendingly; we know from modern studies of children brought up under conditions of isolation that there is no innate language and that children who hear no speech never speak. Psamtik’s hypothesis rested on an invalid assumption, and he apparently mistook a babbled sound for an actual word. Yet we must admire him for trying to prove his hypothesis and for having had the highly original notion that thoughts arise in the mind through internal processes that can be investigated.

  Messages from the Gods

  For it had not occurred to anyone until then, nor would it for another several generations, that human beings could study, understand, and predict how their thoughts and feelings arose.

  Many other complex natural phenomena had long engaged the interest of both primitive and civilized peoples, who had come more or less to understand and master them. For nearly 800,000 years human beings had known how to make and control fire;2 for 100,000 years they had been devising and using tools of many kinds; for eight thousand years some of them had understood how to plant and raise crops; and for over a thousand years, at least in Egypt, they had known some of the elements of human anatomy and possessed hundreds of remedies—some of which may even have worked—for a variety of diseases. But until a century after Psamtik’s time neither the Egyptians nor anyone else thought about or sought to understand—let alone influence—how their own minds functioned.

  And no wonder. They took their thoughts and emotions to be the work of spirits and gods. We have direct and conclusive evidence of this in the form of the testimony of ancient peoples themselves. Mesopotamian cuneiform texts from about 2000 B.C., for instance, refer repeatedly to the “commands” of the gods—literally heard as utterances by the rulers of society—dictating where and how to plant crops, to whom to delegate authority, on whom to make war, and so on. A typical clay cone reads, in part:

  Mesilin King of Kish at the command of his deity Kadi concerning the plantation of that field set up a stele [an inscribed stone column] in that place… Ningirsu, the hero of Enlil [another god], by his righteous command, upon Umma war made.3

  A far more detailed portrait of how early people supposed their thoughts and feelings arose can be found in the Iliad, which records the beliefs of Homer in the ninth century B.C., and to some extent those of the eleventh-century Greeks and Trojans he wrote about. Professor Julian Jaynes of Princeton, who exhaustively analyzed the language of the Iliad that refers to mental and emotional functions, summed up his findings as follows:

  There is in general no consciousness in the Iliad… and in general, therefore, no words for consciousness or mental acts. The words in the Iliad that in a later age come to mean mental things have different meanings, all of them more concrete. The word psyche, which later means soul or conscious mind, [signifies] in most instances life-substances, such as blood or breath: a dying warrior bleeds out his psyche onto the ground or breathes it out in his last gasp …Perhaps most important is the word noos which, spelled as nous in later Greek, comes to mean conscious mind. Its proper translation in the Iliad would be something like perception or recognition or field of vision. Zeus “holds Odysseus in his noos.” He keeps watch over him.4

  The thoughts and feelings of the people in the Iliad are put directly into their minds by the gods. The opening lines of the epic make that plain. It begins when, after nine years of besieging Troy, the Greek army is being decimated by plague, and the thought occurs to the great Achilles that they should withdraw from those shores:

  Achilles called the men to gather together, this having been put into his mind by the goddess of the white arms, Hera, who had pity on the Greeks when she saw them dying… and he said to them, “I believe that backwards we must make our way home if we are to escape death through fighting and the plague.”

  Such explanations of both thought and emotion occur time and again, said Professor Jaynes.

  When Agamemnon, king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon. It is a god… who leads the armies into battle, who speaks to each soldier at the turning points, who debates and teaches Hector what he must do.5

  Other ancient peoples, even centuries later, similarly believed that their thoughts, visions, and dreams were messages from the gods. Herodotus tells us that Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire, crossed into the land of the hostile Massagetae in 529 B.C. and during his first night there dreamed that he saw Darius, the son of his follower Hystaspes, with wings on his shoulders, one shadowing Asia, the other Europe. When Cyrus awoke, he summoned Hystaspes and said, “Your son is discovered to be plotting against me and my crown. I will tell you how I know it so certainly. The gods watch over my safety, and warn me beforehand of every danger.” He recounted the dream and ordered Hystaspes to return to Persia and have the son ready to answer to Cyrus when he came back from defeating the Massagetae.6 (Cyrus, however, was killed by the Massagetae. Darius did later become king, but not by having plotted against him.)

  The ancient Hebrews had comparable beliefs. Throughout the Old Testament, important thoughts are taken to be utterances of God, who appears in person in the earlier writings, or
as the voice of God heard within oneself, in the later ones. Three instances:

  After these things the word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward. (Genesis, 15:1)

  Now after the death of Moses the servant of the Lord it came to pass, that the Lord spake unto Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ minister, saying, Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel. (Joshua, 1:1–2)

  Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me. (Jonah, 1:1–2)

  Disordered thoughts and madness were likewise interpreted as the work of God or of spirits sent by Him. Deuteronomy names insanity as one of the many curses that God will inflict on those who do not obey His commands:

  The Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart. (Deut., 28:28)

  Saul’s psychotic fits, which David allayed by playing the harp, are attributed to an evil spirit sent by the Lord:

  But the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him… And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him. (I Samuel, 16:14–23)

  When David’s fame as a warrior exceeded Saul’s, though, the divinely caused madness raged out of all control:

  And it came to pass on the morrow, that the evil spirit from God came upon Saul, and he prophesied in the midst of the house: and David played with his hand, as at other times: and there was a javelin in Saul’s hand. And Saul cast the javelin; for he said, I will smite David even to the wall with it… [but David] slipped away out of Saul’s presence, and he smote the javelin into the wall. (I Samuel, 18:10–11 and 19:10)

  The Discovery of the Mind

  But in the sixth century B.C. there appeared hints of a remarkable new development. In India, Buddha attributed human thoughts to our sensations and perceptions, which, he said, gradually and automatically combine into ideas. In China, Confucius stressed the power of thought and decision that lay within each person (“A man can command his principles; principles do not master the man,” “Learning, undigested by thought, is labor lost; thought unassisted by learning is perilous”).