by Morton Hunt
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”).
