Contemporary Schools Of Psychology

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CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS
OF PSYCHOLOGY

Contemporary Schools
of Psychology

ROBERT S. WOODWORTH

PH.D., SC.D., LL.D.

Professor ILmeritus of Psychology
Columbia University

ASIA PUBLISHING HOUSE

BOMBAY CALCUTTA NEW DELHI MADRAS

t book was first published in Great Britain on November 5/A,

It has been reprinted four time*

Eighth edition, February 19 5/

// has been reprinted four time*

Reprinted jo,(>o

Itirst Asian Edition 1961. Printed in Great Britain

I'RINILD IN GREAT BRITAIN

PREFACE

The major schools of psychology as they existed in 1931,
when the first edition of this-suryey was published, are still con-
temporary schools. Considerable revision is called for, how-
ever, not because any radically new schools have come forward,
but because important new developments have occurred in
nearly every one of the existing schools. This is notably true
of behaviorism, Gestalt psychology, and psychoanalysis. Be-
haviorism has risen to a more critical scientific level; Gestalt
psychology has branched out into new fields; psychoanalysis
has changed somewhat in its clinical methods and still more in
its theory. The "hormic and holistic" group of schools were
nearly all mentioned in the previous edition but are now brought
together into a single chapter. The newer association! sts, in-
stead of being considered rather incidentally, are now given a
chapter to themselves along with their associationist predeces-
sors.' It has seemed appropriate to regard as functional psy-
chologists, in a broad sense, most of those who were previously
spoken of as being in the "middle of the road" ; and for that
reason the final chapter under the latter heading has lost most
of its content and been reduced to a brief epilogue.

All these revisions and rearrangements have demanded a
practically complete rewriting of the book. Certain discussions
which were perhaps pertinent in 1931 now appear superfluous
and have been omitted, so that the text as a whole has not been
much enlarged, though its coverage is certainly more complete.
What was said in the first edition to the effect that the book had
grown out of a lecture course still remains true, for the author
has lectured on these schools every year since then ; and he de-
sires once more to express his indebtedness to the many
students who have discussed with him these important psycho-
logical problems. Special thanks are due to Professor Mary
Rose Sheehan for her critical review of the text in the proofs.

ROBERT S. WOODWORTH
Columbia University
May 14, 1948

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For permission to incorporate in the text numerous brief quotations
from the works of leading representatives of the schools, the author
thankfully records his indebtedness to the following publishers :

To American Book Company, New York, for permission to quote
from Goldstein's The organism, copyright 1939.

To The American Missionary Association, New York, for permis-
sion to quote from M. W. Calkins, A first book in psychology, copyright
1914.

To American Psychological Association, Inc., Washington, for per-
mission to quote from The Psychological Review, Volumes 30, 39, 44,
and 52.

To Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., New York, for permission to
quote from . C. Tolman, Purposive behavior in animals and men,
copyright 1932.

To Clark University Press, Worcester, Mass., for permission to
quote from Psychologies of 1925, copyright 1926; from Psychologies of
1930, copyright 1930; from A history of psychology in autobiography,
Volume I, copyright 1930; and from A handbook of general experi-
mental psychology, copyright 1934.

To Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., New York, for permission
to quote from K. Koffka, Principles of Gestalt psychology, copyright
1935.

To Harper & Brothers, New York and London, for permission to
quote from M. Wertheimer, Productive thinking, copyright 1945.

To Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., for permission to
quote from K. Goldstein, Human nature in the light of psychopathology,
copyright 1940 ; and from E. L. Thorndike, Man and his works, copy-
right 1943.

To Henry Holt and Company, Inc., New York, for permission to
quote from G. W. Allport, Personality, copyright 1937; from J. R.
Angell, Psychology, copyright 1904 ; and from W. James, Principles of
psychology, copyright 1890.

To Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, Iowa City, for permission
to quote from University of Iowa Studies in Child Welfare, 1940, Vol-
ume 16.

To The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, for permission to quote
from Comparative Psychology Monographs, 1935, Volume 11.

To The Journal Press, Proyincetown, Mass., for permission to quote
from Journal of general Psychology, 1931, Volume 5.

vii

v iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, for permission to quote from
J. R. Kantor, Principles of psychology, Volume I, copyright 1924.

To J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, for permission to quote
from F. Alexander, Our age of unreason, copyright 1942; and from
J. B. Watson, Psychology from the standpoint of a behaviorist, copy-
right 1919.

To Liveright Publishing Corporation, New York, for permission to
quote from Dr. Wolfgang Kohler, Gestalt psychology, copyright 1947.
Published by Liveright Publishing Corporation, New York.

To The Macmillan Company, New York, for permission to quote
from W. Stern, General psychology from the personalistic standpoint,
copyright 1938.

To W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, for permission to
quote from S. Freud, New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis,
translated by W. J. H. Sprott, copyright 1933 ; from K. Horney, New
ways in psychoanalysis, copyright 1939; from K. Horney, Our inner
conflicts, copyright 1945; and from J. B. Watson, Behaviorism, copy-
right 1930.

To The Principia Press, Bloomington, Indiana, for permission to
quote from J. R. Kantor, Problems of physiological psychology, copy-
right 1947.

To Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia Universiiy,
New York, for permission to quote from E. L. Thorndike, Experimental
study of rewards, copyright 1933.

To Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., for permission to
quote from C. S. Sherrington, The integrative action of the nervous
system, copyright 1906, 1947.

R. S. W.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

1 OUR SCHOOLS AND THEIR BACKGROUND 3

The New Psychology of the Nineteenth Century ... 7

2 FUNCTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL PSYCHOLOGY 11

The Beginnings of Functional Psychology 11

Experimental Functional Psychology 14

The Structural Psychology of Conscious Experience . . 24

The Chicago School of Functional Psychology .... 30

European Functionalists 33

3 ASSOCIATIONISM OLD AND NEW 37

The Older Associationism 38

The Newer Associationism 47

4 BEHAVIORISM 63

Watsonian Behaviorism 68

Watson's Views and Concepts 79

Some Other Early Behaviorists 94

The Later Behaviorists 103

5 GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY 120

Founding of the Gestalt School 121

Gestalt Qualities, Form Qualities 124

Factors in Organization 127

The Dynamic "Field" in Gestalt Theory 131

Self and Environment in Direct Experience . . . .135

Insight and Productive Thinking 142

Lewin's Field Theory 151

6 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 156

Development of the Psychoanalytic Method 159

Freud's Earlier Psychology 169

Freud's Later Psychology 181

Alfred Adler and the School of "Individual Psychology" . 193

Carl Gustav Jung and the School of "Analytical Psychology" 198

Neo-Freudian Psychology 203

x CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

7 HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 213

Purposivism or Hormic Psychology 213

Holistic Psychologies 231

8 THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD 253

BIBLIOGRAPHY 257

AUTHOR INDEX 269

SUBJECT INDEX 275

CHAPTER 1
OUR SCHOOLS AND THEIR BACKGROUND

As a science psychology is relatively young, much younger
than physics, chemistry, and some branches of biology. As a
part of philosophy, to be sure, it goes back to Plato and Aris-
totle. In the history of modern philosophy it took on an
empirical slant and approached more and more toward the
status of a natural science. It attained this status in the latter
part of the nineteenth century and from that time to this has
expanded very rapidly. A worldwide survey at the present time
would reveal psychologists working in almost every land along
a great variety of lines. Some would be found in laboratories
and some in clinics. Some are concerned with learning, per-
ception, thinking, motivation, and other such functions in men
and animals. Some are using tests for the study of individual
and group differences. Some are investigating child develop-
ment and some mental derangement. Some are working on
social problems and some on problems that lie close to physi-
ology. Some are applying psychology to education, some to
industry. Those devoted to a specialty have meetings from
time to time and develop distinctive techniques and jargons.
Such specialties might very well be called schools, but that is not
the way psychologists are accustomed to use the word. For
us a "school" is a group of psychologists who put forward a
certain system of ideas designed to point the way that all must
follow if psychology is ever to be made a genuine, productive
science of both theoretical and practical value. We have several
such schools pointing in different directions.

Unknown territory obviously calls for exploration in all direc-
tions. For the research psychologist the unknown territory is
that apparently familiar ground which we call human activity
or more precisely the activity of the human individual, with

3

4 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

some reference also to man's humbler animal cousins. Some
of our explorers are fascinated by one, some by another of the
many phases of individual activity; and the schools can to a
certain extent be distinguished simply by the activity which they
prefer to investigate. More than that, each school believes that
hidden in its own field is the true key to a unified understanding
of human activity as a whole. For one school the illuminating
fact is that man perceiyes the environment ; for another, that he
learns by experience; for another, that he feels and desires;
and for another, that he acts by use of his muscles and so does
something in the world. It may be that desire is the key to
action, that perception is the key to desire, that learning is the
key to perception. With one kind of human activity chosen
as the central fact, a system of methods and concepts can be
organized and a comprehensive theory worked out to the satis-
faction of at least one school of thought. The majority of
psychologists maintain a rather skeptical attitude toward these
ambitious undertakings, but still find the schools stimulating
and suggestive. Each school explores intensively in its chosen
direction and makes concrete discoveries which enlarge the
boundaries of the known territory of psychology. Meanwhile
each school has to be watched, since its claims are sometimes
excessive.

In the following list of schools, some names will be well
known while others are unfamiliar to the general public and
not very prominent in psychology itself :

Functional psychology: very old, wide in scope and not sharply

defined, named in America in 1898
Structural psychology: German in origin, with 1879 as an

outstanding date ; named and sharpened in America in 1898
Associationism: an old British school, taking stimulus-response

form in America in 1898, in Russia in 1903
Psychoanalysis: originating in Austria about 1900
Personalistic and organismic psychologies: originating in both

Germany and America about 1900
Purposivism or hormic psychology: originating in Britain in

1908

Behaviorism: originating in America in 1912
Gestalt psychology: originating in Germany in 1912

OUR SCHOOLS AND THEIR BACKGROUND 5

For most of these schools the major field of interest is clear.
Structural psychology centers in sensation, Gestalt psychology
in perception, associationism in learning and memory, psycho-
analysis in desire, hormic psychology in purposive activity, be-
haviorism in motor activity. Personalism and organismic
psychology focus on the individual as a whole. Functionalism
is tacitly accepted by so many psychologists of varied interests
that perhaps it should not be counted among the schools, but the
reason for including it will be shown in the next chapter.

The dates assigned for the origin or rejuvenation of these
schools are worthy of notice. The turn of the century, from
1898 to 1912, saw them emerge and take shape. How can the
schools of that bygone age, that dim past scarcely distinguish-
able in the perspective of the younger generation from the time
of Aristotle, possibly be regarded as contemporary schools of
the present day ? The fact is that most of them are very much
alive. They have changed somewhat, a good deal in some cases,
but they are still recognizably the same schools. If we could
suppress them all for a couple of decades, very likely they would
emerge again with the same vitality as before. It must be that
they represent points of view that are almost inevitable till some
higher synthesis is found capable of combining them all. And
they are the contemporary schools, for it seems that no radically
new ones have arisen since 1912.

Why should the dawn of the present century have been so
remarkably prolific in new schools of psychology? To gain
perspective * we must glance briefly at the state of our science in
1900. Each school began as a revolt against the established or-
der and cannot be fully understood without taking account of
its historical background. We should know something of the
established order of 1900 against which our schools revolted.
That established order was itself young and had been revolu-
tionary not long before. In fact it was an old tradition in psy-
chology to rebel against tradition. Away back at the beginning
of the modern scientific movement in the seventeenth century

1 For a fuller perspective reference may be made to the excellent his-
tories by Murphy, 1929; Boring, 1929, 1942; Heidbreder, 1933; and, with
special reference to American psychology, to papers by several authors in the
Psychological Review, 1943, 50: 1-155.

6 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

we find such philosophers as Descartes and Hobbes rebelling
against the psychology that had come down from the Greeks
and Scholastics and so making a start toward modern psychol-
ogy. Without attempting to divorce psychology from philoso-
phy they endeavored to bring their psychology into line with the
new developments in physical science. Early in the seventeenth
century Galileo and others revolutionized physics and astron-
omy by showing that many and perhaps all physical processes
could be described in terms of motion and inertia; and Harvey,
by discovering the circulation of the blood, made a start toward
explaining physiological processes in physical terms. Without
delay, Descartes applied the new physics to human and animal
behavior. Behavior he based on what we now call reflex ac-
tion ; and a reflex he conceived as the motion of a fluid along
the nerves from the sense organs to the brain and out again to
the muscles. The soul he located in the brain, and he supposed
it to intervene in certain processes between the incoming and
outgoing motions in the nerves. In animals, however, as he be-
lieved, there was no soul and all behavior consisted purely of
physical motion. The human soul, with its faculty of thinking,
he held to be nonphysical.

Hobbes went Descartes one better by reducing all mental
processes to physical motion. External motion striking the
sense organs was communicated to the nerves, brain, and heart,
and this internal motion, once started, persisted by inertia in the
form of memories and ideas. Hobbes's revolt against the tra-
ditional psychology was certainly radical, but it was sketchy in
detail ; so that the task remained for the English philosophers
of the following century to develop this line of thought, as they
did in the associationist psychology .< They tried to reduce all
mental processes to the single process of association, as we shall
see in Chapter 3. With many variations in their theory as to
the physical nature of associations, with many applications to
morals, economics, and the social sciences in general, and in
spite of numerous objections raised by their contemporaries, the
associationists grew in influence and dominated the field in the
early nineteenth century.

OUR SCHOOLS AND THEIR BACKGROUND 7

The New Psychology of the Nineteenth Century

But just as the physics of Galileo's time exerted an imme-
diate influence on psychology, so, early in the nineteenth cen-
tury, two newly developed sciences made themselves felt. The
wonderful achievements of chemistry led the philosophers of
the time to project an analytical psychology which should dis-
cover the elements of conscious experience and work out their
laws of combination. This was an attractive program and
proved to be feasible to a certain extent. More influential, how-
ever, was the example of physiology, which began early in the
nineteenth century to be an experimental science. Soon it had
remarkable achievements to its credit, and some of them bor-
dered closely on the proper domain of psychology. The work-
ings of the sense organs, nerves, and brain were intensively
studied by physiologists during the nineteenth century. Their
findings gained a place in the current books on psychology, and
their methods were taken up by the new group of experimental
psychologists. Out of the physiological laboratory grew the
psychological laboratory, though it was not till 1879 that the
first recognized psychological laboratory was set up by Wundt
at Leipzig. Soon there were many laboratories, especially in
Germany and the United States, and the "new psychology/ 1 as
it was in 1900, was experimental psychology.

This new psychology rebelled against the older tradition in
respect to methods and scientific standards rather than in re-
spect to theory. Where the earlier psychologist had been satis-
fied with evidence from his memory and ordinary experiences,
the experimentalist insisted on definite recorded data. Ex-
periments on the senses and muscular movements were fol-
lowed by cleverly designed experiments on learning and
memory, and hope was strong that all psychological problems
could in time be attacked by the new method.

We have not yet displayed the full scope of the psychology
of 1900, and our sketch of the nineteenth century developments
would be woefully incomplete if we failed to mention the influ-
ence of two other sciences. General biology, and especially the
theory of evolution, from 1860 on brought into view a whole

8 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

mass of problems that were quite foreign to the older psychol-
ogy and also to physiology, chemistry, and physics. Mental de-
velopment in the race and in the individual as influenced by
heredity and environment, child psychology, animal psychology,
differences between individuals and between races, and similar
topics began to appear in psychological writings toward the end
of the nineteenth century, largely through the influence of Dar-
win and Galton. Tests for measuring individuals were first
invented for use in such studies and were added to the labora-
tory type of experiments as part of the new psychologist's stock
of methods.

The remaining influence that calls for notice came from
psychiatry; and the history of psychiatry throughout the nine-
teenth century would well repay an extended review. Suffice
it to say that the treatment of the insane advanced from an ut-
terly unscientific to a highly promising state. All through the
century psychiatrists were divided into two main schools, the
psychic and the somatic, the one seeking causes in the mental
sphere and the other looking for some brain disturbance behind
every abnormality of behavior. Brain disturbance was actually
found in some kinds of insanity but could not be demonstrated
in other kinds. Where it could not be demonstrated the soma-
tists assumed it to exist in some elusive form. On the whole
the somatic school dominated psychiatry and had the greater in-
fluence upon the psychology of the time.

The new problems and methods tended to break the tradi-
tional connection of psychology with philosophy, and one by
one the American universities at least created separate depart-
ments of psychology. The decade of the 1890's was a period
of great psychological activity. Laboratories were springing
up, journals were started, the American Psychological Associa-
tion was founded, international congresses were held. Great
books were published, fruitful new methods were designed.
The psychologists of 1900 were an active and aggressive group,
small in size but rapidly recruiting itself from the younger gen-
eration, hopeful of its newly acquired technique of tests and
experiments, finding new fields to explore year by year, begin-
ning to study the child, the animal, the insane as well as the

OUR SCHOOLS AND THEIR BACKGROUND 9

normal adult, maintaining contact with the workers in several
other sciences, and ready to break loose from philosophy and
set up an establishment of its own. In theory the psychologists
of 1900 subscribed to the orthodox definition of psychology as
the science of consciousness ; but in practice they were studying
man's performances rather than his states of consciousness. In
theory they stood for an analytical psychology patterned after
chemistry, with elementary sensations, images, and feelings,
and with complex thoughts and emotions composed of these ele-
ments; but in practice they often disregarded this scheme. In
theory they were mostly associationists, but not dogmatically
so; the high noon of associationism was already past.

These discrepancies between theory and practice, between
orthodox definition and actual research work, were an open
challenge to the younger psychologists of the period. Was con-
sciousness the proper subject matter for the psychology of the
future, with introspection as the only direct method of investi-
gation? The younger psychologists, during the first decade of
the twentieth century, even before the outburst of behaviorism,
were more and more inclined to emphasize behavior rather than
consciousness and objective rather than introspective methods ;
and from a totally different angle of approach the psychoana-
lysts urged that the deeper field for investigation lay not in
consciousness but in the unconscious. Was the old slogan, "as-
sociation of ideas," a true guide to a theory of learning? The
connection of stimulus and response might be a much better
guide. Was behavior a collection of simple and complex re-
flexes ? Desire and purpose seemed to be left out of this picture,
and the unity of the organism as well. Was consciousness itself
made up of sensory elements in varied combinations ? Here the
unity of the person and the consciousness of being oneself were
missing, and there was no room even for the unity of a per-
ceived object and the meaning of any experience to the indi-
vidual.

Apart from these flaws in its general theory, the psychology
of 1900 was necessarily open to the criticism of immaturity and
meager accomplishment Such minor defects could gradually
be corrected by ir^ensive work on specific problems, and to this

io CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

sort of work the great body of psychologists has devoted itself
during the now-past half century. Hypotheses have been set
up and tested. Findings have sometimes been disputed, and
opinions have sometimes clashed. But such controversies can
be settled by the weight of evidence, while the merits of the
different schools cannot be appraised in so direct and scientific
a manner. The major tenets of a school can scarcely be proved
or even disproved. The test of a school is its long-run fruitful-
ness or sterility. Each school points the way for psychology to
follow ; psychology is attempting to advance in all directions ;
and the questions are which path will yield the great discoveries
of the future, and whether synthesis of the different lines of ad-
vance will not sometime prove to be possible.

CHAPTER 2
FUNCTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

A very genuine psychological interest is apt to awaken in
anyone who has the opportunity of watching the development
of a young child. How many different things even the little
baby can do ! He sleeps, awakes, sucks and swallows, breathes,
coughs and sneezes at times, cries and vocalizes in various ways,
lies placid or throws his arms and legs around. After a while
he begins to "take notice," to look and listen, to recognize per-
sons, to reach for things and handle them with increasing skill.
Months later he begins to understand words that are spoken to
him and a little later still to speak a few words and then more
and more words. Dozens of items could be added, as any
young parent finds who undertakes to keep a "baby diary."

Such a record, psychologically considered, consists of an-
swers to the question, "What did the child do?" This question
"What?" is one of the three type questions that are asked by
any inquiring person, as for example by a scientist. The others
are "How?" and "Why?" These questions, too, are likely to
occur to the observer of a child. How does he creep? Why
does he cry? They are harder questions to answer. The
"How" question inquires into the process by which a result is
reached, and the "Why" question seeks for the cause behind
an action. The process may be too complex and rapid to fol-
low with the eyes, besides being partly concealed inside the body
and even in the brain. The cause of an action often we can
call it the motive is very likely to be invisible.

The Beginnings of Functional Psychology

If such a diary should be continued through childhood and
youth and on into adult life, the number of things a person does

ii

12 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

would be so enormous that some kind of classification would
be found necessary; and since the interest presumably would
be in the person rather than in the numerous objects involved
in his activities, the variety of objects could be disregarded and
the "things done" brought under a relatively few heads accord-
ing to the results accomplished. All the different words and
sentences spoken could be brought under the head of "talking,"
all the games played under the head of "playing," all the lessons
learned under the head of "learning," all the various facts re-
membered under the head of "remembering." So the final an-
swer to the "What" question would be a more or less systematic
list of kinds of results accomplished. Meanwhile the answers
to the "How" and "Why" questions would be lagging behind
because of their difficulty.

Something like this, as far as we can make out from the
record, was the early history of psychology. In the time of the
ancient Greek philosophers such classes were recognized as : per-
ceiving objects by the senses, remembering, imagining things
never seen, choosing between alternative possible actions, and
carrying out one's chosen plan. Knowing and willing seemed
to be the most inclusive classes possible above the physiological
level of digesting, sensing, and moving. This classification was
obviously an answer to the "What" question. Aristotle made
an important start toward answering the question how we re-
member (page 38), and other philosophers gave some very
amateurish answers to the question how we perceive objects.
The "Why" question received a very general answer from the
hedonists, who asserted that all human activity is dominated by
a desire for pleasure. On the whole the psychology that came
down from the Greeks consisted in a set of broad classes of re-
sults accomplished by the human mind.

Aristotle employed verbal nouns equivalent to our remem-
bering, willing, etc., as names for his classes. When his works
were translated into Latin, a slight change of form was required
to fit the Latin idiom. It was necessary to say "faculty of re-
membering" or something of the kind. The word fa-cult y was
not intended to add any new meaning, though it does of course
imply that a man can remember, the evidence being that he does

FUNCTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL PSYCHOLOGY 13

remember. So the list of faculties was nothing more or less
than a list of classes of "things done," an answer still to the
question 'What?" No doubt the great thinkers who spoke of
the faculties of the mind were perfectly clear on this matter, but
many lesser men, even down into the nineteenth century, were
betrayed by the form of expression into supposing 'that the fac-
ulties were processes, an answer to the question "How?" A
student who asked the professor how we remember and was
told, "By the faculty of memory," was not much wiser. It was
as if he had as'ked how birds fly and obtained the answer, "By
their faculty of flight." Birds certainly have the faculty of fly-
ing, since they do fly. That is a result which they accomplish,
but the question is by what process or operation they accomplish
this result.

A list of faculties is a respectable answer to the question
"What" but only a list of problems for the psychologist who is
beginning to take the "How" question seriously. It is not even
safe to assume that to each faculty there corresponds one dis-
tinct mental operation. To remember a face so as to recognize
it may require an operation different from that of remember-
ing a poem so as to recite it. In terms of operation there may
be many memories rather than a single one. Or, on the con-
trary, there may be fewer fundamental operations than there
are faculties. This last view was that of the associationists, who
tried to show that all mental operations were essentially the one
operation of association (see the following chapter).

A psychology that attempts to give an accurate and system-
atic answer to the question, "What do men do?" and then go
on to the questions, "How do they do it?" and "Why do they
do it?" is called a functional psychology. Men not only know
and will, but also feel, and their emotions as well as their in-
tellectual and executive functions are included in the scope of
functional psychology. Just as the physiologist, starting with
the digestion of food as a result accomplished, seeks to discover
the operations that produce this result, so the functional psy-
chologist starts with the fact that objects are perceived and asks
how they are perceived, or starts with the fact that problems
are solved and asks how they are solved ; or he starts with the

i 4 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

fact that men get angry and asks how they get angry. He asks
"Why?" as well.

In the United States, where psychology of the armchair va-
riety was a very active academic subject as early as 1830, long
before the advent of experimental psychology, a favorite ex-
pression was the "workings of the mind" to indicate the subject
matter. It was evidently a functional psychology that these
"mental philosophers" were attempting to develop. They used
whatever results they could glean from the contemporary physi-
ologists and psychiatrists but were after all rather abstract.
The ideal which they had before their eyes was well expressed
by the chemist Edward L. Youmans in his introduction to an
American edition of Alexander Bain (1868, see page 45 in our
next chapter) :

In the whole circle of human interests there is no need so vital
and urgent as for a better understanding of the laws of mind and char-
acter. . . . The acquirement of true ideas concerning human nature, the
springs of its action, the modes of its working, and the conditions and
limits of its improvement, is indispensable for all. ... The extension of
the subject of Mental Philosophy so as to include the physiological ele-
ments and conditions ... is therefore an important step in the direction
of our greatest needs. ... In place of the abstraction mind, is substi-
tuted the living being, compounded of mind and body, to be contemplated,
like any other object of science, as actually presented to our observation
and in our experience.

This last sentence was an early expression of the "organ-
ismic" point of view taken up in one of our later chapters (page
232). The functional psychologists were not always inclined
toward physiology, however, for there was little known of the
physiological operations of remembering or thinking but un-
doubtedly much to be learned by psychological experiments on
these processes.

Experimental Functional Psychology

It is all very well to ask the question "How," but the diffi-
culty is to find adequate methods for tracing the hidden process
that leads to an observed result. Three general methods were

FUNCTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL PSYCHOLOGY 15

devised during the nineteenth century and still seem to exhaust
the possibilities. There are two objective methods which may
be designated as (1) the physiological method and (2) the
method of varied conditions. And there is (3) the subjective
or introspective method. It will be worth our while to ex-
amine these methods.

THE PHYSIOLOGICAL METHOD. If the question is how we
see, the anatomy and physiology of the eye will give an im-
portant part of our answer. The focusing mechanism for
getting clear vision, the iris diaphragm for regulating the
amount of light admitted, the eye muscles for turning the eyes,
the retina with its rods and cones, its photochemical substances,
and its connection by the optic nerve to certain parts of the
brain- each plays its part in the total complex process of seeing.
If the question is how we respond to a stimulus, the answer is
partly to be found in the sensory and motor nerves conducting
to and from the brain at a rate of about 200 feet a second. If
the question is how we get angry, part of the answer is found
in the activity of the adrenal glands. If the question concerns
general mental activity, part of the answer may be furnished
by the new technique of amplified "brain waves." These elec-
trical phenomena, however, give only a vague impression of
what is going on in the brain. They tell about as much as you
would learn of the operations going on in a factory by listening
to the noise coming out through a window. The physiological
method does not reveal nearly all we want to know about the
processes of perceiving, learning, thinking, choosing, etc., and
most of the psychological work has been done with the psycho-
logical methods.

THE METHOD OF VARIED CONDITIONS. This is simply the
general method of experimental science applied to the perform-
ances of an individual. He is given a task to perform, and we
wish to discover how he performs it. If he can do it under cer-
tain conditions but not under others, or does it better under
some conditions than others, we have some indication of his
mode of operation. We may have to try out many hypotheses
by appropriate control of the conditions before we obtain any-

16 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

thing like a complete picture of the process. For example, he
perceives the distance of objects in the third dimension. What
are his cues or indicators of distance? Several cues are sug-
gested and tested by comparing his success when a cue is pres-
ent and when it is absent. Does he get any help from using
both eyes? Compare his success with one eye open and with
both. For a simple test, let him take a pencil in each hand and
hold them pointing toward each other about a foot in front of
his face. Let him close one eye and bring the pencil points to-
ward each other till they almost touch and then let him open
the closed eye and see if he can improve the setting. Following
this lead the physicist Charles Wheatstone in 1838 invented
the stereoscope and proved that the somewhat different views
obtained by the two eyes were an important cue oi distance
when the object is within a few feet of the eyes.

Ebbinghaus's pioneer experiment on memory ( 1885), 1 from
which came the well-known "curve of forgetting," is a good
example of the method of varied conditions. Is forgetting a
gradual process? The condition varied was the elapsed time
since the learning of a fixed quantity of standard material (non-
sense syllables), and the results showed that when the material
had been just barely learned, it was forgotten rapidly in the
first few hours after learning, and then more and more slowly.
Another variation of conditions was to have the material "over-
learned" (more than barely learned) and the result was that it
was forgotten more slowly. Another, much more recent ex-
periment was to have the subject go to sleep immediately after
learning, and the result showed that forgetting was slower
than under the waking condition. The experiment has been
varied in many different ways during the past sixty years, for
the purpose of getting as complete a picture as possible of the
process of forgetting.

One more example is the use of tests for tracing mental
growth, the condition varied being age. The results indicate
continued growth up through childhood and early adolescence
and not much beyond. The age curve differs somewhat with

1 Dates in parentheses can be used to locate the reference in the Bibliog-
raphy for the entire book, pages 257-268.

FUNCTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL PSYCHOLOGY 17

the kind of performance tested. The correlation of test results
is another outgrowth of this general method.

Other examples could be added indefinitely. In short, the
great body of experimental work in psychology, in both the
nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, has used some form of
this method of varied conditions. In order to keep our histori-
cal perspective clear we should take careful note of the fact that
this objective method has dominated all through the scientific
period of psychology. ~~

THE INTROSPECTIVE METHOD. You are with a friend who
is driving to the suburb of a good-sized city. A few miles from
the city he comes to a stop at the entrance to a side road and si-
lently deliberates for a while, then takes the side road. You ask
him how he reached his decision, and he replies, "I was getting
worried about the time and the slow driving through the city.
This side road seemed to run in the general direction we want
and I figured that, though we might wander around a bit, we
should probably lose less time this way than in the city traffic."
Your friend has given you an introspective account of his
thought process and probably a correct account as far as it goes.
At the beginning of the present century when our schools were
taking shape, much doubt was expressed regarding the validity
of the introspective method and the behaviorists were for dis-
carding it altogether though they would admit privately that
introspective reports like the one just given were wholly accepta-
ble in ordinary life. At the time mentioned, too, a common ac-
cusation against the older psychology was that it had been
merely introspective ; but this was a false accusation in two re-
spects. Many objective experiments had already been carried
out, as we have seen; and even the old "mental philosophers"
had not depended much on introspection in an exact sense.
They had sometimes appealed to the introspection of their au-
dience in support of a statement, as in the famous American
controversy over free will. Jonathan Edwards (1754) had of-
fered a strong logical argument against free will: "Nothing
ever comes to pass without a cause. . . . The will is always
determined by the strongest motive." Several of his successors,

i8 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

as Henry P. Tappan (1841), sought to rescue free will: "We
appeal directly to consciousness; and as a result, we find that
. . . there is nothing intervening between the will and its act
of choice." What we miss here is a report of certain occasions
when the subject said, "I was conscious of choosing A rather
than B as a perfectly uncaused, unmotivated act." The modern
introspectionist would require definite data, not general appeals ;
and he would feel that such introspections as Tappan called for
were too difficult to be reliable.

Strange as it may seem, psychology learned the accurate use
of introspection not from philosophy but from physics and
physiology. Physics used it in studying light and sound, and
physiology in studying the sense organs. Light and sound, we
must remember, are not absolutely objective facts, for light is
not simply radiation, but visible radiation, and sound is not
simply vibration, but audible vibration. There is much vibra-
tion that is not audible and much radiation that is not visible.
The most convenient way to determine the limits of the visible
spectrum is to apply different wave lengths of light to the eyes
of an observer and ask him to report when he sees the light and
when not. The physicists from Newton's time down were in-
terested in these subjective phenomena of light and sound.
With the rapid development of physiology in the early nine-
teenth century, some of the physiologists began to experiment
on the operation of the sense organs. An obvious approach
was to apply a suitable stimulus to a sense organ and ask for a
report on the sensation produced. This way of securing intro-
spective (or at least subjective) data may be called the method
of impression. Apply a stimulus and ask your observer what
impression he gets. In the hands of the sense physiologists and
later of the experimental psychologists the method of impres-
sion has yielded much accepted information.

One general problem in each sense is the search for the ele-
ments. The skin sense, for example, gives us any number of
impressions: the size, shape, weight and texture of objects,
warmth, cold, moisture and dryness, roughness and smoothness,
hardness and softness, and still others. But many of these im-
pressions might be complex, while the elementary sensations

FUNCTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL PSYCHOLOGY 19

were much fewer. Experiments finally showed that there were
certainly four elementary skin sensations warmth, cold, pain,
and pressure and that probably all the others were blends of
these four. This analysis was accomplished by exploring the
skin with different stimuli and finding little spots sensitive to
warmth, other spots sensitive to cold, and so on. In somewhat
the same way the surface of the tongue was explored and four
elementary taste sensations were demonstrated : sweet, sour, bit-
ter, and salty. The numerous "tastes" that we ordinarily speak
of are blends v of these elements with odor sensations and also
with pressure and temperature sensations from the mouth. The
taste of cold lemonade is a blend of cold, sour, sweet, and lemon
odor. By calling it a blend we mean that in spite of the complex
of elements the total impression is unitary.

The sense of smell is more difficult to analyze. The great
variety of odors has been reduced to some kind of order, but
we are still not sure of the elements. In the senses of sight
and hearing the method of impression has yielded many signifi-
cant results.

The method of impression has been used in many different
ways. It got its name in experiments on the feelings, likes and
dislikes, and esthetic judgments. You show a person a color
and ask whether he likes it, whether it makes a pleasant or un-
pleasant impression. You show him two colors and ask which
makes the pleasanter impression. You show him two pictures
and ask which seems to him the more beautiful, or you ask the
same question regarding two faces. You cannot call his judg-
ments on such matters either correct or incorrect, though you
may be able to trace the effects of prejudice. But you do as-
sume that he reports his actual feelings or impressions. To
that extent the method of impression calls for a simple form of
introspection.

But is this form of introspection really any different from
our ordinary objective observation of external facts? Those
psychologists who insist always on objective methods dislike
the method of impression as if it were tainted with subjectivism.
But it seems perfectly objective to the person who receives the
impression and gives the verbal report You show him a color

20 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

and he reports, "It is green," rather than that it gives him a
green impression or sensation. Even when you ask whether he
likes it, he is apt to say, "It is beautiful," rather than that it
gives him a pleasant impression or feeling. His attitude is that
of the ordinary objective observer.

If the method of impression is unsound, all scientific ob-
servation must be unsound, since it makes the same demands
on the observer. Let us suppose that a chemist has a great
many specimens of water to be examined for traces of iron, and
that he adds to each specimen a certain reagent which gives a
blue tinge to water containing any iron ; and suppose he says to
himself, "If I had an assistant with a good pair of eyes whom
I could trust to observe accurately, I could save myself much
routine work." He advertises, and a young girl applies for the
job. He fixes up some test tubes of water containing iron and
others with no iron, and tells the girl that the job is to examine
each test tube carefully and be sure whether or not it shows any
tinge of blue. Suppose he finds her very accurate and puts her
on the job. He then places his unknown specimens in her hands
and depends on her to report which show the blue tinge and
which do not. First he tested the girl ; now with the girl's help
he tests his specimens. But the girl's task is the same, and her
attitude throughout is that of the objective observer. The
chemist used her observations first for testing her psychologi-
cally, and then for testing the water chemically. At first he used
known specimens to find out something regarding an unknown
person ; later he used the known person to find out something
regarding unknown specimens. The data were the same, but
they were used first for a psychological purpose and later for a
chemical purpose.

The organism is a delicate registering instrument. One of
its functions is that of perceiving or registering the environ-
ment. In studying this important function the psychologist
proceeds as the physicist would in testing such a registering in-
strument as a new thermometer. The physicist would apply
known temperatures and note whether the thermometer regis-
tered them accurately. Just so the psychologist applies known
stimuli to the organism in order to determine how the organism

FUNCTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL PSYCHOLOGY 21

registers them; and if the organism is capable of making a
verbal report, the report is used as an indicator of the register-
ing process. Other functions are investigated by the same
logic : place the organism in a situation that is controlled by the
investigator and secure verbal or other responses, which are
your data for indicating how the organism functions in regis-
tering the environment, in learning, solving a problem, or meet-
ing an emergency.

FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTROSPECTIVE METHOD.
The purpose of introspection in functional psychology is to ob-
tain from the person who has done a thing some inside informa-
tion on how he did it. To be accurate enough for scientific
use, an introspective report should be made right after the act
is completed and it should not attempt to cover too much
ground, since it depends on the person's memory of what has
just "passed through his mind." The method of impression is
ideal in these respects. Processes that are more complicated
and take more time can nevertheless be observed and reported
to some extent. There is an old standard experiment in which
the subject compares two weights that are almost equal by lift-
ing first one and then the other. Usually all he is asked to re-
port is his impression as to which is heavier. But how can he
compare the weight he is now lifting with the one he has already
set down? The sensation of lifting the first weight is past and
gone. The older theory was that a memory image of the pull
of the first weight remained and was compared with the actual
pull of the second. But why not have him describe the experi-
ence of comparing the weights, as a test of the theory ? When
the subject did so, the theory was not confirmed. His report
was that he did not remember, nor try to remember, the pull of
the first weight, but simply felt all ready for the second. When
he lifted the second weight, it felt light or heavy and he ac-
cordingly called it lighter or heavier than the first and was
usually right. The experimenter by watching the subject's hand
could clearly see in some cases that a weight which seemed light
to the subject had come up quickly when lifted, while one which
seemed heavy had come up slowly. Now if the subject

22 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

adopted a standard force of lifting, adjusted always to the first
weight, the second weight would come up easily if it were
lighter than the first, but slowly if heavier. The process of
comparison accordingly made use of a muscular adjustment in-
stead of a memory image. This theory, which was confirmed
by variations of the experiment, was based on a combination of
introspective data from the subject with objective observations
by the experimenter. From these experiments came the impor-
tant concept of a preparatory set or state of readiness, a concept
that has a wide range of application.

The type of introspective report first obtained in this experi-
ment stands to the credit mostly of G. E. Miiller (1850-1934),
one of a small number of German psychologists who, without
being pupils of Wundt being rivals, rather had started labo-
ratories not long after Wundt. (The experiment cited dates
from 1889.) Miiller went on to use his new introspective
method in his long-continued studies of memory (1911, 1913,
1917). The excellent pioneer work of Ebbinghaus (already
mentioned, page 16) had used objective data exclusively. It
had seemed to indicate that a list of nonsense syllables was
memorized by a mechanical, though very intense, process of
linking syllable to syllable, quite in line with the old association-
ist theory. Miiller, entertaining some doubt of this interpreta-
tion, required his subjects to report their experiences in mem-
orizing the material. The subjects found a good deal to report.
They seemed to be very active while memorizing, by no means
receiving the material passively and letting it link itself together
by some automatic process. They grouped the items, such as
numbers or nonsense syllables, put the series into rhythmical
form, noted similarities and contrasts, lugged in meanings
where possible, and in general actively organized the material.
Muller found the combination of objective and introspective
methods an excellent approach to the question of how we learn.

About 1900 another great psychologist, Alfred Binet of
Paris (1857-1911), began to use introspection in an experi-
mental study of the process of thinking. In his early days
Binet had written a book on the psychology of reasoning, quite
in the old style, without bothering to obtain any firsthand data,

FUNCTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL PSYCHOLOGY 23

but trusting to logic and the theory of association to furnish a
scheme of the reasoning process. In that book he assumed that
reasoning must be a process of calling up and manipulating
memory images. In his new work (1903) he based his con-
clusions on actual thinking processes reported by his two young
daughters, girls of high school age. He gave them problems
to solve and had them notice and report how they solved them.
He would quiz them: "Just how did you think of that object?
Did you see it? Or say its name to yourself?" Sometimes his
subjects reported images, but in many instances they denied the
presence of any images, and Binet was thus forced to abandon
the theory that thinking consisted essentially in the manipula-
tion of images. Thinking seemed to go on largely in just
"thoughts," "pensccs" he could find no better word. These
thoughts "imageless thoughts" they were often called could
be described as "thinking of" a certain object or "thinking that"
so and so was the case; but this sort of description was not
accepted as expert introspection by all psychologists. Even
so, the introspective method had scored two successes: it had
disproved an old theory; and it had shown that the general
course of a thought process could be reported, even if the de-
tails were not adequately described.

Almost immediately a school of Denkpsychologie ("thought
psychology") arose in Germany under the leadership of Oswald
Kiilpe (1862-1915), a pupil of Wundt who broke away in
certain respects from his master's teaching. This school, com-
prising many distinguished psychologists, flourished in Ger-
many up to the time of the first world war and has been
continued independently in Belgium by Albert Michotte (born
1881), professor at Louvain, and his students. 2 This school
made systematic use of the combined introspective and objec-
tive methods, with more emphasis on the introspective reports
which tended to be very elaborate. They fully confirmed Bi-
net's imageless thoughts and added many other facts on the
process of thinking; and they found M tiller's "preparatory set"
important in both simple and complicated thought processes.

* For a recent example of this work, which is allied also to that of the
Gestalt school, see Michotte, 1946.

24 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

There can be no reasonable doubt, in spite of the behavior-
ists, that introspection affords some very good glimpses of the
processes of learning, problem solving, and reaching a decision.
As was said before, however, the objective method of varied
conditions has been the favorite of functional psychologists.
Many of them think of introspection as belonging to another
school with which they are not in sympathy. But we may well
be curious to know what other school there could be in view
of the broad scope of functional psychology. What other goal
could psychology set before itself except that of discovering
what the organism does and how and why ?

The Structural Psychology of Conscious Experience

William James (1842-1910), a truly great psychologist, in
offering a Briefer course in psychology for the college student
in 1892, started off with a definition which was regarded as
standard at the time: "The definition of psychology may be
best given ... as the description and explanation of states of
consciousness as such." A much-used English textbook of the
period was Outlines of psychology, 1884, by James Sully, who
said: "I abide by the old conception that psychology is dis-
tinctly marked off from the physical or natural sciences as ...
having to do with the phenomena of the inner world, and em-
ploying its own method or instrument, namely, introspection."
Wilhelm Wundt ( 1832-1920), certainly a leader in psychology,
said in 1892: "Psychology has to investigate that which we
call internal experience i.e., our own sensation and feeling, our
thought and volition in contradistinction to the objects of ex-
ternal experience, which form the subject matter of natural
science." In 1896, however, he replaced the words "internal
experience," by the improved formula "immediate experience,"
so as to include what obviously was a part of psychology's sub-
ject matter, our experience of external objects. We are con
scious of objects outside us as well as of thoughts and feelings
inside us, and a science of conscious experience must cover both
Undoubtedly it is the inner experience that first awakens tru
interest of students who approach psychology from this angle

FUNCTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL PSYCHOLOGY 25

James said in a well-known passage of his larger work, the
Principles of psychology (1890, 1, page 550) :

The manner in which trains of imagery and consideration follow
each other through our thinking, the restless flight of one idea before
the next, the transitions our minds make between things wide as the
poles asunder ... all this m r ical, imponderable streaming has froA
time immemorial excited the admiration of all whose attention happened
to be caught by its omnipresent mystery. And it has furthermore chal-
lenged the race of philosophers to banish something of the mystery by
formulating the process in simpler terms.

If conscious experience was set apart as the field for a sci-
ence of psychology to explore and reduce to order, the project
was similar to that of chemistry. Discover the elements of
conscious experience and their modes of combination. So it
seemed to Wundt anyway, though in James's view, on the con-
trary, the main requirement was to bring out clearly the fluid,
streaming, and personal nature of consciousness. It was
Wundt, not James, who mapped out the field of structural psy-
chology, which however he called simply "psychology." All
our experiences perceptions of external objects, memories,
emotions, purposes are complex and call for scientific analysis.

The elements of conscious experience, in Wundt's analysis,
were of two main classes : the sensations which seem to come
to us from outside, and the feelings which seem to belong to
ourselves. The elementary sensations were teased out by the
sense physiologists the colors, the tones, the elementary tastes,
the elementary skin sensations. For the functional psycholo-
gist these sensory elements help to explain how we see, hear,
etc., but for the structural psychologist they are significant as
being the simplest possible kinds of experience, unless it be the
feelings. Of the elementary feelings, the pleasant and unpleas-
ant were universally agreed on, and Wundt proposed two addi-
tional pairs: the excited and the quiet; the tense and the re-
laxed. These elements combine into many blends and patterns.
Emotion, for example, is a complex experience composed of
feelings and bodily sensations ; and the experience of willing is
a certain time pattern of emotion, characterized by an abrupt
C

26 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

change of feeling at the moment of decision. Throughout
Wundt aims to describe not what man does but what his experi-
ence is not his acts but the contents of his consciousness.

Of Wundt's laws of combination the most interesting is his
"law of psychic resultants" or "principle of creative synthesis/'
Combination creates new properties. "Every psychic com-
pound has characteristics which are by no means the mere sum
of the characteristics of the elements" (1896, page 375).
Something very much like this law is to be found in the teach-
ings of the associationists before Wundt and of the Gestalt
psychologists after Wundt.

As the revered head of the Leipzig laboratory, where many
of the young leaders were trained at about the turn of the cen-
tury, Wundt exerted great influence on the psychology of that
period. Few of his numerous American pupils seem to have
carried away a hearty acceptance of the structural point of view ;
they remained functionalists at heart. But Wundt had at least
one vigorous representative in the United States from 1892 on
for over three decades.

Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927) an English pupil
of Wundt, would have preferred on obtaining his doctor's de-
gree in 1892 to be the pioneer in Britain of the new experi-
mental psychology, but the time was not ripe, the British being
skeptical of the new approach to one of their favorite philo-
sophical subjects. Titchener accepted a position at Cornell Uni-
versity and remained there the rest of his life, directing a very
active laboratory and training a loyal band of structural psy-
chologists. He promptly took up the cudgels in support of the
Wundt ian structural psychology as against the functional psy-
chology which he found dominant in the United States. It was
Titchener at this time who coined the terms functional and
structural psychology ( 1898, 1899) . We can speak of the struc-
ture of a machine and of its function or use. We can speak of
the structure of the eye and of the function or operation and use
of each part of the structure. In biology we have structural sci-
ences and functional sciences, human anatomy being structural,
while physiology is functional. The structure of an organ is
what it is ; the function is what it does, what it is for. Both

FUNCTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL PSYCHOLOGY 27

kinds of science are important, but the structural would seem to
have priority, since the function of an organ could not very well
be investigated until the organ itself was known.

Now psychology is the science of consciousness, according
to general agreement at that time. This science, like biology,
will include a study of structure and a study of function. The
structure of consciousness will be what consciousness is, "as
such," and the function of consciousness will be what it does,
what use it is in the life of the individual and of the social
group. Structural study should have priority over functional,
for until we know thoroughly what conscious processes are we
are not equipped to investigate what they do for the organism.
Functional psychology will continue to be speculative till struc-
tural psychology has provided a scientific foundation.

Now how shall we describe the structure of consciousness,
or better, of any conscious process or experience? Every ex-
perience, as Wundt said, is complex and calls for scientific
analysis; and when analysis has gone as far as possible and
reached the elements of conscious experience, description must
advance to synthesis, so as to show how the elements fit to-
gether into the concrete conscious experience. You recognize a
person in the street as an old acquaintance. Logically this must
be a complex experience, some elements being supplied by the
sense of sight and other elements by memory. As structural
psychologists, however, we are not satisfied with this logical
analysis, but insist on observing in the experience what is sup-
plied by memory. Is it an image of some past experience or is
it a mere feeling of familiarity? Observational analysis of such
everyday experiences may be very difficult and only to be ac-
complished in the laboratory by well-trained introspectionists.
They must be trained to report only what they observe as fac-
tually present. They must report only the elements they find in
the experience, not the logical meaning or practical value of the
elements. They must not be like the person who when asked to
describe a certain coin says that it is a shilling, so stating its
meaning or value and not what it is in itself. The introspective
observer must learn to strip off meanings and values. The
meanings and values are indeed present in the experience, but

28 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

they are not elements ; they are elusive compounds which must
be analyzed if possible. As would be expected, and as Titchener
himself expected, his standards for expert introspection were
difficult to enforce in the laboratory. To bring out his point of
view he sometimes spoke of his brand of psychology as the
"existential."

With conscious experience as the subject matter of psychol-
ogy, the questions "What?" and "How?" take on a new aspect.
"What?" becomes "What are the elements?" and "How?" be-
comes "How are they combined?" The "Why" question calls
for explanation and for fitting conscious experiences into the
organism and the world at large (Titchener, 1909-1910, page
41). The question "What for? 1 ' has no place in existential
psychology, being the appropriate question for a functional psy-
chology, and corresponding to the "What" question of the
genuine functional psychology. That is, the genuine functional
psychology starts not from consciousness, but from man's do-
ings, and uses introspection to give some indications of how he
does what he does. If consciousness is the only proper starting
point for any psychology, as was generally assumed in 1900,
man's doings can be regarded as what consciousness is for, i.e.,
as the value, use, or function of consciousness.

The word function has two related but rather confusing
meanings. It means "use or value" ; and it means "operation
or process." If you look under the hood of an automobile and
discover a certain structure there called a carburetor, you ask,
"What is the function of this thing? What is it for? What
does it do? What is its use in the running of the automobile?"
But if you start with the automobile as a whole, a functional
whole, you ask what operations must go on in it, what internal
functions (not external uses) it must have; and you see that it
has the function of supplying its own energy by burning gaso-
line. Then you ask how this function is carried out and dis-
cover that gasoline and air are mixed in the carburetor. In the
same way you could start with a bodily organ such as the stom-
ach and ask what its function is, or you could start with the
function of digestion and ask how it operates. At the psycho-
logical level you could, as a structuralist, start with memory

FUNCTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL PSYCHOLOGY 29

images and then, turning functionalist, ask what use they have
for the organism ; or, being a functionalist from the start, you
would note that the organism has the function of remembering
past events and then, asking how this function is performed,
find that memory images played a part. Either approach is
legitimate, but the thoroughgoing functional approach seems
more promising if what you want in the end is a functional psy-
chology. And the actual work in functional psychology, of
which a few samples were cited earlier in this chapter, has ap-
proached its problems not from the side of conscious experience
but from the side of results accomplished. (There is still a
third meaning of function, taken over from mathematics, and
probably more common than either of the others in present-day
psychology. Y is a function of X, i.e., depends on X, varies
systematically with X. Appetite is a function of the time since
eating; forgetting is a function of the time since learning; in-
telligence is a function of age. The numerous "curves" which
psychological investigators put out to show their results are
functions in this sense, or represent functions. They also, to
be sure, belong under the head of functional psychology for the
most part.)

Though Titchener won quite a number of adherents, espe-
cially among his students, his crusade for a structural psy-
chology did not carry the day with American psychologists
generally. Instead, great and increasing doubt was voiced as to
whether psychology was properly the science of consciousness
as such or was not better called the science of behavior (see
Chapter 4). Titchener granted that there could be a science of
behavior but denied that it was psychology. Instead it would
necessarily be a part of biology. According to Titchener
(1929) the biological and psychological viewpoints are radically
different, since biology views the organism in relation to the
environment while psychology views conscious experience in
relation to the organism. Conscious experience has direct rela-
tions, not with the environment, but only with processes occur-
ring within the organism, especially in the nervous system.
But behavior is directly related to the environment and so be-
longs in the province of biology.

30 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

In spite of this attempt to draw a sharp line between genuine
psychology and the science of behavior, Titchener still regarded
the two sciences as closely related. In his general textbooks
( 1909-1910, 1915) he introduced functional as well as structural
material. He projected a comprehensive advanced treatise on
structural psychology; but this project bogged down for some
reason, perhaps because of the difficulty of fitting into his
scheme the newer developments in introspective psychology.
He evidently had considerable sympathy with the Denkpsycholo-
gie (page 23) but could not accept "imageless thought" as add-
ing anything to the conscious elements of sensation, image, and
feeling ( 1909). He may well have had a similar sympathy for
the emerging "phenomenological psychology" (page 34) and
even for Gestalt psychology (page 120) ; but to fit these into
his system would have been almost impossible. At any rate,
his comprehensive treatise was never completed, and only the
introductory groundwork was published ( 1929). His magnum
opus, a great contribution to the advancement of our science,
was his four- volume Experimental psychology (1901, 1905).
Here, too, functional as well as structural experiments are in-
cluded. In fact anyone would find it very difficult to draw the
line. The quantitative study of sensation ("psychophysics")
can evidently be regarded as belonging to structural psychology,
but at the same time it is a study of the functions of discrimina-
tion and estimation. The same can be said of the valuable work
on the "dimensions" of a sensation, such as tonal pitch, loud-
ness, volume, and density (Boring and Stevens, 1936). Titch-
ener's pupils can certainly not be accused of any narrow
outlook (Pillsbury, 1911; Washburn, 1916, 1930; Boring,
1929, 1930, 1942; Bentley, 1926, 1930).

The Chicago School of Functional Psychology

Titchener's challenge to the functionalists was promptly ac-
cepted by a vigorous group at the University of Chicago under
the leadership of John Dewey (born 1859) and James Rowland
Angell (born 1869), two of the most distinguished men in our
whole list Dewey the great philosopher, Angell later influen-

FUNCTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL PSYCHOLOGY 31

tial as an educational administrator. In their stand for a func-
tional psychology they were influenced by William James with
his conviction that consciousness was not a mere frill or epi-
phenomenon but rather a genuine causal factor in life and bio-
logical survival. Every sensation or feeling, besides its mere
existence, has a function as referring to some kind of an ob-
ject, knowing it and also choosing or rejecting it. Moreover,
"every possible feeling produces a movement," or sometimes an
inhibition of movement. Conscious processes are thus tied in
with the environment on both sensory and motor sides (1890,
I, pages 271, 478; II, page 372).

Like James, the early Chicago functionalists accepted the
definition of psychology as the science of consciousness and held
that conscious processes should be studied not only as existential
facts but also as playing their parts in the life of the individual
and his adaptation to the environment. A few citations from
Angell's Psychology, an introductory study of the structure and
function of human consciousness (1904), will bring out the
point of view.

Psychologists have hitherto devoted the larger part of their energy
to investigating the structure of the mind. Of late, however, there has
been manifest a disposition to deal more fully with its functional and
genetic phases. To determine how consciousness develops and how it
operates is felt to be quite as important as the discovery of its constituent
elements. . . . The fundamental psychological method is introspection
. . . the direct examination of one's own mental processes. . . . We are
able to supplement introspection by immediate objective observation of
other individuals. . . . Animal psychology is engaged with the study of
consciousness, wherever ... its presence can be detected. . . . We shall
adopt the biological point of view . . . we shall regard-all the operations
of consciousness all our sensations, all our emotions, and all our acts
of will as so many expressions of organic adaptations to our environ-
ment, an environment which we must remember is social as well as
physical. ... If the reflexes and the automatic acts were wholly com-
petent to steer the organism throughout its course, there is no reason to
suppose that consciousness would ever put in an appearance. 3

"Angell, 1904, pp. Hi, 4, 6, 7, 50. See also Angell, 1907, 1936.

32 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

Here we see an outspoken functionalism making its debut in
psychology, but it was not identical with the latent functional-
ism of the experimental work mentioned earlier in the chapter.
It did not start with results accomplished by the individual and
ask how they were accomplished, but it started with conscious
processes and asked what their use might be in organic and so-
cial life. It sought to discover what needs of the organism were
met by sense perception, by memory images, by emotion. Tak-
ing the evolutionary point of view, it sought to divine at what
stage in the development of the race the need for each mental
process must have led to the emergence of that particular ability.
The simpler forms of consciousness probably emerged when re-
flexes were unable to meet the organism's needs, and the higher
mental processes emerged when a wider and more flexible con-
trol of the environment became necessary. Thus functional
psychology aimed to give psychology a place in the general field
of biological science. It aimed also to be of practical use, espe-
cially in the field of education. Dewey, besides his eminence as
the philosopher of pragmatism, was a pioneer in progressive
education, which, he said, should be based on an understanding
of the child's needs as a childish person.

Believing so strongly in genetic or developmental psychology,
the Chicago functionalists soon possessed an active animal labo-
ratory. Consciousness could be assumed, according to Angell's
view, whenever an animal adjusted to a novel environment or
problem. Without regard to this particular assumption the lab-
oratory became and long remained very productive of experi-
mental work on animal learning. Under the direct leadership
of Angell's junior colleague and later successor, Harvey Carr
(born 1873), the Chicago group lost most of that great empha-
sis on introspection and most of those speculative and philo-
sophical interests (Carr, 1930), and it trained and sent out to
all parts of the country many productive research psychologists.
The Chicago school has been a very important psychological
center, though Angell never aspired to establish a "school" in
our sense. In the course of time the Chicago brand merged
with the "latent" brand, which has remained the dominant

FUNCTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL PSYCHOLOGY 33

American tendency in psychology, a tendency that is, however,
not limited to this country.

European Functionalists

Edouard Claparede (1873-1940) is the best example of a
European functionalist, and there are many parallels between
his work at Geneva in Switzerland and the practically simulta-
neous work of the Chicago group. Early in his career he
adopted a point of view which he first called biological and later
functional. The functional conception, he said, "considers psy-
chical phenomena primarily from the point of view of their func-
tion in life. . . . This comes to the same thing as asking one's
self: What is their use?" (1930, page 79). Their function is
to meet a person's needs and interests. He set up an animal
laboratory in his department of the university. Because of his
dissatisfaction with the traditional methods of elementary teach-
ing and his belief that "the teacher should learn from the child,"
he founded at Geneva the now world-famous J. J. Rousseau In-
stitute for the study of the child and for the development of
progressive methods of teaching. He found John Dewey's
ideas on education very much to his liking. Believing in intro-
spection, he would not by any means restrict it as Titchener did
to the observation of meaningless existential content. For the
study of thought processes he adopted a method which he called
reflexion parlee or "thinking aloud" (1943). Claparede had
no desire to found a "school" of psychology. A peace-loving
man of wide acquaintance among psychologists, for many years
the secretary of the International Congresses of Psychology,
he regarded the controversies between schools as wasted energy
which might better be turned into productive channels. "What
is the use of wantonly limiting the scope of psychology, pre-
scribing beforehand the concepts which will be of value to it?
I believe one should be eclectic and adopt provisionally all those
points of view which would appear to be of practical value, even
if they be contradictory" (1930, page 96). There should not
be many "psychologies," but a single all-inclusive psychology.

David Katz (born 1884, now professor at Rostock in Ger-

34 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

many), a pupil of G. E. Miiller and long his right-hand man in
the Gottingen laboratory, later professor in other universities in
Germany, the United States, and Sweden, might be classed as
a functionalist in the broad sense. Fie is well known for his
animal experiments and for his intimate studies of young chil-
dren. He has attacked the psychological problems of hunger
and appetite. Outstanding are his works on the phenomenology
of color sensation ( 191 1, 1930) and of touch sensation ( 1925).
He stands as the promoter of "phenomenological psychology."
By phenomena we mean "appearances." By touch phenomena
we mean the impressions an ordinary observer gets from touch-
ing and handling objects and various kinds of material. We
do not tell our observer about the "elements," warmth, cold,
pressure, and pain. We leave him as na'ive as possible and sim-
ply ask him to report how these things feel. He reports that
one thing is smooth and hard, another thing soft and bulky, and
uses quite a variety of such descriptive adjectives. The struc-
tural psychologist might complain that such data are unsci-
entific, contaminated with meanings acquired in past experience,
and not pure sensations. The phenomenological attitude is that
these naive impressions are important for psychology and that
we should not restrict our psychology to analysis into elements
and synthesis of known elements into compounds. Certainly
Katz used the phenomenological approach very effectively and
worked out a great deal of good psychology. His work on
"color constancy" was particularly important and has been fol-
lowed up by other investigators in many laboratories.

Edgar Rubin (born 1886, professor at the University of
Copenhagen) was a pupil of Miiller and Katz at Gottingen and
may be counted as an exponent of the phenomenological
method. His special contribution was the famous study of fig-
ure and ground (1915, 1921). To see a figure as standing out
from its background is perhaps as fundamental a characteristic
of the process of seeing as to see the elementary colors. The
figure is typically compact and at any rate it has some form,
while the background appears like unlimited space. The figure
is more apt to catch attention, but there is no great difficulty in
directing attention to the ground ; so that the difference between

FUNCTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL PSYCHOLOGY 35

figure and ground is not merely the difference between the focus
and margin of attention. Figure and ground are not peculiar
to the sense of sight. A rhythmical drum-beat or the chugging
of a motorboat stands out against the general background of
vaguer noises; and something moving on the skin stands out
from the general mass of cutaneous sensations. The facts are
obvious enough, but they were overlooked by psychologists till
their significance was demonstrated by Rubin. Figure and
ground were quickly taken up by the Gestalt school (page 128)
and made a part of their system. Rubin's own attitude toward
the schools was much like that of Claparede: "Psychological
schools are a nuisance. As a rule the association of the mem-
bers with each other serves as a help toward the continued be-
lief in some unproved favorite notions which characterize the
school. As a rule the founders of a school are not so bad as the
pupils" (1930).

Rubin, like Katz, and like G. E. Miiller before them, could
be broadly included in the functional school except that that
school is so very broad as scarcely to be called a school. It is a
school, of course, in distinction from the structural school. The
phenomenological method of impression, along with the some-
what similar free introspection of Claparede, Binet, and the
Denkpsychologie group, is a useful tool for the study of psycho-
logical functions (cf. MacLeod, 1947). Even the results ob-
tained by the restricted introspection of the structuralists can
often be turned to good account in the study of function.

In this chapter we have taken note of two, or really three,
approaches to psychology. One is the structural approach, the
other two are functional. The structural approach starts from
a man's conscious experience and attempts to give a scientific
account of it and by analysis and synthesis to work out its com-
position or structure. The Chicago functionalists also started
from a man's conscious experience but were interested not only
in its structure but also in its function or use to the man in his
dealing with the physical and social environment. The pri-
mary fact for this school was conscious experience; the sec-
ondary fact was the function of consciousness. This approach
can therefore be called secondary functionalism. By contrast,

36 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

primary functionalism starts with results accomplished and
asks by what process they are accomplished. It may appeal to
conscious experience for evidence on the process, but its inter-
est in conscious experience is secondary to its interest in func-
tions.

Psychology was formerly defined as the science of the mind.
Considered as an entity, "the mind" is a metaphysical concept
of no use to an empirical science such as modern psychology.
The structuralists, however, could define an individual's mind
as the sum total of his conscious experiences. The secondary
functionalists could accept this definition, adding that the role
in life of consciousness must be considered. The primary func-
tionalists would define mind as the sum total of mental func-
tions, though they would admit the difficulty of drawing a sharp
distinction between these and other functions of the organism.

Of the schools next to be considered, associationism and be-
haviorism certainly belong to the general functional group,
while Gestalt psychology originated, at least, as a reform in
structural psychology.

CHAPTER 3

ASSOCIATIONISM OLD AND NEW

The topic of learning has a prominent place in present-day
psychology, as anyone can see by examining the current text-
books or glancing through the journals that report current re-
search. How we learn the "we" including animals as well as
men has been for several decades one of the biggest problems
for psychological experimenters and theorists. How we learn
a poem or a list of nonsense syllables, how we learn to solve a
puzzle or to find our way through a maze, how we learn a good
or a bad habit, how we learn a face so as to recognize it later,
or a scene so as to describe it, or a motor performance so as to
execute it with skill and speed all these and many similar ques-
tions have been investigated. Learning is certainly one of the
major interests of psychology today. TV< ^<-s A- V% V w b"* t

It is surprising, then, to find no chapter on learning in the
older textbooks. Even William James in his great book of
1890, the Principles of psychology, had no such chapter, nor
did the term learning occur in the index of this two-volume
work. The older psychologists had a great deal to say about
remembering what had previously been learned, but they had
not begun to experiment on the process of learning. They did,
however, have a general theory of the process of learning, and
this was the theory of association. They started, not with the
process of learning, but with the facts of remembering and
thinking. They asked where the ideas came from that were
used in thinking, and they answered that they came from past
experience and largely some said entirely from past sensory
experience. They asked how it came about that ideas occurred
in clusters and often in regular sequences, and they answered
that the clusters and sequences had been formed in past experi-
ence by the linking together of sensations that occurred together

37

38 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

or in immediate succession. This was the teaching of the as-
sociationists, a predominantly British school. 1

The Older Associationism

The germ of associationism can be found even as far back as
Aristotle's essay on "Memory." He made the fundamental ob-
servation that one thing reminds you of another, and went on
^o ask this question, in effect: "If A reminds you of B, what is
the relation of A and B?" He answered that the relation was
sometimes one of similarity, sometimes one of contrast, some-
times one of contiguity. For example, one person reminds you
of another because they are so much alike, or because they are
markedly different, or because you have seen them together.
These three relations were called the "laws of association" by
the British associationists, who attempted with some success to
reduce them all to the single law of contiguity in experience.
If A, a stranger, reminds you of your friend B, the two have
obviously never been together in your experience; but if they
resemble each other, you must now see something in A which
you have previously seen in B, and this something, this common
characteristic, furnishes a bridge of contiguity between A and
B. Contrast could be plausibly reduced to partial contiguity in
somewhat the same way.

While these reductions might be open to question, the con-
cept of association seems too matter-of-fact to arouse con-
troversy or provide the basis for a "school." The British as-
sociationists made it the basis of their school by claiming so
much for it by regarding it as the sole mental operation, ex-
cept for sensation. At once, therefore, they came into conflict
with the faculty psychology which assumed a variety of mental
operations to account for the various results accomplished.
Thomas Hobbes, the first of the British line, had the following
to say in his Leviathan, 1651 :

*For the full story of the associationist school, see Warren (1921), and
for briefer accounts Murphy (1929), Heidbreder (1933), and Boring
(1929).

ASSOCIATIONISM OLD AND NEW 39

Concerning the thoughts of man, I will consider them first singly,
and afterwards in train, or dependence upon one another. . . . The orig-
inal of them all is that which we call 'sense/ for there is no conception
in a man's mind which hath not at first, totally or by parts, been begot-
ten upon the organs of sense. ... As we have no imagination, whereof
we have not formerly had sense, in whole or in parts, so we have no
transition from one imagination to another, whereof we never had the
like before in our senses. . . . All fancies are motions within us, relics
of those made in the sense; and those motions that immediately suc-
ceeded one another in the sense continue also together after sense. . . .

But the philosophy schools . . . teach another doctrine. . . . Some
say the senses receive the species of things, and deliver them to the
common sense ; and the common sense delivers them over to the fancy,
and the fancy to the memory, and the memory to the judgment, like
handing of things from one to another, with many words making nothing
understood. . . . Those other faculties . . . are acquired and increased by
study and industry. . . . For besides sense, and thoughts, and the train

of thoughts, the mind of man has no other motion. . v a ccooTaJ^*^

/ <>

In place of the various faculties, then, Hobbes admitted only
three (or two) fundamental operations: sensation, recall, and
association which governs recall. Hobbes did not use the word
association which was introduced by later writers, but when he
speaks of "fancies," i.e., thoughts and images, as coming in se-
quences determined by the original succession of sensations, he
is speaking of association by contiguity. Hobbes reduces the
two or three fundamental operations mentioned to a single one
which he calls "motion." An external object affects the senses
through what we now call the "stimulus" of light, sound, pres-
sure, or chemical action some kind of physical motion and
the motion of the stimulus is communicated into the organism
through a sense organ. When the stimulus ceases, the internal
motion does not cease but continues by inertia though gradually
dying away. The original motion is the sensation, and the re-
sidual motion is the retained image. A certain sequence of
stimuli leaves behind the same sequence of images and so ac-
counts for a later sequence of thoughts. So Hobbes reduced
everything to physical terms : motion, the communication of mo-
tion, and inertia.. But he was forced to recognize one additional
factor in the organism. The organism reacts to the stimulus by

40 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

muscular movement, and the direction of this movement is not
communicated from outside but originates within the organism.
The reaction is either approaching or avoiding, either toward
or away from an external object. Desirejs an incipient motion
of approach, aversion an incipient motion of avoidance. Some
desires, such as the appetite for food, are native, and others are
acquired from experience of the properties of objects. Hobbes
develops this theme extensively, but most interesting to us is his
use of desire as a control factor in association. He made the
important distinction between what we now call free and con-
trolled association. Because stimuli occur in different sequences
at different times, there are many alternative sequences of
thoughts available. From A you may pass to B, C, or D, each
of which has followed A at one time or another. So thought is
free to wander unless there is some active desire present to ex-
ercise a selective and directive influence.

This train of thoughts ... is of two sorts. The first is 'unguided/
'without design/ and inconstant ; wherein there is no passionate thought
to govern and direct those that follow ... in which case the thoughts
are said to wander, ... as in a dream. . . . The second is more constant,
as being 'regulated* by some desire and design. . . . From desire ariseth
the thought of some means. . . . And because the end . . . comes often to
mind, in case our thoughts begin to wander, they are quickly again re-
duced into the way. . . . Look often upon what you would have, as the
thing that directs all your thoughts in the way to attain it. v/

Hobbes was concerned with the sequence of thoughts, the
successive association of later terminology. John Locke, next
in the chronological list of the British school, had more to say
of what was later called simultaneous association. In his fa-
mous Essay concerning human understanding, 1690, Locke
undertook to prove that all our knowledge is derived from ex-
perience. He combated the notion that self-evident or axio-
matic knowledge is independent of experience and based upon
"innate ideas." Instead, he held that all simple ideas are de-
rived from experience, mostly from sensory experience of the
outside world but partly from experience of our own mental
operations. Given these simple ideas as elements, we are able
to put them together into compound ideas of endless variety.

ASSOCIATIONISM OLD AND NEW 41

To test the validity of any idea we have to trace it back to its
origin and see whether it is justified by experience. Locke was
most interested in this philosophical question of the validity of
knowledge, and the philosophical discussion which he started
and which continued for a hundred years and more does not
concern us here. As to the psychological question of how we
combine ideas, he indicates that some are combined because
they logically belong together, but others from the mere chance
"association of ideas" this being the first appearance in the
literature of that historic expression. He wrote, 2

"

*i -

Some of our ideas have a natural correspondence and connexion

one with another : it is the office ... of our reason to ... hold them
together. . . . There is another connexion of ideas wholly owing to
chance or custom: ideas that in themselves are not [at all akin] come
to be so united in some men's minds that it is very hard to separate
them ; . . . the one no sooner at any time comes into the understanding,
but its associate appears with it. ...

Instances. The ideas of goblins and sprights have really no more
to do with darkness than light : yet let but a foolish maid inculcate these
often on the mind of a child, . . . possibly he shall never be able to
separate them again so long as he lives ; but darkness shall for ever
afterward bring with it those frightful ideas. . . . Many children im-
puting the pain they endured at school to their books ... so join those
ideas together that a book becomes their aversion . . . and thus reading
becomes a torment to them, which otherwise poF:ibly they might have
made the greatest pleasure of their lives.

It is interesting to find what we now call conditioned fears
and antipathies appearing so early in the history of association-
ism. Many other foretastes of modern scientific results could
be culled from the authors who followed Locke in the next cen-
tury and more, if we had the leisure for such historical research.
Just a few salient contributions should be mentioned.

George Berkeley in his Essay toward a new theory of vision,
1709, made an important contribution, though he did not use
the term association. Just as the meanings of words are obvi-
ously acquired by associating the words with the objects they
stand for, so it is with a great variety of signs and indicators.

* In Book 2, Chapter 33 of the 4th edition of the Essay, 1700.

42 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

A certain sound means to the listener "a horse trotting along
the road" evidently because of previous observation of horses
making that sort of noise. Since the eye furnishes only a two-
dimensional picture, and still reveals the third dimension the
distance of objects the visual appearance must indicate dis-
tance by virtue of association with the bodily movements neces-
sary to reach a seen object. All such sign-meaning associations
are successive rather than simultaneous, the sign having the
role of a stimulus, in modern terminology, and the meaning the
role of a response. Because of constant use, however, and be-
cause of predominant interest in the meaning, we are scarcely
aware of the sign but seem to ourselves actually to see distance,
as we even seem to hear the meanings of words spoken in every-
day conversation.

David Hume in his two great books, Treatise on human
nature, 1739, and Inquiry concerning human understanding,
1748, carried forward the discussion of the validity of knowl-
edge which had been inaugurated by Locke (and which was
later taken up in Germany by Kant and his successors). Hume
formulated the problem of the associationist psychology very
clearly when he asked whether it was not possible to go behind
the "faculties" and discover "the secret springs and principles
by which the mind is actuated in its operations." He concluded
that such a principle was found in association, a fox-ce of attrac-
tion between ideas. He recognized the factor of similarity but
laid most emphasis on contiguity, especially the immediate suc-
cession of one sensation (or "impression") after another.
Some sequences of impressions are so frequent and invariable
as to become firmly associated, with the result that we cannot
see the antecedent occur without expecting the consequent. We
ihen call them cause and effect, and we assume that the effect
faust occur because the cause has occurred. We imagine that
we see a "necessary connection" in cases such as the falling of
an unsupported body or the putting out of a fire by water
thrown upon it just because we are forced by habitual asso-
ciation to expect the usual consequent after the given ante-
cedent. All our reasoning, except in mathematics, is based on

ASSOCIATIONISM OLD AND NEW 43

habitual associations. "This is the whole operation of the
mind, in all our conclusions concerning matter of fact." 3

David Hartley, a contemporary of Hume, published in 1749
his Observations on man, his frame, his duty, and his expecta-
tions^a^Sook that is less philosophical and more psychological
than those of his predecessors. He reduced everything to as-
sociation by contiguity in experience, either simultaneous or
successive. Sensations occurring simultaneously tended to co-
alesce into a complex sensation, like the taste of lemonade, and
left behind a corresponding complex idea; and ideas brought
together in the mind tended similarly to coalesce. Muscular
movements often repeated in the same sequence became asso-
ciated into automatic habits. Ideas became associated with
movements and so furnished the basis for voluntary action.
Emotions were combinations of sensations, including especially
pleasure and pain, bound into units by simultaneous association.
So Hartley developed associationism into an all-round theory,
a theory which, though vigorously opposed in certain quarters,
was widely accepted and influential for the hundred years fol-
lowing. Though capable of further development, it remained
little changed till the early part of the nineteenth century.

Thomas Brown was professor at Edinburgh the first pro-
fessor in our list and his remarkable, though long-winded,
Lectures on the philosophy of the human mind were published
in 1820. By this time the modern science of chemistry had
begun to show its power, and to Brown it furnished a guide or
analogy in tackling the problem of simultaneous association.
Many sensations, emotions, and ideas are complex and call for
analysis ; and yet they have characteristics which are not found
in their elements, as the taste of lemonade is a blend and not
simply a sum of sweet, sour, etc. :

As in chemistry it often happens that the qualities of the separate
ingredients of a compound body are not recognizable by us in the
apparently different qualities of the compound itself so, in this spon-
taneous chemistry of the mind, the compound sentiment that results from

8 Inquiry, Section 5.

44 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

the association of former feelirigs has in many cases . . . little resem-
blance to these constituents. 4

This idea of a "mental chemistry" reappeared from time to
time in later psychological theories; it was rechristened "cre-
ative synthesis" by Wundt and was taken over as a central prob-
lem by the Gestalt school.

Brown accepted contiguity in experience as the sole primary
"law of association but saw that certain secondary laws were
needed. Why does A remind me of B at one time, but of C or
jt) at another time, B, C, and D having been contiguous with A
at different moments of my previous experience? It depends,
said Brown, on such factors as the relative frequency, recency,
and liveliness (later renamed vividness) of those previous con-
tiguities. 5 These secondary laws have remained a permanent
possession of psychology.

A third major contribution of Thomas Brown may not be-
long in a strict associationist psychology, since it recognizes
something besides the combination of ideas or impressions.
Objects are not merely associated; they are compared, related
to each other :

There is an original tendency ... of the mind, by which, on perceiv-
ing together different objects, we are instantly . . . sensible of their
relation in certain respects . . . coexistence and succession . . . resem-
blance . . . difference . . . proportion . . . degree . . . the number of
relations, indeed, being almost infinite. 6

He goes on to show that knowledge consists very largely in
perceived relations. Mathematics and indeed all science are
concerned wholly with relations.

James Mill's Analysis of the phenomena of the human mind,
1829, is regarded as the high point of strict associatibnism.
With his insistence on a rigidly logical and consistent system,
Mill discarded mental chemistry and perception of relations, and
admitted only simple ideas derived from sensation and mechani-
cally linked by association. When the associations are strong

* Lecture 10.
8 Lecture 37.

6 Lecture 45. Brown probably was indebted to the French psychologist
Laromiguiere in this matter of perception of relations.

ASSOCIATIONISM OLD AND NEW 45

and quick-acting from frequent use, the elements may seem to
coalesce and the resulting complex idea may seem simple,
though it still is composed of all the simple ideas that have en-
tered into it in past experience. The complex idea of a house
contains the less complex ideas of walls, windows, doors, floors,
roof, and chimney, and these contain the simpler ideas of bricks,
boards, and nails, and the still simpler ideas of wood, iron,
glass, mortar, etc., combined of course with appropriate ideas
of size, shape, position, and strength. Such a complex idea
would seem to be unmanageable in any ordinary thinking about
a house, without some sort of unifying organization of the total
idea. It certainly seemed as if James Mill's logical system
amounted to a reductio ad absurdum of strict associationism.
Accordingly his son, John Stuart Mill, in giving this work a
critical revision, reinstated mental chemistry and spoke of the
simple ideas as "generating," rather than composing, the com-
plex ones.

Last of the great figures in the British line of associationists
is Alexander Bain, whose principal works, The senses and the
intellect, 1855, and The emotions and the will, 1859, have much
of the modern atmosphere. But Bain departed in some respects
from the strict associationist doctrine. ( 1 ) He said that the
first step toward building up knowledge from sensory experi-
ence was not association but discrimination, the singling out of
an item from the mass. Until it has been separated it is not
ready to be combined with other items. (2) Associations are
established not by contiguity alone but by perception of likeness
and difference, cause and effect, utility and other relations. (3)
Being interested in motor behavior as well as in sensations and
ideas, he could not say that everything is derived from experi-
ence; for the infant possesses some definite reflexes as well as
a large stock of "random movements" which furnish the raw
material for motor behavior. There are no innate ideas, as
Locke rightly insisted, but there are surely innate muscular
movements. There is such a thing as instinct, defined as "un-
taught ability" or as "what can be done prior to experience and
education." Associationism had tried to trace everything back
to experience, but now the factor of heredity had to be added.

46 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

The emphasis on heredity was greatly accentuated a little later,
when Darwin and evolution began to make an impression on
psychology.

British associationism had considerable influence in France
but very little in Germany down to the beginning of the nine-
teenth century. Hume's skeptical theory of knowledge had in-
deed been a powerful stimulus to German philosophy, but in
psychology the faculty theory remained dominant down to the
time of Johann Friedrich Herbart and his textbook, Lehrbuch
zur Psychologic, 1816, and his more extensive treatise, Psy-
chologic als Wissenschaft (Psychology as a science), 1824-
1825. Herbart is said to have administered a knockout blow to
the faculty psychology by arguments already used in our pre-
ceding chapter (page 13).

Herbart's system, by no means the same as associationism,
resembles it in being a theory of the interaction of ideas. The
difference is that the associationists assumed a single force of
attraction between ideas, while Herbart assumed both attraction
and repulsion. Ideas that occur simultaneously in consciousness
come together and combine so far as they are congruous with
each other, but repel or inhibit each other so far as they are
incongruous. These forces are due to the unity and limited
span of consciousness, or better of attention. You cannot at-
tend to two ideas at once except so far as they will unite into a
single complex idea. When one idea holds the center of the
stage, incongruous ideas are forced into the background or off
the stage altogether into unconsciousness. They still remain
alive, however, and "strive" to get back to the center of the
stage, being kept out most of the time by other ideas but being
drawn in (recalled) when the dominant idea of the moment is
congruous. When two or more ideas have combined, the com-
plex idea behaves as a unit thereafter, being forced out and
drawn back as a whole. A combination of many related ideas
forms a powerful "apperception mass" which welcomes relevant
material but excludes the irrelevant. At this point the theory
had an important application to teaching. Before introducing
new material, prepare the way for it by building up an appercep-
tion mass of familiar and interesting ideas. The Herbartians

ASSOCIATIONISM OLD AND NEW 47

had much influence on both general and educational psychology
for a period of fifty years or more. The concept of inhibition
reappears much later, both in the conditioned reflex theory of
Pavlov and in Freud's "repression." And inhibition or inter-
ference in one form or another comes to light again and again
in modern experimental studies of learning and remembering.
The associationists, spread over a period of two centuries,
were obviously not a compact school like the Gestaltists or psy-
choanalysts. s There was apparently no personal contact be-
tween any of the men mentioned except between John Stuart
Mill and his father on one hand and Alexander Bain on the
other. More recent psychologists generally accept association
as an important fact in psychology without agreeing with the
extreme associationists who regarded it as the sole basis for all
mental operations.

The Newer Associationism

A new era began in 1885 when Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)
published his work on memory (already cited on page 16) which
was new not only in being experimental but also in studying the
formation of associations, the learning process. The older as-
sociationists started with associations as they operate in recall
and tried to reason back to the process by which these associa-
tions were probably established. The new associationists start
with the process of forming associations and then test the
strength of the associations by later recall. That is, the older
associationists started with effects and tried to infer the causes,
while the newer ones start with known causes or conditions and
observe the effects. The newer procedure is obviously more
complete and trustworthy.

Ebbinghaus wished to follow the formation of associations
from scratch and therefore needed items not previously associ-
ated. He invented nonsense syllables such as cag, worn, kel,
which nobody has ever associated together. A single pair of
these could be^learned in one reading and there would be no ob-
servable process to follow objectively. With close attention a
series of four or five syllables could be learned in one reading,

48 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

and after considerable practice a person could perhaps recite
six or even seven syllables after a single reading, but that would
be his limit, his "memory span." Some kind of inhibition or
mutual interference prevented the immediate grasp of a longer
series. The interference could be overcome by repeated read-
ings, and the longer the series of syllables the more readings
were required. By this and similar methods Ebbinghaus and
his successors reduced the law of frequency to quantitative form
and worked out the now familiar "learning curves/' The law
of recency was given quantitative form in the "curve of forget-
ting/' Contiguity itself was found to be a matter of more or
less, since associations were formed not only between the ad-
jacent syllables in a series, but also, though less strongly, be-
tween syllables lying farther apart in the series. This start
toward an exact knowledge of the process of forming associa-
tions was quickly followed up by many experimenters.

From Ebbinghaus down the study of learning has used ob-
jective methods in the main, and quite a number of ingenious
methods have been devised. But introspection also has proved
of value in giving inside information on how the learner man-
ages to combine disconnected material such as nonsense sylla-
bles. G. E. Miiller was especially successful in combining
introspection with objective measurement as we saw in the pre-
vious chapter (page 22). Association by contiguity, his results
show, is not the whole story. Contiguity is an opportunity
rather than a force, and the learner establishes connections
largely by perceiving relations.

VNOV*<AS^ "^V^* 71 ^/

J ASSOCIATION IN ANIMAL BEHAVIOR. The psychological
study of animals arose partly from the interest of biologists and
physiologists in the sense organs and motor activities of various
kinds of animals. There was much experimental work along
those lines in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Another
very important influence came from Darwin and the theory of
evolution. For if all animals are blood relatives in respect to
bodily structure, must they not be the same in respect to be-
havior and mentality ? And if the human body has evolved from
an ancestral line of animals, must not the human mind have de-

ASSOCIATIONISM OLD AND NEW 49

veloped from a more primitive animal mind ? Such a suggestion
was bound to awaken heated opposition not only from the theo-
logical side but even from the self-conceit of the common man
who regarded himself as radically different from the "brutes,"
hot merely superior to them. The animal was guided by "in-
stinct," not by "reason," which was peculiar to man. To com-
bat this argument the early evolutionists industriously collected
instances of animal behavior which seemed to depend on reas-
oning. Ther v e were numerous anecdotes of this sort: A dog,
without ever being trained to do it, was observed to open a gate
by raising the latch with his muzzle evidently, so the dog's
master felt, because he had figured out the mechanism of the
latch or because he had seen it opened by men and reasoned that
he could do the same in his own way. \> o^ -V-* i^T^K^Ji^j
The trouble with such interpretations was that they saw only
the alternatives, instinct and reason, instead of the broader
choice between instinct and learning. Certainly the dog does
not open a gate by instinct, and therefore he must have learned
to open it. But how did he learn the trick ? The only way to
tell would be to take a dog which has never learned to open a
gate, confront him with the problem of opening one, and watch
carefully how he attacks the problem. Give him repeated trials
and follow his progress till he is complete master of the trick.
Such an experimental study of animal learning was projected
in the early 1890's by two eminent psychologists of the day, in
Germany by Wundt in the second edition of his Lectures on hu-
man and animal psychology, 1892 (English translation, 1894)
and in Britain by Lloyd Morgan in his Introduction to compara-
tive psychology, 1894. Both of these men, but especially Lloyd
Morgan, had already made some informal homemade experi-
ments and had concluded that dogs learned by forming simple
associations (Wundt) or by trial and error (Morgan), and not
by reasoning. At least the facts could be explained without the
assumption of higher mental processes. And both of these men
recommended that animal psychology should observe the law
of parsimony, "the approved maxim of the exact natural sci-
ences that we should always have recourse to the simplest ex-
planation possible" (Wundt) or in other words that "in no

50 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

case may we interpret an action as the outcome ... of a
higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the out-
come ... of one which stands lower in the psychological
scale" (Lloyd Morgan's Canon, as it has been called).

These two books no doubt had much influence in turning
the attention of the young experimentalists of the time toward
the study of animals. Especially in the budding laboratories of
the United States animal work soon became established, and of
course it tended to change the atmosphere of the department of
psychology, which became less philosophical and more biologi-
cal. Experimental studies of animal learning came out from
the Harvard, Columbia, and Clark laboratories before 1900 and
from Chicago and several other universities shortly thereafter.
This early work can be truly called epoch-making both because
of the extensive and fruitful investigations that have followed
down to the present day and because of the two theoretical
schools that arose from it, Thorndike's connectionism and Wat-
son's behaviorism.

A NEW LAW OF ASSOCIATION REVEALED IN ANIMAL
LEARNING. Now we come to a striking instance of that inde-
pendent but (almost) simultaneous discovery of the same fact
or law which has occurred so often in the history of science
(evolution, the conservation of energy, photography, the
telephone, and many other examples). Thorndike's law of
"effect" was discovered about 1898, Pavlov's law of "reinforce-
ment" about 1902. It was many years before the identity of
these two laws was fully recognized. The two discoveries were
as independent as possible. Thorndike, a young American
graduate student of psychology, was following up the evolu-
tionary interest in animal intelligence. Pavlov, an already dis-
tinguished Russian physiologist, came upon the "conditioned
reflex" in the course of his investigations of digestion and fas-
tened on it as a possible lead toward the understanding of brain
physiology. In spite of this great difference in background and
aim the two men were alike in scientific spirit, keen alertness,
and great energy and persistence.

Edward Lee Thorndike (born 1874, long professor at

^SSOCIATIONISM OLD AI^DJf^EW 51

Teachers College, Columbia University) was a pupil both of
James at Harvard and of Cattell at Columbia, but his selection
of animal psychology as a fruitful field for experiment was not
due to either of them but probably to study of the books of
Wundt and Lloyd Morgan already mentioned. He shares with
his contemporaries, Linus W. Kline and Willard S. Small, who
worked at Clark University, the honor of introducing the ani-
mal into the psychological laboratory. Mazes and problem
boxes (or puzzle boxes) were the tasks which they gave the
animals to learn. The animal was confronted with the problem
by being placed in the maze or puzzle box while hungry, with
food present as a reward for the solution of the problem. The
animal was left to his own devices, his behavior was watched,
and the time required for the first success was noted. He was
given trial after trial and the changes in his behavior and the
decrease in time of performance were recorded. From these
data the animal's progress in mastery of the problem could be
plotted in a "learning curve," and some evidence could b$ ob-
tained as to how the animal learned/ TX^^W, ^v^

Beginning in 1896 and continuing for several years until his
energies were absorbed in educational psychology, Thorndike
used these methods^vvitfLJi^es^^ and finally

monkeys. His extensive experiments with cats are best known,
and his description of the cat's behavior has been so often
quoted as to be classic. The cat, usually a young and lively one,
was placed while hungry in a slatted cage or box, with food
outside as a reward for getting out. The door could be opened
in one box by pulling a string, in another by turning a door but-
ton, etc.

When put into the box the cat would show evident signs of discom-
fort and of an impulse to escape from confinement. It tries to squeeze
through any opening ; it claws and bites at the bars or wire ; it thrusts
its paws out through any opening and claws at everything it reaches ;
it continues its efforts when it strikes anything loose and shaky. . . .
The cat that is clawing all over the box . . . will probably claw the
string or loop or button so as to open the door. And gradually [i.e., in
the course of a number of trials] all the other non -successful impulses
will be stamped out and the particular impulse leading to the successful

52 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

act will be stamped in by the resulting pleasure, until, after many trials,
the cat will, when put in the box, immediately claw the button or loop
in a definite way [1898, page 11].

This "stamping in" or "stamping out" of a response tend-
ency by its favorable or unfavorable results constituted Thorn-
dike's "law of effect," which he formulated as follows a little
later (1905, page 203):

Any act which in a given situation produces satisfaction becomes
associated wkh that situation, so that when the situation recurs the act
is more likely than before to recur also. Conversely, any act which in a
given situation produces discomfort becomes dissociated from that situa-
tion, so that when the situation recurs the act is less likely than before
to recur.

A companion law was the law of exercise, or of use and dis-
use, which stated that any response made to a given situation
was thereby associated with the situation, that the more it was
used as a response to the same situation the more strongly it
tyas associated with it, whereas prolonged disuse weakened the
Sssociation. This law of exercise was evidently the old law of
association applied to connections, not between ideas, but be-
tween situation and response. It was the old law of association
with its sublaws of frequency and recency.

The study of animal learning showed clearly that the law of
exercise did not cover the ground. In a novel situation such as
a maze or puzzle box the animal (or man for that matter) is
apt to make a number of different responses before hitting on
the successful one. Every one of these responses, according to
the law of exercise, becomes associated with the situation. Con-
sider the first response made: as soon as it is made it has a
recency and frequency advantage over any alternative response
which has not been made, and therefore this first response
should be immediately repeated and so gain still more advan-
tage. According to the law of recency alone, the animal would
never get away from this first unsuccessful response. There
must be some factor at work causing him to desist from this
first response and try something else. The law of recency must
be counteracted by some other factor or the animal would never

ASSOCIATIONISM OLD AND NEW 53

reach success. By the time he does succeed he is likely to have
repeated certain unsuccessful responses several times during this
first trial, but the successful response is made only once because
it terminates the trial. At the start of the second trial, then, the
successful response is at a disadvantage in respect to frequency,
and according to the law of frequency alone it would remain at
a disadvantage trial after trial and no improvement could occur.
As a matter of fact, however, the unsuccessful responses gradu-
ally lose out v in spite of their advantage in recency and fre-
quency, and the successful response is victorious.

The law of effect, announced by Thorndike, encountered
much criticism, stimulated a vast amount of experimental inves-
tigation, and led to persistent efforts to work out a complete and
satisfactory theory of learning. It is not necessary for our
purposes to follow this discussion, though we shall catch
glimpses of it in connection with some of the other schools.
We need consider only the importance of this law in the newer
associationism.

The law of effect is a law of association and nothing more.
It lays down a certain factor in the strengthening and weaken-
ing of associations. When a response is made to a situation,
thfe favorable or unfavorable result of the response is a factor in
strengthening or weakening the association of that response to
that situation. The early criticisms of the law of effect failed
to notice the precise bearing of the law.

It was said, for example, that the law pretended that the
outcome of an act worked backward to strengthen or weaken
the act just performed. Absurd, of course; but the law as-
serted, instead, that the outcome of an act strengthened or
weakened the continuing association something calling for
neurological explanation, no doubt, but not involving any ab-
surdity.

Again, it was objected that the law assumed blind trial and
error in hitting on the successful response. Thorndike seemed
to make this assumption, but it has nothing to do with the law
of effect, which does not attempt to say how the response is ini-
tiated but only that, when initiated and performed, it has results
which strengthen or weaken the tendency to make the same re-

54 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

sponse in the future. Perhaps, if an act were done with crystal-
clear insight, it would need no further confirmation from
successful results; but in the ordinary human cases of partial
insight, success certainly has an effect.

It was said, too, that the law had the reprehensible character
of being "atomistic" the cardinal sin to certain schools but
there is nothing atomistic about Thorndike's "situation" and
"response," nor about "effect." The total act of a whole or-
ganism can have a global effect which strengthens or weakens
the tendency to repeat the same total act.

The behaviorists of course took fright at the words pleasure,
discomfort, satisfaction, and annoyance used by Thorndike to
indicate the effects of an act and asked what right he had to as-
sume such conscious states in animals or to assume even in man
that they could have any effect on the brain so as to strengthen
the nerve connections involved in making a certain response to
a situation. Thorndike offered possible neural explanations,
admitting that they were speculative. Really it is not necessary
to work out a neural explanation before accepting a behavioral
law such as the law of effect, if only it conforms to the facts of
behavior. And it is not necessary to speculate on the animal's
conscious states. All we need assume is that success has an
effect on the organism, that failure has a different effect, and
that these different intraorganic effects can modify the organ-
ism's associations or response tendencies. So much as this can
safely be assumed in view of many behavioral facts besides the
facts of learning.

About thirty years after the original animal experiments
which led to the law of effect, Thorndike re-examined the mat-
ter by extensive experiments on human learning (1932, 1933).
The learner's task in these varied experiments was quite differ-
ent from that of a puzzle box, except that alternative responses
were always possible and that one response was successful or
correct and was "rewarded" by the experimenter's saying
"Right," while other responses were "punished" by being called
"Wrong." The results demonstrated a strong positive effect
of reward but no comparable negative effect of punishment.
Thorndike accordingly revised his law of effect by assigning

ASSOCIATIONISM OLD AND NEW 55

much greater weight to reward than to punishment. The effect
of punishment, he decided, was not exactly to "dissociate a re-
sponse from the situation" but rather to cause the learner to
try something else until a response was found that was re-
warded and so positively associated with the situation. Es-
tablishment of the correct response would incidentally and
automatically eliminate the incorrect ones.

With the law of effect thus simplified, Thorndike was able
to offer a physiologically conceivable explanation. The organ-
ism, being "set* for reaching a certain goal, makes tentative
exploratory movements aimed at the goal; when one of these
movements is actually reaching the goal, the whole organism
instantly confirms and intensifies it, so giving it an advantage
which remains behind as an association of the successful re-
sponse with the situation and goal. Or, in Thorndike's words
(1933, pages 66-67):

Suppose that in animals possessed of a certain degree of cerebral
organization, the acceptability or satisfyingness of a status arouses what
we may call the "confirmatory" reaction. . . . Suppose that the nature
of this confirmatory reaction is such that it strengthens whatever con-
nections it acts upon. . . . The confirmatory reaction probably is set up
and controlled by large fractions of the "higher" levels of the cortex,
often by what corresponds to the general "set" and purpose of the ani-
mal at the time. . . . The confirmatory reaction will . . . make the ani-
mal more likely to repeat the connection when the situation recurs.

Or again ( 1943, page 33 ff.) :

The strengthening by satisfying consequences may have a biological
causation. . . . Perhaps all that is required is that the over-all control
of a person or animal (what we used to call the "higher" centers) should
be able to react to a certain stimulus by a reinforcement of whatever
connection has most recently been active, and that the stimulus that sets
off this "confirming reaction" should be satisfying to the over-all con-
trol. . . . The confirming reaction is not held in reserve for great affairs.
. . . You do not have a dozen a week, but more nearly a dozen a minute.
To each phrase that I speak you respond by a certain meaning. If this
meaning satisfies you by making sense, the connection is confirmed. . . .
But if difficulty or confusion arises, the confirming reaction is withheld.

56 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

It is not necessary for our purposes to examine Thorndike's
numerous and important contributions to such problems as the
nature and measurement of intelligence, the influences of he-
redity and environment, and many others, though in all of these
studies he is a thoroughgoing associationist, or "connectionist"
as he prefers to call himself. All associations, he believes, have
the character of stimulus-response connections. The mere con-
tiguity of two impressions or ideas in a momentary experience
does not, he believes, establish an association between them un-
less some response is evoked. Human genes enable men to
establish more connections and larger systems of connections
than is possible for animals, and therein lies man's superior
mentality. "A good simple definition or description of a man's
mind is that it is his connection system, adapting the responses
of thought, feeling, and action that he makes to the situations
that he meets" (1943, page 22).

THE PAVLOVIAN CONDITIONED RESPONSE. Jvan Petrovitch
Pavlov (1849-1936) , a clergyman's son (and in this one respect
having a background similar to Thorndike's), started to prepare
for the priesthood but was deflected by an awakening scientific
interest into the study of medicine and particularly of physi-
ology. By 1890 he had definitely "arrived' 1 as a leading phys-
iologist, and from that date until his death he was director of
the physiological laboratory at the Institute for Experimental
Medicine in St. Petersburg (later Petrograd, Leningrad).
For the first twelve years he devoted his laboratory to the study
of the digestive glands, their nerves and reflexes. His inge-
nious and instructive experiments along this line won for him
the Nobel Prize in 1904. Meanwhile, in 1902, he made an in-
cidental observation which, after a year of hesitation and soul-
searching, changed the whole course of his research. For the
study of salivary reflexes in dogs he had devised apparatus en-
abling him to collect and measure the saliva secreted in response
to the stimulus of food in the mouth. In a dog that was being
used in these experiments he noticed that the saliva began to
flow before the food actually reached the mouth. It flowed at
the sight of the food dish, or at the approach of the attendant

ASSOCIATIONISM OLD AND .NEW. 57

who customarily brought the food, or even at the sound of the
attendant's footsteps in the adjoining room. Now while food
in the mouth is a natural stimulus for the reflex flow of saliva,
the sight of a dish or the sound of footsteps cannot be a natu-
ral stimulus for this reflex. The salivary response to the dish
or to the attendant must have been acquired by the dog in the
course of the long series of experiments. The sight of the dish
or the sound of the footsteps had come to serve as a signal that
food was coming. Pavlov saw that such signals could play an
important role in the adaptation of an animal to any particular
environment. This biological lead would not have turned him
away from his chosen physiological field of work. But it
seemed to him that he had found a promising lead toward re-
search in brain physiology. Physiologists had been trying to
study the brain by operations which could not but disturb the
normal function, while here he had a method which left the
brain intact. The salivary response to a signal he at first called
a "psychic secretion/' but as he wished to stick to physiology
and not get drawn off into assumptions regarding the dog's
mental life, he gave up that expression and coined the term con-
ditioned reflex- (CR). The signal he called the conditioned
stimulus (CS^^v^^^^^^VcCcAi^c, ^U^ ^- l

The conditioned reflex was obviously a learned response, but
Pavlov's interest focused on its being a cortical affair, not sim-
ply subcortical like a true reflex. It was a compact specimen
of the "higher nervous activity/' readily available for experi-
ment and measurement. The first step was to discover how a
conditioned response could be established. He quickly found
the way to build up a conditioned salivary response to any stim-
ulus that would attract the dog's attention without arousing
fright or anger. A hungry dog was placed in the familiar ap-
paratus and left quiet for a while. Then a metronome began
to tick ; the dog pricked up his ears ; when the metronome had
ticked for thirty seconds, meat powder was introduced into the
dog's mouth producing the normal reflex flow of saliva. This
exact procedure was repeated at intervals of perhaps fifteen
minutes, and after a number of such repetitions saliva began to
flow during the thirty-second interval before the meat powder

58 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

was given. This advance flow was the conditioned response ; its
quantity was small the first time it appeared, but it increased
trial by trial to a moderate amount. The metronome in this
experiment was the conditioned stimulus; the meat powder
was the unconditioned stimulus, also called the reinforcement
because it produced a much greater flow of saliva than the
metronome did even after conditioning.

To establish the conditioned response so thoroughly that it
will hold over from day to day may require several days of con-
ditioning, but once well established it is retained over a long
period of disuse. It can be temporarily inhibited by any dis-
tracting stimulus such as disturbs the dog or makes him investi-
gate. Even the experimenter should be kept out of the dog's
sight. Pavlov drew plans for a special conditioned reflex labo-
ratory in the country with elaborate provisions for excluding
extraneous sights, sounds, odors, gusts of air, etc. ; and, in spite
of his being no politician but rather an outspoken critic of the
government, the Soviet recognized his scientific importance and
built him his laboratory.

Besides distraction, another kind of inhibition came to light.
One of Pavlov's most important discoveries was the extinction
of a conditioned response. Even a well-established conditioned
.response can be extinguished by the same procedure as is used
for establishing it, with one important difference: no reinforce-
ments are given. The hungry dog is in the usual apparatus and
the metronome begins its usual ticking, the dog giving the usual
conditioned salivary response ; but when the time for meat pow-
der arrives, no meat powder is given. This procedure is re-
peated time after time, with never any reinforcement, and the
saliva secreted in response to the metronome decreases from
trial to trial till it ceases altogether. The conditioned response
has been extinguished by repetition without reinforcement.
This "extinction," however, is not a complete loss or forgetting,
but is only temporary, for after a rest of a few hours the tick-
ing metronome will again produce a flow of saliva. The
conditioned response has been temporarily inhibited by non-
reinforcement. In terms of "signals," the metronome has now
become a signal that no food is coming, instead of a signal that

ASSOCIATIONISM OLD AND NEW 59

food is coming. After being an exciting stimulus it has now
become a depressing one. Instead of waking up the dog's brain
to a state of readiness for action, it now (partially) benumbs
the brain into a state of readiness for inaction. It makes the
dog visibly drowsy instead of visibly alert('"V^ ^^ W fr*o<*

Pavlov concluded that he had found out how to produce two
opposite brain states, the state of excitation and the state ofjn-
hibition. By use of these two recognized physiological concepts
he could formu|ate hypotheses and put them to the test of ex-
periment. He could predict, for example, that if he kept the
metronome ticking and the dog waiting for two minutes instead
of half a minute before the food was given, making this the
regular procedure for a long series of trials, the conditioned re-
sponse would become a two-phase affair, inhibition followed
by excitation. When the metronome began ticking it would be
a signal of "no food coming for quite a while'' and so would
induce drowsiness without salivation ; but after the ticking had
continued for a minute or more it would become a signal of
"food coming soon" and so would arouse the dog to alertness
with salivation. The prediction was verified, and this two-
phase response was named the delayed conditioned reflex.

Another prediction had to do with slim ul us generalization
and differentiation. When the salivary conditioned response to
a slowly ticking metronome has been established, the same re-
sponse (only not so strong) will be made also to a more rapidly
ticking metronome. If the regular conditioned stimulus has
been a high-pitched tone, and a low-pitched tone is substituted,
the conditioned response will still occur. If the regular condi-
tioned stimulus has been a vibrating pressure on the dog's
shoulder, a similar pressure on the dog's flank will give the con-
ditioned response. The effective conditioned stimulus, then, is
"generalized," and the question is how to get the dog to distin-
guish or "differentiate" the regular conditioned stimulus from
other more or less similar stimuli. Prediction: response to
these other stimuli must be subjected to inhibition, i.e., to ex-
tinction by nonreinforcement, while the conditioned response to
the regular stimulus is being maintained by regular reinforce-
ment. Again the prediction was verified, though it often took

60 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

very many trials to eliminate the nonrein forced response com-
pletely. Dogs were found to differ, some being more excitable,
easy to condition, and hard to extinguish, while others were
more inhibitable, hard to condition, and easy to extinguish.
Such individual differences were no doubt physiological and
seemed to Pavlov to open a lead toward a truly physiological
and scientific psychiatry (Pavlov, 1941).

When two stimuli have been well differentiated, with a posi-
tive response to a high tone, for example, and a negative re-
sponse to a low tone, there is a Chance to test the dog's power
of sensory discrimination. In a long series of trials extending
through many days, so as not to break down the differentiation,
raise the pitch of the low tone by degrees, so making it more and
more similar to the high tone, while always reinforcing the high
tone by giving food, but never reinforcing the lower tone. By
slow, careful work the dog may be brought to differentiate quite
small differences in pitch, or in shape, etc. But there is a limit
where the dog breaks down and may become emotionally dis-
turbed, with barking, biting the apparatus, and refusal to work
any more in the apparatus. This disturbed condition Pavlov
called ''experimental neurosis," and he interpreted it as due to
the clash of cerebral excitation and inhibition aroused by the
ambiguous stimulus.

Many other experiments were done by Pavlov and his stu-
dents, aimed entirely at an understanding of brain processes.
He made no claim to be a psychologist; in fact that is about
the last thing he would have claimed. Time and again in his
lectures he made a remark of this nature :

In conclusion we must count it an uncontested fact that the physiol-
ogy of the highest part of the nervous system of higher animals cannot
be successfully studied, unless we utterly renounce the untenable preten-
sions of psychology.

When, at the beginning of all this work in 1902-1903, he
asked his psychological colleagues what concepts they would use
in explaining his results, they suggested desire, expectation, dis-
appointment, and the like ; but he did not find it possible to make
effective use of such concepts for devising new experiments or

ASSOCIATIONISM OLD AND NEW 61

predicting results. When he used his physiological concepts of
reinforcement, excitation, and inhibition, he made progress. So
he concluded that the key to the understanding of behavior lies
wholly in physiology. It is true, however, that on becoming ac-
quainted a few years later with Thorndike's animal experiments
he welcomed them as akin to his own and recognized Thorn-
dike's priority (Pavlov, 1927, page 6; 1928, page 39). But
Pavlov was never very well pleased with the use made by psy-
chologists of hjs results (Pavlov, 1932).

In view of his general discontent with psychology, it is curi-
ous to find that Pavlov's conditioned reflexes have awakened
much livelier interest among the psychologists than among the
physiologists. One of his best friends among the physiologists
wrote him expressing the hope that he would soon drop this con-
ditioned reflex fad and get back into genuine physiology. The
psychologists, many of them, have seen in conditioning a sim-
ple and perhaps the fundamental form of learning. When they
first got to know of the conditioned response they regarded it
mostly as providing a useful technique for examining the senses
of animals ; and it is still used for that purpose. Then, in the
1920's, it began to serve as the basis of theories of learning, and
from this angle it has given rise in the last two decades to a vast
amount of experimenting and theorizing much more than we
can attempt to analyze here. But we must endeavor to bring
out the bearing of the conditioned response on the newer asso-
ciationism.

There was a time in the 1920's when many of us psycholo-
gists uncritically adopted the "substitute stimulus" view of the
conditioned response which had been uncritically suggested by
Pavlov. His interest was not in learning but in brain conditions
of excitation and inhibition. This substitute stimulus theory
may be stated as follows : When two stimuli are given simulta-
neously, and one of them is the natural stimulus which elicits
a reflex response, this reflex will with sufficient repetition be-
come attached to the other stimulus (the CS), which thus be-
comes a substitute for the natural stimulus and elicits the reflex
response. Closely examined, this glib statement is seen to be a
very inaccurate description of Pavlov's procedure and results.

62 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

It is inaccurate in several respects. (1) It speaks of the two
stimuli as simultaneous, while actually the CS begins first and
arouses the CR before the natural stimulus arrives. Pavlov
found it very important to time the two stimuli in this way.
Unless the CS began first, the CR would not occur (cf. Spooner
and Kellogg, 1947). (2) It speaks as if the reflex were
aroused by the CS (after conditioning), whereas the true re-
flex does not start till the natural stimulus has arrived. (3)
It speaks as if the CR were the same as the natural reflex,
whereas actually the two responses are quite unlike in certain
respects. As far as salivary secretion is concerned the two
differ only in quantity, the reflex being more rapid and abundant.
But the natural reflex includes a chewing movement which is
absent from the CR. Instead the CR includes some sort of
approaching movement. Thus the CR, the response to the ad-
vance signal of food, is a preparatory act, a getting ready for
receiving the food, while the reflex is a final or consummatory
act. The preparation is not deliberate or voluntary but it is
preparation none the less.

Many other conditioned responses have been established in
other laboratories. Liddell and his co-workers at Cornell
(1934) found the sheep a good subject and the reflex with-
drawal movement aroused by an electric shock a good basis for
the establishment of a CR. The shock is delivered through an
electrode bound to one foreleg, and the CS is a ticking metro-
nome which starts a few seconds before the shock. After the
animal has become conditioned, he responds to the metronome
by raising the leg part way and taking a crouching posture, so
getting ready to take the shock. When the shock comes, the
reflex response is a full raising of the leg followed by relaxa-
tion. Here the shock is the reinforcement, and omission of the
shock for a series of trials extinguishes the CR.

Several forms of CR have been obtained with human sub-
jects. Hilgard and Marquis (1940) give a good example. A
puff of air blown against the front of the open eye elicits a
reflex wink. If a signal is given regularly half a second before
the puff, a CR develops consisting of a slow, partial wink a
getting ready to take the puff. Though this CR is executed

ASSOCIATIONISM OLD AND NEW 63

by the same muscle as the reflex wink, the two are quite differ-
ent movements, the wink reflex being a remarkably quick move-
ment, and the CR relatively slow to start and slow to stop. The
reflex wink is governed by a subcortical (midbrain) center, and
there is no evidence or likelihood that this center becomes at-
tached to the signal stimulus. Conditioning is a cortical proc-
ess and builds up a new response which resembles a voluntary
wink rather than the reflex. The reflex wink is not "condi-
tioned" or modified in any way.

Probably no subcortical reflex is ever conditioned in the
strict sense, though it may be temporarily sensitized and made
more easily aroused. The conditioned response is not a reflex at-
tached to a new stimulus, but is a new response. The once-
common theory that learned behavior consists of native reflex
acts attached to new stimuli is not justified by the facts of con-
ditioned responses. Reflexes are neat little patterns of move-
ment (or secretion), controlled by well-organized subcortical
centers provided in the native structure of the organism.
Learned movements depend on cortical organization which is
not rigidly laid down in the native structure but is shaped by

conditioning and other learning processes.
( ^>M'/>*~I &\ >(>-* ^

THE INSTRUMENTAL CONDITIONED RESPONSE. ' In Pavlov s
experiment the dog's conditioned response did nothing in the
way of securing the food, for the food was provided at the
regular time without regard to the dog's actions. The regular
sequence of signal and food, controlled by the experimenter,
was the essential feature of the procedure. The conditioned
salivary response was preparatory in the sense of preparing the
organism for the reception of food in the mouth, but it did
nothing toward securing the food. Pavlov noted also the motor
part of the conditioned response, the movement of approach to-
ward the awaited food, but in his setup this approach movement
was not necessary for obtaining the food. If the dog is placed
at a little distance from the food pan and left free to move, then
the dog, as shown by other experiments fZener, 1937), re-
sponds to the metronome signal by approaching the food pan
(salivating meanwhile), and this approach movement is "in-

64 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

strumental" in securing the food. An instrumental CR secures
the reinforcement and is necessary, under the experimental con-
ditions, for the reinforcement to occur. Instrumental behavior
acts on the environment by locomotion or manipulation and so
secures rewards and avoids punishments. It is as common as
prose. The successful act in a puzzle box is an instrumental
response but can it be called a conditioned response with any
propriety? Thorndike's trial-and-error learning and Pavlov's
conditioning appeared for decades to be radically different and
irreducible. The gap between them was bridged by B. F. Skin-
ner when he devised a simplified form of puzzle box, now
widely known and used under the name of the Skinner box
(Skinner, 1938).

As employed in experiments on that favorite laboratory ani-
mal, the white rat, a Skinner box is small and bare, with little
opportunity for the varied reactions elicited by a typical puzzle
box. It has a little tin pan in one corner, and outside is a ma-
chine which can deliver pellets of food through a chute into the
pan, each pellet making a "bing'' as it falls into the tin pan.
When a new pupil is introduced into this schoolroom and has
nosed around and become adjusted, the teacher lets a pellet of
food drop into the pan. The rat responds to the bing by ap-
proaching the food pan, and then responds to the pellet by eat-
ing it. Pellets are dropped into the pan at intervals, and the rat
soon learns to approach the pan promptly at the sound.

Now let us compare the sequence of events here with that
in the Pavlov experiment. In Pavlov's case we have :

metronome salivate food eat
And in Skinner's case :

bing approach food eat

The two sequences are exactly alike except that the salivary CR
is not instrumental in securing the food, while the rat's ap-
proach to the food pan is instrumental. Let us then agree that
this approach movement is a CR, and that the bing is a CS.

In preparation for the second lesson the schoolroom is
equipped with a horizontal bar extending along one wall and
hooked up to the pellet-delivering machine so that downward
pressure on the bar will release a pellet into the food pan. The

ASSOCIATIONISM OLD AND NEW 65

pupil is let in and left to his own devices. Sooner or later he is
sure to get his forepaws on the bar and exert enough pressure
to release a pellet with the customary bing, to which he responds
as before by approaching the food pan. As soon as he goes
back and presses the bar again which some rats do at once
and others after some wandering around a second pellet is de-
livered. The conditioning is soon complete and the rat, left in
the box, continues to press the bar and secure pellets as long as
he remains hungry. The bar-pressing response can be extin-
guished, though not very quickly, by stopping the supply of
pellets.

The learned sequence in this last experiment is :

bar press bing approach pellet eat
The visual or olfactory stimulus from the bar that guides the
rat to it is a CS, the bar-pressing a CR, this S-R unit being
preparatory to the previously established bing-approach unit,
and this in turn preparatory to the consummatory unit, pellet-
eat. Both the bar-pressing and the approach to the pan are in-
strumental in obtaining the reinforcement of food. A longer
series of such S-R units can be built up by suitable conditioning,
but the principle is the same as in the simpler instrumental con-
ditioning or in Pavlovian conditioning.

How does the rat's mastery of the Skinner box differ from
the cat's mastery of the Thorndike puzzle box? The Skinner
box offers a minimum of false leads, while the puzzle box offers
a number of promising leads that have to be tried and elimi-
nated. The two differ in respect to elimination, which is of
course an important matter in many problems, but as far as con-
cerns the positive learning of the successful response there is
probably no essential difference. The positive learned sequence
in a puzzle box is, for instance:

door button claw it door opens go out food eat
which is exactly parallel to the sequence learned in the Skinner
box. An extinction test was not part of Thorndike's procedure,
credit for this important invention going wholly to Pavlov.
But extinction would certainly occur as it does in a maze if
the setup were altered so that not the door button any longer,

66 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

but something else, had to be manipulated in order to obtain the
reward.

ASSOCIATIONISM TODAY. It has become clear from all this
work that Pavlov's "reinforcement" and Thorndike's "reward"
are the same. They stand for the same positive factor in es-
tablishing an association. Psychologists today are apt to prefer
the term reinforcement, which does apply more neatly to such
cases as the electric shock in the sheep experiment or the puff of
air against the eye in the human experiment cited. Can the
shock or the puff be called a reward? Well, they do in a sense
reward the preparatory adjustment, the readiness to "take" the
obnoxious stimulus. They justify the preparation, they confirm
it, to use Thorndike's recent terminology. They enable the
preparation to do its job, instead of coming to nought as it does
in an extinction series.

The law of reinforcement, effect, or confirmation is the prin-
cipal contribution of present or recent psychology to associa-
tionism. The law has a wide scope, holding good not only in
the establishment of conditioned responses but also in many
other types of learning, perhaps in all. At least it seems likely
that some sort of reinforcement is necessary for the establish-
ment of any strong association (Wood worth and Marquis,
1947, page 536).

Another contribution, not so recent, is the experimental veri-
fication by G. E. M tiller of the old suggestion of Thomas
Brown that the perception of relations is an important factor
in the establishment of an association (pages 22, 44). This
suggestion has not been much followed up by recent associa-
tionists, perhaps because it introduces a cognitive factor that is
inconsistent with a strict associationism. The eminent British
psychologist, Charles Edward Spearman (1863-1945), did in-
deed base a whole system of intellectual psychology mostly on
the perception or "eduction" of relations and correlates ( 1923),
but he did not regard this system as a form of association-
ism. Quite the contrary, he complained that the association-
ists were "astonishingly crude" in their theory, since they
ignored what he called "noegenesis," the discovery of new

ASSOCIATIONISM OLD AND NEW 67

knowledge and solution of new problems, and practically dealt
only with memory. The Gestalt psychologists have made a
similar criticism, and their main contribution might be re-
garded as filling this important gap in the associationist theory.

Meanwhile the experimental associationists have found
plenty of valuable work to do on problems lying clearly in their
proper field. They have been working out conditions favorable
or unfavorable to memorizing, learning curves and curves of
forgetting, the mutual interference of competing associations,
the transfer of learned responses and acquired abilities from one
situation or task to another, and other similar problems (Hil-
gard, 1948; McGeoch, 1942; Robinson, 1932; Woodworth,
1938).

Of the behaviorists, next to be considered, many could be
counted among the associationists, but some not ; and of the as-
sociationists not all by any means could be regarded as behavior-
ists. Associationism is a theory of learning and remembering,
while behaviorism is well, we shall see.

CHAPTER 4

BEHAVIORISM

As behaviorism is now approaching forty years of age, it
has had time to pass through different stages and to take on
somewhat different meanings. It grew out of the study of ani-
mal behavior, but to define it as the science of behavior would
be to miss the force of the "ism." In fact some of the leading
workers in animal psychology Edward Thorndike, Robert
Yerkes, Harvey Carr, and others never joined the ranks of
the behaviorists. Behaviorism started off very definitely and
consciously as a "school," opposed to the supposedly dominant
school of structuralism, and to functionalism as represented by
William James and the Chicago group. As these old contro-
versies have died down, behaviorism has naturally become less
negativistic and more a part of the general stream of psychol-
ogy, while still adhering to behavior methods and behavior con-
cepts. Our aim will be to show what behaviorism was when it
started, to follow its development to some extent, and finally to
see what it has now become.

Watsonian Behaviorism

John Broadus Watson (born 1878 l long professor at Johns
Hopkins) was the founder of this school. Having become in-
terested in philosophy during his college years, he went for
graduate study in that subject to the University of Chicago,
where he switched to psychology, took his doctor's degree,
joined the teaching staff, and set up one of the earliest of the
animal psychology laboratories. In 1908 he became professor
at Johns Hopkins University. By 1912 he was well known for
his incisive studies in animal learning as well as for his forceful

68

BEHAVIORISM 69

but winning personality. As a teacher of psychology he became
more and more disgusted with the abstract and esoteric material
he was supposed to convey to his students, till finally, as he later
said (1924-1925, page 6), "the behaviorists reached the con-
clusion that they could no longer be content to work with in-
tangibles and unapproachables. They decided either to give up
psychobgy or else make it a natural science." All that had been
accomplished by Wundt and the other experimentalists in their
effort to make psychology a science amounted as far as Watson
could see to the substitution of the word consciousness for the
soul of medieval philosophy. He wanted to teach a psychology
dealing with visible, concrete facts. c.^^ ,*',>,< u -

Another cause of his irritation was the ambiguous status of
animal psychology, his field of research. According to the or-
thodox definition at the time, psychology was, the science^ of
conscious experience. Now since the days of Descartes it had
beerT recognized that you cannot observe or logically prove con-
sciousness in animals. At best, inference from their behavior
to consciousness was reasoning by analogy. Titchener and oth-
ers (notably Margaret Floy Washburn in her excellent book,
The animal mind, 1908) granted that some such inferences
could legitimately be drawn and that animal experiments could
thus throw some light on psychology. At best, however, animal
psychology was regarded by the structuralists as only a side-
show. Meanwhile the animal psychologists were obtaining
excellent results bearing on instinct and learning certainly
psychological problems and were more or less resentful at the
disparaging attitude of the structuralists. Watson decided to
take the offensive with the forceful claim that the animal psy-
chologists were doing the truly scientific work and leading the
way for all psychologists to follow the nonintrospective, non-
mentalistic way.

Watson's behaviorist manifesto, as we may call it, was set
forth first in some public lectures in 1912, and then in a journal
article in 1913 and in his book, Behavior, in 1914. A few ex-
tracts from this notable document will indicate what behavior-
ism meant to its founder.

7 o CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology as the behavior ist views it is a purely objective experi-
mental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction
and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its
methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon . . . inter-
pretation in terms of consciousness. . . . The time seems to have come
when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness ; when it
need no longer delude itself into thinking that it is making menial states
the object of observation. . . . Our psychological quarrel is not with the
. . . structural psychologist alone. The last fifteen years have seen the
growth of what is called functional psychology. . . . The difference
between functional psychology and structural psychology, as the func-
tionalists have so far stated the case, is unintelligible. The terms sensa-
tion, perception, affection, emotion, volition are used as much by the
functionalist as by the structuralist. . . . We advance the view that
behaviorism is the only consistent and logical functionalism.

It is possible to write a psychology, to define it ... as the "science
of behavior," and never go back on the definition : never to use the terms
consciousness, mental states, mind, content, will, imagery, and the like.
... It can be done in terms of stimulus and response, in terms of habit
formation, habit integration, and the like. . . . The reason for this is to
learn general and particular methods by which behavior may be con-
trolled. . . . Those who have occasion to apply psychological principles
practically would find no need to complain as they do at the present
time. ... If this is done, work ... on the human being will be directly
comparable with the work on animals, w- . i V; .* f v^o JU<*A

' ** J * l '

This was a stirring appeal and made a strong impression on
many of the younger psychologists, as can be seen from the fact
that the American Psychological Association by a plurality vote
elected Watson to be its president for the year 1915. Many of
the younger generation felt that Watson was changing the
atmosphere of psychology by clearing away old mysteries, un-
certainties, complexities, and difficulties, a heritage from phi-
losophy which the older generation of psychologists had not
been able to shake off. In their enthusiasm they exaggerated
the extent of the revolution, and it is important, in order to
keep the historical record straight, that we analyze this mani-
festo and see how much of it was new, original, and progres-
sive. The following points are clearly made :

BEHAVIORISM 71

1. Definition: Psychology is to be the science, not of con-
sciousness, but of behavior.

2. Scope: It is to cover both human and animal behavior,
the simpler animal behavior being indeed more fundamental
than the more complex behavior of men.

3. Method: It is to rely wholly on objective data, introspec-
tion being discarded.

4. Concepts: It is to avoid "mentalistic" concepts such as
sensation, perception, and emotion, and employ only behavior
concepts j>uch as stimulus and response^ learning arid habit.
Presumably mentalistic concepts are suggested by human con-
scious experience and introspection, while behavior concepts are
suggested only by objective observation of animals and human
beings. Since behaviorism is to be "the only consistent and
logical functionalism," the admissible concepts would appar-
ently be concepts of functions, but this point is not made very
clear.

5. Application: A scientific basis is to be provided for the
practical control of behavior, and this means, as shown in some
unquoted passages, a scientific basis for dealing with "behavior
problems" as they appear in a guidance or psychiatric clinic.

6. Philosophy: The old mind-body problem and the rival
theories of interaction and parallelism disappear, as shown in
unquoted passages, with the disappearance of mind. There is
no mystery in the relation of body and behavior. Psychologists
have introduced unnecessary mystery by replacing the mind or
soul by the inaccessible brain. Behaviorism must not make a
fetish of the brain but must keep its eyes fixed on the peripheral
organs, the sense organs, muscles, and glands. Only objectively
observable facts are admissible. fceV^M\A*V >w*u*-^ <&* f

This list consists largely of "thou shalt nots" : drop the mind
say no more about consciousness, cease introspecting, eliminate
mentalistic concepts, stop speculating on what goes on in the
brain. It was this negative emphasis that was novel. Objec-
tive methods had been in use for a long time, as we saw in an
earlier chapter (page IS), and functional concepts had pre-
dominated from the first. Animal learning had thrown light
on human learning. Objective tests had been devised to aid in

72 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

the prediction and control of behavior. Watson recognized
some of this work and complained only that the conclusions
were often tainted with superfluous references to "conscious-
ness" as was true to a certain extent.

With regard to the proper definition of psychology, the
ground had been well prepared for Watson. It is true that
around 1900 most psychologists, even when working on func-
tions or performances, gave formal assent to the orthodox defi-
nition of psychology as the science of consciousness. These
active laboratory workers scarcely attempted to define their sci-
ence in terms of their work. The first to do so was probably
James McKeen Cattell ( 1860-1944), a pupil of Wundt at Leip-
zig, a co-worker with Galton in London, the founder of the psy-
chological laboratories at Pennsylvania and Columbia, a pioneer
in the development of mental tests, and in some ways the most
influential American psychologist of his time, though not much
given to theoretical writing. In 1904, however, in connection
with the World's Fair at St. Louis, he was designated to make
an address on the scope and method of psychology, and ex-
pressed himself as follows:

The task has been assigned to me of considering the scope, concep-
tions and methods of psychology, and it is my business to define the field
of psychology or to acknowledge my inability to do so. I must choose
the latter alternative. I can only say that psychology is what the psy-
chologist is interested in qua psychologist. ... I am not convinced that
psychology should be limited to the study of consciousness as such. . . .
I admire ... the ever-increasing acuteness of introspective analysis . . .
but the positive scientific results are small in quantity when compared
with the objective experimental work accomplished in the past fifty
years. There is no conflict between introspective analysis and objective
experiment on the contrary, they should and do continually cooperate.
But the rather widespread notion that there is no psychology apart from
introspection is refuted by the brute argument of accomplished fact. It
seems to me that most of the research work that has been done by me or
in my laboratory is nearly as independent of introspection as work in
physics or in zoology. ... I see no reason why the application of sys-
tematized knowledge to the control of human nature may not in the
course of the present century accomplish results commensurate with

BEHAVIORISM 73

the nineteenth century applications of physical science to the material
world.

Watson, if he noticed Cattell's pronouncement, regarded it
as too tame for his own purposes, which were not simply to pro-
mote objective psychology, but to get rid of everything else.
For the same reason he was not satisfied with certain other pro-
posals of the same period.

The first man to define psychology as the science of behavior
was apparently the young English experimentalist, William Mc-
Dougall, whom we shall meet again in a later chapter (page
216). In his little book_on Physiological psychology, published
in 1905, He KI9 this to say on the matter of definition :

Psychology may be best and most comprehensively defined as the
positive science of the conduct of living creatures. . . . Psychology is
more commonly defined as the science of mind, or as the science of
mental or psychical processes, or of consciousness, or of individual
experience. Such definitions . . . express the aims of a psychologist who
relies solely upon introspection, the observation and analysis of his own
experience, and who unduly neglects the manifestations of mental life
afforded by the conduct of his fellow-creatures.

Here he used the word conduct, but in 1908, in his Introduction
to social psychology, a book which immediately gained a wide
audience, he added the word behavior to his definition :

Psychologists must cease to be content with the sterile and narrow
conception of their science as the science of consciousness, and must
holdly assert its claim to be the positive science ... of conduct or be-
havior. . . . Happily this more generous conception of psychology is
beginning to prevail.

In those years, say from 1904 to 1912, just before the ad-
vent or outbreak of behaviorism, there were many psychologists
strongly inclined toward this new and broader definition of psy-
chology. An influential representative of this tendency was
Walter Bowers Pillsbury (born 1872, professor at Michigan),
one of Titchener's early pupils who devoted himself more to
functional than structural investigations. Pillsbury published
in 1911 his Essentials of psychology, a standard college text-

74 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

book, and his definition was acceptable to a large share of his
contemporaries :

Psychology may be most satisfactorily defined as the science of human
behavior. Man may be treated as objectively as any physical phenom-
enon. . . . Viewed in this way the end of our science is to understand
human action. The practical end is ... to discover means of increasing
man's efficiency. . . . Even if we regard the understanding of human
behavior as the ultimate end of psychology, consciousness must still play
a very important part in our science. By consciousness we mean a
man's awareness of his own acts and their antecedents. . . . Behavior is
to be studied through the consciousness of the individual and by external
observation.

Pillsbury was saying, in effect, that conscious experience was
valuable to psychology for the light it threw on behavior, while
the structuralists said that behavior was valuable for the light
it threw on conscious experience. But Watson complained that
Pillsbury was "going back on his definition" by allowing any
value to introspection and using terms like consciousness and
imagery. For Watson, behavior and consciousness were mu-
tually exclusive, and to define psychology as the science of
behavior was to make a radical departure and rule out all intro-
spection, all reference to conscious experience, and so practically
all of the psychological work down to 1912.

Why was Watson so dead set against introspection? Pri-
marily, no doubt, because it was put forward by the struc-
turalists as the essential method of psychology, while it was
obviously unavailable to the animal psychologist, who was thus
left out in the cold. He had other reasons as well. He was sus-
picious of the accuracy of introspection. Titchener had ad-
mitted or rather insisted that only well-trained introspective
observers could be trusted. But Watson pointed an accusing
finger at the "imageless thought" controversy and other recent
examples of divergent results obtained in different laboratories
by presumably well-trained introspectionists. If even your best
observers cannot agree on matters of fact, he said, how can you
ever make psychology a science instead of a debating society?
Here Watson was overplaying his hand, for there were many
matters of fact on which introspective observers did agree, the

BEHAVIORISM

examples of disagreement being such as made extra-heavy de-
mands on keen observation and in the matter of imagery indi-
viduals differ anyway and quite properly report different
observations. Watson admitted a little later (1919, page 39)
that a person can observe his own behavior to some extent so
as to report, for example, "that I am writing, that my face is
flushed, etc/' And in his autobiography (1936) he includes
many personal introspections of this type: "I enjoyed . . .,"
"I hated to leave," "The thought presented itself/' "I honestly
think . . ./' "I still believe . . ." Watson's argument on the
score of reliability did not succeed in disproving a conservative
statement such as that introspection can be trusted if too much
is not demanded of it.

But Watson had a more serious objection to introspection,
an objection that began by being very practical and ended by
being altogether metaphysical. He wanted to deal with tangi-
bles, visibles, audibles things or happenings that he could point
out to a fellow-observer as the chemist points at the contents
of a test tube. He did not want to have anything going on in
his laboratory that was not objectively observable. Introspec-
tion pretended to report something going on in an organism that
was not objectively observable. Now of course there is much
going on inside the organism's skin that is practically unob-
servable movements of the viscera, secretions of the various
glands, minimal contractions of the various muscles, nerve im-
pulses running to and from the brain. All such internal
motions and secretions belong under the head of behavior.
They are not overt behavior, to be sure, but they are "implicit
behavior/* In introducing this famous concept of implicit be-
havior Watson was relaxing his original requirement that
everything in psychology should be actually observable, and re-
treating to the philosophical demand that everything must be
potentially observable. All that goes on in the organism is im-
plicit behavior, and all implicit behavior is theoretically ob-
servable by physical means. Introspectionists have claimed to
observe processes of an entirely different order, not conceiva-
bly observable by any refinement of physical instrumentation;
but this claim cannot be allowed by the behaviorist. The paral-

76 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

lelists have assumed two processes going on in the organism,
a conscious (or sometimes conscious) psychical process and a
physical process keeping step with the psychical process; but
the philosophical behaviorist eliminates the psychical process
and admits only behavior all of which, however hidden and
"implicit/' is of the same order as the actually observable
movements of the organism. All this may be good strong
metaphysics but it does not concern the psychologist, and cer-
tainly it has no bearing on the use of introspective data when
they are trustworthy empirical facts.

Strictly judged, this philosophical behaviorism was "incom-
petent, irrelevant, immaterial" in a scientific psychology. But
equally so, of course, was the opposed philosophy which re-
garded introspection as revealing an inner reality distinct from
the order of nature. By opposing one of these two irrelevancies
to the other the behaviorists helped to clear the psychological
atmosphere. The atmosphere became more hard-boiled to
mix our metaphors a bit. But the older, semireligious atmos-
phere had not been created by the structuralists (whose views
were wholly naturalistic ; see page 28) but had come down from
the older "mental philosophy."

Methodological behaviorism the insistence on objective
methods to the exclusion of introspection loomed very large
at first but proved to be of minor importance. It would have
been a mistake to do away with all introspection, and Watson
himself came to make some use of it under the name of "verbal
report," as we shall see. On the positive side the behaviorists
had little to contribute, for the excellent reason that objective
methods had been a major concern of psychology since it began
to be experimental. x The psychophysical ^methods, the memory
methods, the condjtio^ed_rgspQnse methods^were already in use
before the beEaviorists came along. Certainly they made con-
tributions to method, but not revolutionary ones, because no
revolution was necessary and because there is no fundamental
antagonism between objective and introspective methods.

Conceptual behaviorism was more important in the progress
of psychology. It helped along the necessary task of sharpen-
ing the functional concepts, particularly the "What" concepts.

BEHAVIORISM 77

What does the organism do? Watson's emphasis on muscular
and glandular action laid him open to the charge that his be-
havior psychology was only a little piece of physiology.
Against this charge he had a strong defense (1919, pages 19-
20):

It has been claimed by some that behavior psychology is really physi-
ology. That this is not the case appears from even a casual examination.
. . . Physiology teaches us concerning the functions of the special or-
gans. . . . Certain combined processes are studied, such as metabolism
. . . but nowhere in physiology do we get the organism, as it were, put
back together again and tested in relation to its environment as a
whole. . . . The physiologist qua physiologist knows nothing of the total
situations in the daily life of an individual that shape his action and
conduct.

Psychology, then, should concern itself with the doings of
the whole organism in relation to its environment. Structural-
ism had excluded the environment from the psychological pic-
ture on the ground that consciousness had no direct relations
with the environment. Angell's functionalism had brought in
the environment but scarcely the whole organism, since only the
functions of consciousness were to be considered. The actual
experiments of many psychologists had placed the individual in
known situations and noted his responses, but a definite formula
for this kind of work had perhaps not been given. "Behavior
of the organism in relation to the environment" was a good
framework for the "What" question.

Watson's proposal that psychology should shift its general
headquarters from the human to the animal field seemed mere
adolescent bravado at first, but in the course of time it exerted
no little influence on the conceptual framework of psychology.
The fundamental relations of the organism to the environment
must be common to men and animals, and probably there are
certain fundamental ways of dealing with the environment
common to both. If so, the fundamental operations might be
more readily discerned in animal behavior than in man's more
complicated behavior. From this point of view it would be
desirable to have a set of fundamental concepts free from

78 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

"anthropomorphism" and strictly applicable to animal behavior.
Into this framework of basic concepts could be fitted the second-
ary concepts required for human mental processes. The funda-
mental laws of learning, for example, should be worked out
in animal experiments or at least should hold good for animals.
Man's use of language in learning would require additional laws
and concepts. The same would be true in the study of rnotiya.-
tionjmd of problem solving^ This general standpoint has been
adopted by many psychologists who would not call themselves
behaviorists and who would not hesitate to employ introspec-
tion in human studies.

Undoubtedly it has been a good thing for psychology to
prune its fundamental concepts of anthropomorphism and su-
perfluous references to consciousness. Yet this behavioristic
tendency has been disadvantageous in certain respects. The or-
ganism's relations with the environment are sensory as well as
motor. In order to act effectively upon the environment, it has
to be aware of the environment to explore it, perceive it, know
jjt but these important operations are better observed intro-
'spectively than objectively. Exploring movements can of course
pe observed in animals. We see them look by turning the head
and eyes, we see them listen by pricking up the ears, we see
them feel or sniff an object. But what do they get out of
these exploring movements? We know perfectly well from
our own experience what they get. They get to know the en-
vironment by seeing, hearing, feeling, and smelling it. Now
we must not assume consciousness in animals though it would
be still more hazardous to assume an absence of consciousness
and if we look to the behaviorists for our fundamental con-
cepts of perceiving and knowing, we find them very cautious
and disinclined to tackle this part of the subject, because it
comes dangerously near to the study of conscious processes.
The lead here must be taken by human psychology, though
with that lead the animal psychologist can devise behavioral
tests for discovering how much the animal perceives. The
behaviorist influence for a decade or two was such as to turn
the younger psychologists away from this large and important
part of the territory to be explored.

BEHAVIORISM 79

With regard, then, to the behaviorist manifesto of 1912-
1914, we have seen that its metaphysics was irrelevant, its meth-
odology unimportant, its definition of psychology as the science
of behavior not original but still important as an emphatic
expression of the tendency of the time. Its attempt to center
psychology in animal behavior and to use concepts applicable
to animal no less than human behavior was very influential and
largely for good. Its desire to find practical applications was
shared by many other psychologists, though not by the struc-
turalists. The work of a "behavior clinic/' in spite of its name,
is not behavioristic in the least, since the subject's feelings in
regard to his behavior difficulties are a part of the problem
to be examined. The most important forward stride was con-
ceptual behaviorism, and the working out of an adequate set
of behavioral concepts was necessarily a long and difficult task
in which we cannot expect Watson to have made more than a
beginning. Without being too abstractly conceptual ourselves,
let us see what Watson accomplished and attempted.

Watson's Views and Concepts

Watson's career as a productive theorist was unfortunately
rather brief. Soon after his initial pronouncement in 1912-
1914 came the first world war, during which he joined with
many other psychologists in contributing to the war effort
and it is significant that psychologists of different schools could
do effective teamwork in the emergency. Soon after the war
he left the academic field for a successful career in the practical
application of psychology, though for a few years he continued
to give emphatic and popularized expression to behaviorism.
Watson has to his credit quite an array of important contribu-
tions to animal psychology and also to child psychology, for
he was a pioneer in experimental studies of the young child.
His system of behavioristic psychology can be found in his
three principal books: the Behavior, of 1914; the Psychology
from the standpoint of a behaviorist, first published in 1919;
and the Behaviorism, first published in 1924-1925. The first
book is devoted mostly to animal psychology, the other two

8o CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

mostly to the behavior of human children and adults. The
major tenets of behaviorism can be found in each of these
books but perhaps best in the 1919 Psychology.

STIMULUS AND RESPONSE. Just as Wundt had said that
conscious experiences are complex and call for analysis into
simple sensations and feelings, so Watson said that behavior
was^complexand capable _of analysfc into sin^l._3Lina,ulujS'
response~umts which he called reflexes. "Instinct and habit are
undoubtedly composed of the same elementary reflexes. . . .
In instinct the pattern and order are inherited, in habit both
are acquired during the lifetime of the individual" (1919, pages
272-273). Such statements made it easy for the Gcstalt and
organismic schools to accuse Watson of "atomism." Neither
his experimental work nor his theorizing, however, ran much
to atomism. From his strong emphasis on motor behavior you
might expect him to embark on an analysis of complex move-
ments into the action of separate muscles ; but, though he does
include in his Psychology (1919) some account of the striped
and smooth muscles, and of the glands, he makes no effort
to analyze complex movements into muscular elements, believ-
ing no doubt that such analysis is the job of the physiologist
and not of the psychologist. In explaining what he means by
response he starts with the knee jerk and other reflexes but
advances to acts such as taking food, unlocking a door, writing
a letter, and even building a house. Evidently he is thinking
of a response not as composed of muscular elements but as
accomplishing certain results in the environment. ^

In the same way his examples of a stimulus start with rays
of light thrown into the eyes, sound entering the ears, etc., and
go on to objects in the environment and to total situations. His
real interest is not in the analysis of behavior into elementary
muscular (and glandular) responses to elementary stimuli, but,
quite to the contrary, in what the individual will do in a given
situation. For example, the stimulus is a stick of candy dangled
in front of a baby and the response (at a certain age) is a
reaching out and grasping the candy and putting it into the
mouth. Or, the stimulus is a baseball thrown by the pitcher,

BEHAVIORISM 81

and the response is a fly to the outfield. In strictness we should
speak in such cases not of stimulus and response but of objec-
tive situation and objective results produced by the individual's
response. It is in that sense that Watson should be understood
when he says that the goal of behavior psychology is the "ascer-
taining of such data and laws that, given the stimulus, psy-
chology can predict what the response will be ; or, on the other
hand, given the response, it can specify the nature of the effec-
tive stimulus" (1919, page 10). <K\~^ &$&'& *$
Responses can be classified as learned or unlearned, and also
as explicit and implicit. It was important for behavior psy-
chology to distinguish between what was instinctive and what
was learned, and to discover the laws of learning or habit for-
mation. Still another way of classifying responses is according
to the sense organ receiving the stimulus. So an "auditory
response" is any sort of motor response aroused by a stimulus
to the ears, whether it be a startle response to a pistol shot
or a verbal report that a tone is high or low. An "olfactory
response" may be a sniffing movement or a verbal report of
smelling something like violets or like tar. But how can a
speech movement be called olfactory or auditory? It seems
a strange use of terms. To see why the behaviorists felt com-
pelled to speak in this queer way we need to examine their
attitude toward sensation.

SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. Since we cannot assume con-
sciousness in animals, we have no right to say that they see,
hear, or smell. However, since they demonstrably make motor
responses to visual, auditory and olfactory stimuli, there is no
objection to saying that they make "visual responses," etc., with
the meaning just explained. Our objective data in the case of
an animal are the stimulus and the motor response. With a
human subject before us we wish to be equally objective. His
conscious experience, if he has any, is invisible to us. We wish
to find out what his "visual response" will be to light of a
certain wave length, and to make things simple for him we
use the vulgar expression, "Tell me what you see." He replies
that he sees blue. This verbal response is a perfectly objective

82 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF, PSYCHOLOGY

phenomenon. We need not assume that he has any conscious
sensation but only accept the fact that he makes the verbal
response. If we make the blue stimulus fainter till he says
that he no longer sees blue, we learn as much about his power
of color discrimination by simply accepting his verbal response
as by assuming any conscious sensations in him which we can-
not observe. That chemist who employed the young girl to
make color tests (page 20) could have been a behavior ist; in
which case he would have said, "I don't care whether she sees
blue or not, if only she says blue at the right times and not
otherwise. I don't admit," he might continue, "that there is
any such thing as seeing, apart from some motor response, any
more than I admit that my thermometer feels the temperature
which it registers. All I admit, in either case, is a movement
which tallies with the stimulus." Well and good but some-
times the chemist examines his test tubes himself and reports
blue or not-blue, and he probably would admit if cross-
examined that he reported what he saw. For him to deny or
doubt that the other observer's reports are like his own in this
respect, or, in general, for the behaviorists to deny that the
human subject, at least, is actually seeing or hearing when he
so reports, seems pedantic to say the least. The behaviorist
certainly admits that he himself can see and hear, for does
he not insist that only what he can see and hear shall be accepted
as scientific data?

The method of impression (page 18) was an old standby
of the introspectionists, but Watson believed he could transform
it into an acceptable objective method by rechristening it the
method of verbal report. As an animal psychologist he did not
like this method very well and even proposed to substitute for
it, as far as possible, the conditioned reflex method which
Pavlov had found useful in testing the animal's powers of sen-
sory discrimination. Watson proposed (1916, 1919) to use
the motor conditioned response which V. M. Bekhterev (1857-
1927), a Russian contemporary and rival of Pavlov, had in-
troduced with human subjects. Bekhterev had written an
Objective psychology in 1907 which became known to our psy-
chologists through the German and French translations of 1913.

BEHAVIORISM 83

Watson did not care much for Bekhterev's general treatment
of the subject, but he did like the motor conditioned response,
because it was so purely behavioral and free from any suspicion
of introspection. But Watson could not afford to throw over-
board all the results obtained in the study of the senses by the
method of impression. For example, he did not want to dis-
card the visual after-image as a mere introspective delusion and
relic of the old religious psychology. Thus he says (1919,
page 91):

One of the most interesting sets of phenomena to be met with in the
whole of sensory physiology appears in the after-effects of monochro-
matic light stimulation. After the eye has been stimulated for a time by a
monochromatic light which is then removed, one of two things may be
reported by the subject : The subject may react as though he were stimu-
lated anew by the original light, the so-called "positive after-image";
or, as though he were stimulated by light the wave length of which is
complementary to the original light, the "negative after-image." We
can illustrate this by data obtained by the verbal report method. If we
stimulate with . . . blue and the subject then looks at a gray screen, he
will say, "I see yellow." . . . Stating these phenomena in physiological
terms, we may say. . . .

From these phenomena, he continues, something can be learned
regarding the physiological processes that occur in the eye.

We must be on our guard here, for Watson may be claiming
too much and widening the scope of his behaviorism by appro-
priating data which do not properly belong in his system. So
long as he says "verbal response" he remains a behaviorist, for
he himself heard the subject say, "I see yellow," and is fully
entitled to record that objective fact. But now Watson shifts
to saying "verbal report/' and we must ask, "Who makes this
report, and what does he report ?" And we find that the subject
makes the report and that he reports "seeing." If Watson
accepts this report, he admits "seeing" into his system, while
pretending to have a system which excludes all such subjective
foolishness. And he cannot pretend that after all he means
nothing more than "verbal response," for the mere speech
movements of his subject give no indication of the physiological
processes in the eye, except so far as they are a report of seeing.

8 4 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

The "phenomena" which Watson finds so interesting and valu-
able in the after-image experiment are the after-images them-
selves, not the subject's speech movements. We must conclude
that verbal report is not a behavioristic method and that
Watson's use of it is practically a confession of defeat for
methodological behaviorism. As to conceptual behaviorism, it
certainly is not strong and stimulating at this point. For who
would devote himself to the study of "visual responses' 1 if he
believed he would have to do only with a certain small selection
of speech movements? From the history of American psy-
chology following Watson it seems indeed that behaviorism
exerted a deadening rather than a stimulating influence on re-
search into human sensation and perception.

MEMORY IMAGES. Behavior in Watson's view is a periph-
eral and not a cerebral affair ; or, rather, it is an activity of the
whole organism in which the brain serves to connect the sensory
with the motor nerves and so link the sense organs with the
muscles. Nerve impulses coming into the brain by the sensory
nerves are instantly transmitted to the motor nerves, he be-
lieved, and all behavior is sensorimotor. If any process can
go on entirely within the brain, it is too inaccessible to be
included under behavior. Now memory images, mostly visual,
auditory, or tactile, sometimes olfactory, are reported by almost
every person who is asked to call to mind a friend's face, or
a bit of music, or the feel of velvet, or the odor of plsppermint.
These images resemble sensations, though they are not pro-
duced by any present stimulus to the eyes or ears or skin or
nose. They seem to be "centrally aroused sensations/' purely
cerebral affairs accessible to introspection but not to the be-
havioral methods of observation. Watson attempted to show
(1914 pages 16-21) that the so-called images were really sen-
sorimotor affairs. The visual image could consist partly in
after-images from the eye, partly in kinesthetic impulses from
the eye muscles, and partly in implicit speech movements.

FEELING AND EMOTION. Like the image, the feelings of
pleasantness and unpleasantness seemed to many psychologists
to be purely central affairs, without any sense organ to arouse

BEHAVIORISM 85

them and without any distinct motor expression. Efforts had
been made to discover definite expressive changes in the heart-
beat, blood pressure, and breathing, but these efforts had led
to no clear result. Watson suggested (1914, pages 21-26)
that pleasantness was a true sensorimotor affair, the sensory
impulses coming in from tumescent sex organs (or other erog-
enous zones), and the motor impulses going out to muscles
and arousing incipient movements of approach with the re-
verse conditions in unpleasantness.

From our point of view as students of the schools, it is not
important to decide whether Watson made a good guess or a
wild one in his attempt to explain feeling or memory images.
It is important for us to notice two things : ( 1 ) he evidently
did not regard feelings or images as mere unreal ghosts, for
then he would not have attempted to explain them; (2) if they
were sensorimotor processes, they were behavior and quite
acceptable to him, even though both the stimulus and the re-
sponse were implicit and hypothetical. Nothing must go on in
the organism except sensorimotor processes that was the be-
haviorist's demand or postulate.

Emotion was universally admitted to be more complex than
pleasant or unpleasant feeling, and psychologists had long no-
ticed the rapid heartbeat and breathing and, the tense muscles
of strong emotion. The old view was that the stirred-up bodily
state was aroused by the conscious emotion, while the famous
James-Lange theory, dating from 1884-1885, held that the
perception of danger, for example, directly caused the bodily
changes, and that the mass of resulting bodily sensations was
the emotion as we experience it. To convert this theory into
Watson's, say simply that the presence of danger causes bodily
changes (period). Watson, of course, would not admit any
conscious "perception" of danger, and especially he would not
admit any "mass of sensations" from the bodily organs. What
he says is that emotion consists in "profound changes of the
bodily mechanism as a whole, but particularly of the visceral
and glandular systems," each separate emotion being a particu-
lar pattern of such changes (1919, page 195). "Notwith-
standing the fact that in all emotional responses there are overt

86 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

factors such as the movement of the eyes and the arms and the
legs and the trunk, visceral and glandular factors predominate"
(1924-25, page 130). Emotion is a form of "implicit be-
havior," though the hidden visceral changes manifest them-
selves to some extent by visible changes in pulse, breathing,
blushing, and the like, so that emotional behavior can be more
directly observed than is possible with the simple feelings.

How much simpler Watson's theory is than that of James !
Where James had five items to be fitted into the picture situa-
tion, perception of it, bodily changes, overt act such as running
away from danger, conscious state of emotion Watson, by leav-
ing out the two conscious or cerebral processes, has only three
items to consider. He has the situation and the overt response,
and the visceral changes. Different emotions can be distin-
guished on the basis of situation and overt response. So we
have flight as an overt response to danger, fighting as an overt
response to interference. Each different emotion should have
its different visceral pattern. Valiant efforts have been made
to identify such patterns of internal behavior by records of cir-
culatory, respiratory, and other changes; but definite patterns
have not been found (Landis, 1924). In physiological experi-
ments on animals, anger and fear have shown essentially the
same visceral pattern (Cannon, 1929). And recent physiologi-
cal and clinical findings tend to emphasize the role of ttje thala-
mus and frontal lobes in emotion, and to minimize the role
of the viscera, thus throwing both the James-Lange and the
Watson theories into the shade.

Watson felt that his simplified theory opened the door for
a developmental study of emotions in children. He made some
important contributions along this line. In very young infants
he found three well-marked patterns of emotional behavior,
distinguished however in terms of external situation and overt
response rather than in terms of implicit visceral behavior.
These three primal emotions he called fear, rage, and love. As
he could distinguish no others in infants, he regarded these
three as the only native emotions, all others being built up by
processes of learning. The natural or original stimuli of fear

BEHAVIORISM 87

rage, interference with the infant's freedom of movement ; for
love, patting and stroking. Other stimuli could be made effec-
tive by the conditioned response technique. He was able to
develop a conditioned fear in a child of eleven months by "pun-
ishing" with a loud, harsh noise each of the child's efforts to
reach a white rat, an animal that up to that time had always
got a positive response from the child. The loud noise made
the child start and sometimes whimper and give other signs
of fear or discomfort ; and by repeating the punishment every
time the child reached for the rat, the experimenter soon estab-
lished a conditioned avoiding response to the animal. More-
over, this conditioned fear persisted. Such fears are in fact
difficult to extinguish. These early results of Watson's are cer-
tainly important, even though they do not exhaust the subject
of native and acquired emotions (1924-1925, page 120).

* THEORY OF LEARNING. It will be recalled from the preced-
ing chapter that Thorndike had modified the older association
theory by adding to the law of contiguity, which he renamed
the law of exercise, a new law, the law of effect. Successful
responses to a situation, by giving satisfaction to the learner,
were gradually stamped in, while the unsuccessful ones were
stamped out by the discomfort of failure. Although satisfac-
tion and discomfort could be regarded as physiological states,
and although Watson himself suggested a behavioral theory for
them (see above, page 85), yet the law of effect seemed to
assume conscious feelings in the animal subject and even to
allow them a causal influence on behavior. Therefore the be-
haviorists attempted to eliminate the law of effect by reducing
it in some way to the law of exercise. Watson at first pinned
his faith to the long-accepted laws of frequency and recency,
those sublaws under the law of exercise. He pointed out that
an animal learning to run a maze is bound to take the correct
path at least once on every trial before reaching the food box,
whereas any particular blind alley may be skipped in some trials.
Thus the successful response would gradually acquire a bal-
ance of frequency over the unsuccessful. Thorndike, in reply,
pointed out that the same blind alley was often entered
several times in the same trial, so that the advantage in

88 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

frequency would favor that alley, trial after trial, and the blind
alley never could be eliminated on the basis of frequency.
Thorndike had the best of the argument (page 53).

Later, Watson came to rely mostly on the conditioned
response. He had at first adopted the Pavlov and Bekhterev
techniques only as convenient objective methods in certain
problems. In 1919 he utilized the conditioned response concept
for explaining acquired fears, and we have seen how he devel-
oped a conditioned fear in a child. By 1924 he had come to
suspect that the conditioned response might afford the key to
all habit formation a suggestion first made, apparently, by
Smith and Guthrie in a book with decided behavioristic lean-
ings (1921). But neither these writers nor Watson himself
recognized the basic importance of Pavlov's law of reinforce-
ment, which we have seen (page 66) to be practically identical
with the law of effect. Watson's theory of learning, therefore,
belongs with the older associationism and has few adherents
among present-day behaviorists.

THEORY OF THINKING. Among psychologists at any rate,
Watson's reduction of thinking to implicit motor behavior, is
the most famous and distinctive of his theories. He started
with his regular postulate that thinking must be sensorimotor
behavior of some sort, and it seemed to him that implicit speech
movements were the most likely behavior for thinking. People,
especially children, often think aloud. The child often says
what he is doing as he does it, naming the objects he is playing
with and the results he is producing. He gives up talking aloud
for whispering to himself, gives up whispering for inaudible
lip movement, and finally reaches the stage when his talking
to himself is invisible as well as inaudible. He also learns to
talk to himself not only about what he is actually doing but
also about what he has done or intends to do ; and so he reaches
the adult form of thinking. Adults often substitute subvocal
talking for actual manipulation m the effort to solve a problem,
so saving time and effort. Instead of moving the piano bodily
to a new position in the room, we silently say to ourselves,
"Suppose I moved it over there," and continue, "But it would
jut out over the window. That won't do." It seemed likely

BEHAVIORISM 89

to Watson, then, that the implicit behavior that was substituted
for actual manipulation consisted mostly of minute speech
movements. He readily conceded that implicit gestures as well
as speech movements might occur in thinking. In the case of
deaf people who talk with their hands he held that they would
also think in implicit hand movements. He had no radical
objection to including other implicit movements, insisting in-
deed that we think with our whole body, but he always came
back to his original emphasis on subvocal talking (1914, page
19; 1919; P ages 322-328; 1924-1925, pages 191-199).

Watson's theory of thinking strikes one as reasonable, since
most of us can testify that we talk to ourselves more or less
while thinking. We are often aware of our own inner speech.
The reasonableness of the hypothesis rests on this common
introspective observation much more than upon the history
of the child's talking which was mentioned. Margaret Floy
Washburn, a strong supporter herself of a motor theory of
thinking, though by no means a behaviorist, pointed out the
absurdity of basing upon introspection a hypothesis designed
to bolster up behaviorism (1922).

Because it agrees with our own inner experience, the hypoth-
esis that thinking is silent speech is by no means novel but has
been propounded time and again without any reference to be-
haviorism. What behaviorism requires is that this inner speech
must consist of actual little movements of the speech organs.
In this requirement it of course goes beyond any introspective
evidence. To some persons, inner speech is felt in the mouth
and throat and chest as if actual movements were occurring
there ; while to others it is heard rather than felt, seeming to
be auditory rather than motor. Introspection cannot tell whether
inner speech involves actual speech movements. Watson, though
probably getting his hypothesis from his own introspection, did
not propose to test it by introspection. He proposed to apply
delicate recording apparatus to the speech organs in the hope
of securing objective evidence of speech movements during
thinking. The larynx seemed to him at first the most likely
"organ of thought" and the best organ to approach with ex-
ternal registering instruments. When his attention was called

90 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

to persons whose larynx had been removed by surgical means
and who were still able to think, he shifted his emphasis to the
mouth and tongue.

For a hypothesis of purely theoretical interest, without any
possible bearing on the practical question of how to promote
better thinking, Watson's suggestion was surprisingly stimulat-
ing to the experimentalists. It was a challenge to their techni-
cal abilities. Could they demonstrate the supposed implicit
movements of the speech organs during silent thought or show
conclusively that such movements did not occur? Mechanical
recording instruments used by the earlier experimenters failed
to yield any conclusive result. They revealed slight movements
of the tongue and larynx part of the time but not all of tjae
time while the subject was thinking, and did not show the defi-
nite patterns that might be expected. Electrical registration
with amplification of the little "muscle currents" that occur
when a muscle is even minimally active gave more trustworthy
results. By this test the tongue muscle proves to be active dur-
ing some silent speech but not during all silent thinking (Jacob-
son, 1932). More accessible are the forearm muscles employed
by a deaf person in talking with his hands, and by the electrical
test these muscles are apt to show some activity when the sub-
ject is engaged in difficult thinking but not when the thinking
is easy and smooth (Max, 1937). The evidence for or against
the theory, so far, cannot be called conclusive.

Behaviorism does not stand or fall with the fortunes of this
particular hypothesis. Even if speech movements were always
found during silent thought, there would remain the questions :
What kept them going? Was the brain action that kept them
going more essential than the little speech movements? On
the other hand, if speech movements should be proved non-
existent in some or even most thinking, there would remain
other possible muscular movements and tensions to provide the
sensorimotor process demanded by behaviorism.

WATSON'S ENVIRONMENTALISM. In the 1920's Watson be-
came widely known for his strong emphasis on environment as
against heredity. What at that time appeared to be most char-

BEHAVIORISM 91

acteristically behavioristic was his rejection of instincts and of
all hereditary mental traits. "Has the boomerang an instinct
to return to the hand of the thrower? . . . Well, why does it
return? Because it is made in such a way that ... it must
return." (An argument, by the way, that could be used equally
well in support of instinct.) "Let us, then, forever lay the
ghosts of inheritance of aptitudes, of 'mental' characteristics,
of special abilities." His strongest claim for environment was
that he could "guarantee," given a free hand in controlling
the envirohment, to take any normal infant "and train him to
become any type of specialist I might select doctor, lawyer,
artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief,
regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, voca-
tions, and race of his ancestors." He admitted that he was
going beyond the known facts and was trying to enlist support
for a program of research to check this assertion (1924-1925,
pages 82-85). This extreme environmentalism is not logically
bound up with behaviorism. It has nothing to do with an
insistence on objective methods and a rejection of introspection
and consciousness. In 1914 Watson found a great deal to say
in favor of animal instincts. In 1919, while critical of the long
lists of human instincts offered by James and by Thorndike,
he still recognized a number of human instincts and stressed
the importance of unlearned activity as a basis for learning and
habit formation. Did Watson only gradually realize the full
meaning of his behaviorism? Or have we here simply a de-
velopment of his thinking on a special topic? More likely the
latter. The behaviorist cannot be bound for life to the job
of continually expounding his main theory and its logical im-
plications. Some behaviorists, it is safe to say, reject Watson's
environmentalism, while some who are not behaviorists accept
this view. It is not a question between one psychological school
and another. It is a question of fact and evidence, and the
evidence is still coming in from investigators who work not
as behaviorists or as nonbehaviorists, but simply as scientific
investigators.

In one way, indeed, extreme environmentalism was a logical
stand for Watson. He admits that his conclusion goes be-

Q2 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

yond the evidence, but he justifies himself on the ground that
the hereditarians have been in the saddle "for many thousands
of years" without any real evidence in their favor. This urge
to shake people out of their complacent acceptance of traditional
views is perhaps more characteristic of Watson's behaviorism
than any of his special theories of learning, thinking, emotion,
and instinct.

WATSON'S POPULAR APPEAL. Watson's later books and lec-
tures were intended to win a public following and were very
successful in doing so. A literary reviewer could say in 1930
that behaviorism and psychoanalysis "come near dividing the
modern Occidental world between them" and that "of the two
behaviorism is probably the better adapted to the American
temperament because it is fundamentally hopeful and demo-
cratic." There is some literary exaggeration here but interest
in behaviorism was genuine and widespread. Why was this?
We cannot imagine people getting excited over the psycholo-
gist's technical concepts and methods. Why should the public
be disturbed to learn that introspection was practiced in certain
psychological laboratories, and that certain psychologists pre-
tended to be conscious and to have sensations, feelings, and
memory images, and why should the public acclaim the bold
knight who set forth to fight these superstitions ? Why should
great enthusiasm be awakened by the announcement that think-
ing went on in the neck and not in the head? That part of the
public which became involved in college courses in psychology
would to be sure welcome the simplifications which behaviorism
seemed to introduce. Some of the simplifications were only
verbal, and some of the "mysteries" eliminated with a wave of
the hand remained in the form of unsolved problems ; but other
simplifications were genuine, for behaviorism certainly helped
on their path to oblivion some unpsychological problems inher-
ited from the old mental philosophy.

But the influence of behaviorism extended beyond depart-
mental boundaries. A sociology textbook of that time was
advertised as "frankly behavioristic" because the authors "keep
their eyes on concrete problems in American life and discuss

BEHAVIORISM 93

them on the basis of verifiable material." And the Nation of
London had this to say of Watson's Behaviorism :

His new book claims to put forward not only a new methodology, not
even merely a body of psychological theory, but a system which will, in
his opinion, revolutionize ethics, religion, psychoanalysis in fact all the
mental and moral sciences.

What Watson had said (1924-1925) was that behaviorism
is a truly natural science which takes as its prospective field
all humah behavior, to be studied by experimental methods,
with the object of controlling man's behavior scientifically.
This natural-science approach, he said, is causing philosophy
to disappear and become a history of science, is preparing the
way for an experimental ethics to replace the old authoritative
and speculative ethics based on religion, and will gradually do
away with psychoanalysis and develop in its place a scientific
control of child development which will prevent the neuroses
instead of leaving them to be treated in adult life. He outlined
his system in very few words and left it as a program or rather
as a hope for future scientific work.

But it was significant that a man who had won the public
ear as a representative of science should express this hope so
confidently. The New York Times said of this same book, "It
marks an epoch in the intellectual history of man/'

That is doing pretty well for the Times. Now let us hear
the Tribune: "Perhaps this is the most important book ever
written. One stands for an instant blinded with a great hope."
The reference must be to Watson's strong faith in the environ-
ment and to that "guarantee" to make something great of any
child whose environment from birth up he was allowed to con-
trol. It was only a hope on Watson's part, for if anyone had
secured him the full control of a child's environment he would
not have known how to proceed, except by way of research.
Neither he nor anyone yet possesses the requisite scientific
knowledge. But at any rate that may have been the hope that
blinded the reviewer.

It was not so much Watson's actual scientific achievements,
nor even his system of concepts and methods, that made him

94 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

a standard-bearer in the forward march of psychology. It was,
rather, his boldness, tough-mindedness, scorn of tradition and
mystery, along with an optimistic faith in the capacity of science
to take charge of human affairs. Behaviorism meant to many
young men and women of the time a new orientation and a
new hope when the old guides had become hopelessly discredited
in their eyes. It was a religion to take the place of religion.

Some Other Early Behaviorists

Though Watson was undoubtedly the prime mover in the
behavioristic movement and its most prominent representative
for two decades, there were a few other eminent psychologists
who soon adopted much the same point of view.

Max Meyer (born 1873, long professor at Missouri), writ-
ing in 1911 on The fundamental laws of human behavior, came
rather close to behaviorism, and has since been classed as a
behaviorist. Meyer was a pupil of the important German psy-
chologist, Carl Stumpf ( 1848-1936) of the University of Ber-
lin who, like G. E. Miiller, previously mentioned, was one of
the younger contemporaries of Wundt who independently
started psychological laboratories in the early days. Stumpf
specialized in the psychology of hearing and of music, and
Meyer has been a prolific contributor to this line of study, which
cannot by any means be called behavioristic. But Meyer became
intensely interested in the mechanism of the ear and brain and
came to believe that the only true science of psychology must
deal with such matters. What he did in his book of 1911 was
to develop laws and schemes of nerve action to explain the facts
of conscious experience and of behavior.

During the past few decades the conviction became general that a
science of the subjective, an introspective science, because of its limited
possibility of generalizations, hardly deserved the name of a science. In
order to remedy the defect which had been discovered, objective meth-
ods, like those in the physical sciences, were introduced into the mental
sciences, to supplement the subjective method of introspection. . . .

Not the study of the individual's consciousness, of the "structure of
the mind," but the study of the nervous laws of behavior will enable us

BEHAVIORISM 95

to understand the significance of human action for human life in the
individual and in society. The scientific value of introspective psychol-
ogy consists merely in the fact that it aids us in discovering the laws of
nervous function.

Meyer's view, much like Pillsbury's of the same date (page
74), was that introspection should be used for throwing light
on function, rather than for attempting to build up a science
of conscious experience.

Another of Meyer's books, published in 1921 as a college
textbook, is called The psychology of the other one. The title
at first seems odd for a general work on psychology ; you would
think it indicated some special topic. But it embodies the au-
thor's view that the proper object of psychological study is "the
other one." He is the individual to be observed. The author
thus urges the student away from the traditional view of psy-
chology as primarily the study of oneself. It should be pri-
marily a study of other people. You are personally concerned
about your own doings and likely to be biased in your observa-
tion. A clinical psychologist, an experimental psychologist, a
social psychologist needs to study other people.

One of Meyer's pupils was Albert P. Weiss (1879-1931)
who was certainly a behaviorist, as well as an active experi-
mentalist and student of child development. In his book, A
theoretical basis of human behavior ( 1925, 1929), he was con-
cerned to find a place for psychology among the natural sciences.
He urged psychologists to give up certain pretensions which he
believed were alienating them from other scientists. Psycholo-
gists should not pretend to have access through introspection to
any realities which are immaterial and so inaccessible to the
natural scientist. Psychology should freely admit that there
are no ultimate entities besides those recognized in physics.
Physics at the time recognized the electron and proton as the
fundamental entities. Psychology should adopt these and not
claim any other fundamental entities. ( In a psychological lab-
oratory or clinic, to be sure, we have nothing directly to do with
electrons and protons, but we are no worse off in this respect
than the biologist or even the chemist who is mostly satisfied

96 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

with atoms as his fundamentals. Let us all join hands in pay-
ing homage to the electron and the proton, and freely admit
that all chemical and biological processes, including what we
familiarly call mental processes, consist ultimately in the motion
of electrons and protons, until physics has something better to
offer.) In short psychology should not claim a separate world
as its field but should adopt the view that all phenomena, its
own included, are natural phenomena subject to the same ulti-
mate laws. Most important, it should not assume any mental
forces or factors separate from the biological forces and factors
which are themselves reducible to physical terms (1930).

In ordinary common-sense language we imply that the feel-
ings are causes of behavior we do something because it is
pleasant and avoid something else because it gives us pain.
Psychologists should not speak in this way unless they are pre-
pared to regard the feelings as physical processes in the nervous
system (1928).

Weiss, however, does not wish to confine psychology to
physiological concepts. The human organism exists in a social
environment. One individual's behavior acts as a stimulus
arousing behavior in other individuals, and each individual's
development is very largely controlled by the social situation.
But while recognizing the social character of human behavior
we must not forget that it is biological at the same time. In
becoming socialized, man does not become any less biological.
All his activities talking for example remain just as truly
physiological processes as they would be if he were a solitary
animal. In order to do justice to both sides, Weiss coined the
term biosocial to characterize human behavior. The field of
psychology is that of biosocial processes, and the appropriate
standpoint for psychology is biosocial. Its main task is to trace
the development of the human infant into the social adult.
In this task such mentalistic concepts as sensation, image, per-
ception, feeling, thinking, striving are not going to be of any
help. Rather, they will hamper research. The development of
conscious experience cannot be followed from infancy, because
we have no direct access to the infant's feelings, for example.
We can only use behavioral indicators. Only in behavioral

BEHAVIORISM 97

terms, then, can a complete developmental history be worked
out. (This line of argument loses its force if we regard per-
ception, feeling, thinking, etc., not primarily as kinds of
conscious experience, but as functions defined by results accom-
plished and calling for investigation as to how they operate.)
Weiss inaugurated a comprehensive program at the Ohio State
University for following the development of behavior in the
young child, but died before the program could be carried to
completion.

Walter S. Hunter (born 1889, professor at Brown Univer-
sity), a pupil of Angell and Carr, is another prominent be-
haviorist. As an experimentalist working with both human
and animal subjects he is to be credited with several very sig-
nificant contributions to the psychology of learning and prob-
lem solving, the most noteworthy being perhaps the "delayed
reaction" and the "temporal maze." His view on the schools is
that in the time of Wundt and Titchener there was reason to
expect a structural introspective psychology to be fruitful, but
that it has proved to be relatively sterile.

In America we seem to be emerging at last from an era of contro-
versy concerning what psychology is or ought to be. For good or ill
the onward march of experiment, which no mere speculation and con-
troversy can halt, has carried psychology along the way of the objective
study of human behavior. . . . Psychology seeks to describe and explain,
to predict and control, the extrinsic behavior of the organism to an
external environment which is predominantly social [1932, pp. 2, 24].

An analysis of conscious experience does not yield much
in the way of real discoveries because the main facts are known
to everyone. "The discovery of seeing, feeling and thinking
. . . was made by common-sense observation at some unrecorded
time in the past" ( 1932, page 5 ) . The great variety of detailed
"conscious content" does not appear to the ordinary man as
mental at all but appears to belong to the environment.

The . . . Wundtians abstract qualities, intensities, durations . . . from
the environment and call the material selected experience. The users of
meaning take concrete objects from the environment and call these ex-
perience [1926, p. 88],

98 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY
Or, in other words :

If we ask any contemporary psychologist [not behaviorist] what he
means by the term consciousness, or experience, he will reply by enum-
erating such things as sweet, red, and kinesthetic strain ... or he will
reply by enumerating such things as roses, books, configurations, and
melodies. ... I wish to point out that consciousness or experience for
the psychologist is merely a name which he applies to what other people
call the environment [1930, pp. 282-283].

A good stiff argument could be directed against Hunter on
this last point, for the environment is not the same thing as the
individual's perception of the environment. To perceive the
size, shape, color and distance of an object is really a remarka-
ble achievement, and it is a task for functional psychology (in
the broad sense, page 13) to discover how this result is accom-
plished. Hunter, however, is engaged here in combating the
structural, not the functional, psychologist.

Karl S. Lashley (born 1890, professor at Harvard), a pupil
of Watson, can best be called a neuropsychologist, as will ap-
pear shortly, but has always been classed as a behaviorist. He
so announced himself in an early theoretical paper ( 1923). He
opposed subjectivism and any pretension of introspection to
reveal a unique mode of existence not conceivable in objective
terms. "The subjectivist claims a universe of nonmaterial
things as the subject of his study. The behaviorist denies sen-
sations, images, and all other phenomena which the subjectivist
claims to find by introspection." This was the regular behav-
ioristic stand. But Lashley went on to show that all genuine
findings of the introspectionists could be expressed in objective
terms and so find a place in a behavioristic psychology. This
conclusion is interesting in two ways. It would show that sub-
jectivism was entirely unnecessary in psychology; but it would
also show that the behaviorists, after all, should make no funda-
mental objection to introspection. They might well be cautious
in using so slippery a method of observation, but their objection
could not be fundamental if they could utilize some of its results
in their own system.

Lashley has devoted many years to an untiring investigation

BEHAVIORISM 99

of the brain in relation to learning and other psychological func-
tions. Localization of functions in the cerebral cortex had been
a major enterprise of the physiologists in the latter part of the
nineteenth century, and they had shown that each of the senses
is connected to a definite cortical area. Besides these sensory
areas, a motor area was identified. But all these areas, sensory
and motor combined, made up but a small proportion of the cor-
tex in man. Plenty of cortex remained for the higher func-
tions. If these were to be localized, it was time for psycholo-
gists to unite their forces with the physiologists. Credit for
initiating this neuropsychological line of investigation belongs
to Shepard Ivory Franz (1874-1933), a pupil of Cattell and
fellow-student with Thorndike. After mastering Thorndike's
methods of studying animal learning and the physiologist's
methods of studying localization, Franz devised a combination
of the two. To discover, for example, whether the cat's frontal
lobes were concerned in learning to escape from a puzzle box
by turning the door button, he had the animal learn the trick,
removed the frontal lobes and allowed time for recovery from
the operation, and tested the animal for retention of the trick.
If there was no retention, the animal was given the opportunity
to learn the trick over again. Franz's results showed that with
loss of the frontal lobes there was a loss of the previously
learned trick, but no great loss of the ability to learn the same
trick again. This is but a sample of Franz's important results
(1902, 1907, and many later papers).

Lashley started on this line of investigation as a collaborator
of Franz. In 1917 they applied the combined method to that
favorite laboratory animal, the white rat, a very convenient ani-
mal for such experiments, though its brain is so much smaller
and less complicated than that of man. Lashley has continued
this line of work on the rat and other animals, with striking
though somewhat baffling results. Certainly his results, like
those of Franz, perplex anyone who expects as Lashley did
at first to find a small localized center for each learned per-
formance. While the loss of any considerable amount of the
cortex slows the rat's maze learning, it seems to make little dif-
ference to the rat what particular part of the cortex is removed

ioo CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

and what part is left for him to learn with. He apparently
learns the maze as well with one part as with another. The
greater the amount of cortex removed, the more is he hampered
in his learning. Easy tricks are learned rather quickly with
only half of the cortex left, but not difficult tricks, which require
a larger mass of cortex. Lashley summarizes his findings un-
der two principles (1929) :

1. The principle of equipotentiality : one part of the cortex
is potentially the same as another in its capacity to learn a maze
or other performance. There are some exceptions : visual per-
ception of a shape or pattern can be accomplished only by the
occipital (rear) area, though within that area the parts are
largely equipotential.

2. The principle of mass action : the more cortex left, the
better the learning.

Lashley himself was surprised by these results and checked
them over very carefully. He started this work with the ex-
pectation of finding definite sensorimotor connections, definite
paths through the cortex, laid down by heredity for instinctive
reactions, established by conditioning for learned reactions.
But the whole tendency of his results is against accepting the
simple reflex arc as the basic unit in brain function. Superim-
posing the conditioned reflex on the native reflex cannot give us
the key to learned behavior. The brain must function in some
other way not yet clearly discerned.

Regarding the change in his own views Lashley has this to
say (1931, page 14):

I began life as an ardent advocate of muscle- twitch psychology. I
became glib in formulating all problems of psychology in terms of stimu-
lus-response and in explaining all things as conditioned reflexes. ... I
embarked enthusiastically upon a program of experiments to prove the
adequacy of the motor-chain theory of integration. And the result is as
though I had maliciously planned an attack upon the whole system. . . ,
The conditioned reflex turned out not to be a reflex, not the simple basic
key to the learning problem. ... In order that the concept of stimulus-
response should have any scientific value it must convey a notion of how
a particular stimulus elicits a particular response and no other. . . .
When viewed in relation to the problems of neurology, the nature of the

BEHAVIORISM 101

Stimulus and of the response is intrinsically such as to preclude the
theory of simple point-to-point connection in reflexes.

The last sentence refers to such facts as these : ( 1 ) in look-
ing repeatedly at the same object, you change your fixation
point and so bring into play different rods and cones and differ-
ent nerve fibers leading to the brain, and yet the object appears
the same and gets the same response; (2) the motor response,
too, varies in the exact muscles used and still produces the same
result. The cat that has learned to turn the door button of a
puzzle box gets somewhat different stimuli and makes some-
what different responses, neurologically, from one trial to the
next, and still her behavior remains essentially the same. The
brain, therefore, must do something more than merely switch
incoming nerve currents over into outgoing nerves. Watson in
his desire not to make a fetish of the brain had allowed it only
this switching function, and the early conception of the condi-
tioned response had envisaged specific sensor imotor connections
established in the brain. Lashley's own experiments and his
critical survey of other results led him to view the brain as hav-
ing a more active role. "This evidence seems to favor the older
doctrine of imagery and to throw us back upon the concept of
activity maintained within the central nervous system for an
understanding of serial habits and the mechanisms of thinking"
( 1934, pages 482-483). Nor can Watson's extremely negative
view of instinct and heredity be maintained ( 1947).

No doubt Lashley's views and findings came as a shock to
many behaviorists, who liked the reflex and the conditioned re-
flex as furnishing a simple scheme of behavior and banishing
"mystery." Yet it must be said that behaviorism is not bound
to any single hypothesis or explanation so as to be seriously
shaken when that hypothesis is displaced by one that is more
adequate. Concepts must be allowed to change provided they
remain true to the spirit and attitude of behaviorism. Lash-
ley's concepts are dictated in part by the requirements of neuro-
physiology.

In one of his papers Lashley gives a graphic description of
the behavior of rats after removal of some of their cerebral

102 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

cortex, in comparison with the behavior of normal rats in the
same situation, the "latch box/' a form of puzzle box; and in
this connection he indicates the kind of concepts which have
real value in his neuropsychology (1935, pages 31-35).

The behavior of animals with cerebral lesions in the latch box situa-
tions suggests two more general defects which may have contributed to
their poor records ... a general reduction in sensitivity . . . and . . .
exploratory activity ... a lack of aggressiveness. ... In addition to
these differences between normal and cerebral operated cases a third
may be significant. The normal rat rather quickly modifies his reactions
to the latch so that, whereas his original movement in springing it may
have been a random stumbling, his subsequent movements are directly
adapted to operating it with a minimum of effort. . . . Such behavior
suggests that the normal rat ... comes to identify the movable latch as
a distinct object connected with the opening of the door. . . . Whatever
the explanation of behavior of this character, animals with extensive
cerebral lesions show a limitation in acquiring it. Their behavior is
more stereotyped in that they tend to repeat the movements which were
first successful. . . . The observations may be summarized by the state-
ment that the rats with extensive cerebral lesions are less observing,
have less initiative, and show less insight into the relations of latch and
door than do normal animals.

In previous discussions of the effects of cerebral lesions I have
striven to avoid such psychological interpretations of behavior. They
do not give us any understanding of the cerebral mechanisms involved
and tend to obscure the issues by presenting a pseudoscientific explana-
tion in terms of empathy. ... I therefore present the above psycho-
logical interpretations, not because they have any explanatory value, but
in order to make the dynamic concepts of cerebral function sound less
strange by identifying them with terms which, though scientifically
meaningless, are familiar.

In observing animal behavior we tend by "empathy" to put
ourselves in the animal's place, even while avoiding anthropo-
morphism as far as possible, and we say that the animal seems
to perceive objects and relations. But we cannot apply such
concepts directly to brain processes. The concept of "connec-
tions" can readily be applied to the brain, which shows in its
microscopic structure innumerable nerve fibers connecting one
part of the cortex with another. But Lashley's work indicates

BEHAVIORISM 103

that connections do not tell the whole story. "The unit of func-
tional organization seems to be not the reflex arc ... but the
mechanism, whatever be its nature, by which response to a
ratio of intensities is brought about" (1934, page 493).

One interesting aspect of Lashley's findings is that they
bring behaviorism and Gestalt psychology which we shall con-
sider in our next chapter closer together than once appeared
possible. We might even find more in common between Lash-
ley and the Gestalt psychologist Kohler than between Lashley
and the behaviorist Hull. Indeed, our present behaviorists dif-
fer considerably among themselves. Their work has not been
neuropsychological. There are some very productive neuro-
psychologists at work, but they are not identified closely with
behaviorism. ^

The Later Behaviorists

The division into early and later behaviorists is rather ar-
bitrary, since two of those just considered, Hunter and Lash-
ley, are definitely present-day behaviorists. The distinction,
such as it is, rests on the fact that behaviorism seemed to have
a new birth about 1930, with new names becoming prominent
and new forms of behaviorism emerging. As far as age goes,
Hunter and Lashley are a little younger than Tolman and Hull,
the next two on our list.

Edward Chace Tolman (born 1886, professor at California)
was~really one of tHeearTy converts to behaviorism. As early
as 1920 and 1922 he was calling himself a behaviorist or some-
times a "purposive behaviorist." There was some doubt in the
minds of most psychologists whether his purposive behaviorism
could properly be called behaviorism. As the experimental
work in Tolman's active animal laboratory proceeded, the meth-
ods were seen to be behavioral methods, beyond doubt, and the
behavioral basis of his system of concepts was rather convinc-
ingly set forth in his 1932 book on Purposive behavior in ani-
mals and men. From that time to the present, purposive
behaviorism has been generally recognized as truly a form of
behaviorism, though differing from the original Watsonian
variety.

104 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

Tolman's espousal of behaviorism was from the beginning
coupled with rather severe criticisms of Watson's views. Wat-
son had waved "purpose" aside as an introspective superstition
of no interest to a behaviorist. Tolman, less impatient and
more subtle, believed he could discern an objective purposive-
ness in behavior itself.

Watson had been far from clear and consistent in his defini-
tion of behavior. He had insisted that behavior was something
that could be seen, objectively observed ; yet he had postulated
implicit behavior which could not actually be observed. He had
emphasized the role of muscles, glands, and the viscera; and
yet, to distinguish behavior study from physiology, he had said
(1919, page 195) : "It is perfectly possible for a student of be-
havior entirely ignorant ... of the glands and smooth mus-
cles ... to write a thoroughly comprehensive and accurate
study of the emotions." He had distinguished fear, rage, and
love as the emotions observable in infants without making any
attempt to get at the visceral processes in the infants so as to
discover whether there actually were three distinct patterns of
visceral behavior. Instead, he had observed three types of overt
behavior aroused by three types of external situation. He had
observed, for instance, that the infant screamed and made slash-
ing or striking movements of the arms and legs when his move-
ments were hampered by the experimenter. The angry behavior
was a fighting against interference. The stimulus varied and
the response also varied and still the behavior was clearly angry.
A critical review of this work led Tolman (1923) to draw a
significant conclusion: "It is not a response, as such, nor a
stimulus situation, as such, that constitutes the behavior defini-
tion of an emotion, but rather the response- as affecting . . .
the stimulus situation." Behavioristically, an emotion is a
"tendency toward a particular type of behavior-result." What
Watson actually described was the infant's behavior in the true
sense ; what he said he ought to describe amounted to visceral
and other physiological processes (Tolman, 1922).

As Tolman put the matter later ( 1932, pages 6-7) : *

In short, our conclusion must be that Watson has in reality dallied
with two different notions of behavior, though he himself has not clearly

BEHAVIORISM 105

seen how different they are. On the one hand, he has defined behavior
in terms of its strict underlying physical and physiological details. . . .
We shall designate this as the molecular definition of behavior. And,
on the other hand, he has come to recognize . . . that behavior, as such,
is more than and different from the sum of its physiological parts. Be-
havior, as such, is an "emergent" phenomenon that has descriptive and
defining properties of its own. And we shall designate this latter as the
molar definition of behavior.

Physiological analysis of a behavior act, perfectly legitimate
and desirable in its place, does not bring out the behavioral
character of the act. Clutching at your hat when the wind
threatens to blow it off is a behavior act, a relatively small one
and yet big enough to involve a host of physiological details.
As a bit of behavior it has a start and a finish : it starts from a
certain situation and terminates in a certain change effected in
the situation. Watson's three emotional patterns in the infant
started from different stimulating situations and tended toward
different results. Often a behavior act proceeds through several
stages on its way to the end-result or goal. Several steps may
be taken, several minor acts performed, all advancing toward
the goal.

An animal's trial-and-error behavior in the maze or puzzle
box is visibly goal-directed or purposive. If the goal is not
reached by one route, some other route is taken, and still others
till the goal is reached. In a series of trials the blind alleys are
eliminated, and shorter paths adopted instead of longer ones
leading to the same goal. The animal learns something. And
what does he learn ? The route to a goal the means to an end.
This learning is the real evidence of purpose. For if the animal
after rummaging around in the maze comes upon food and
stops to eat, there is nothing so far to indicate that he has been
seeking that result. But when in a number of trials in the same
maze he comes to take the most direct route to the food box, his
behavior is clearly steered toward that goal. It shows purpose,
and it also shows knowledge, acquaintance with that situation
built up by the trial-and-error process of exploration. When he
dashes by a certain route to the food box, he is behaviorally as-

io6 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

serting that he is taking a good route toward the goal (1932,
pages 10-21).

As can be readily imagined, Tolman had to entrench himself
against serious attacks from behaviorists and introspectionists
alike, both contending that knowing and purposing could not
be attributed to animals except on the assumption that the ani-
mals were conscious. Tolman insisted that he neither knew nor
cared what knowing and purposing felt like to the animals. If a
rat has any conscious foresight of the goal or any conscious
preference for the shortest route, it is his private affair and we
have nothing to do with his private feelings. Even in the case
of human beings, Tolman went on to say, the "raw feel" of
their sensations and emotions is their private possession and in-
communicable. If I try to describe to you my sensation of the
color red, I find it cannot be done. I can point to a red object,
I can say that red is somewhat like orange or purple, and very
different from green and blue, quite a gay, stimulating color,
very nice for a tie but a little too gay for a professor's overcoat
I can put red in many such relations but I cannot describe the
sensation itself. I should have the same difficulty in trying to
describe my feelings of pleasantness. Now what is essentially
private cannot be made the subject matter of science, for science
is social. The data of science must be public or capable of pub-
lication. The "mentalists" have tried to create a science of
private experience, while the behaviorists of all varieties reject
any such possibility. Only to the extent that private experience
can be reported, made public, can it have any place in science.

This apparently clear distinction between behaviorism and
mentalism, however, does not stand up very well under analysis.
The structuralists, who seem to be the typical mentalists, do in-
sist on verbal report of all introspective observations. Their
data are made public and on this basis should be acceptable to
the behaviorists. If so, the behaviorists have no real quarrel
with the structuralists, except so far as the structuralists attempt
(or once did attempt) to rule behavioral data out of psychology.
Similarly, the structuralists have no real quarrel with the be-
haviorists except so far as the latter attempt to rule the former
out of scientific psychology. From the broad functionalist

BEHAVIORISM 107

point of view (page 24) both kinds of data can throw some
light on the difficult "How" question, and accordingly both
structuralists and behaviorists are accepted for their positive
contributions, while both are rejected for their negativistic tend-
encies. Tolman, it must be said, is less negativistic than most
other behaviorists. He is open-minded toward all the schools
and finds concepts that he can utilize even in the theories of
such antibehavioristic schools as Gestalt psychology and psycho-
analysis (1932, 1942, 1948).

Indeed Tolman seems to claim for "behaviorism" any psy-
chological work using objective methods or objective concepts,
concepts that can be expressed in behavioral or even in hypo-
thetical physiological terms (1935). If behaviorism becomes
so imperialistic as that, it ceases to be behaviorism and merges
into the general body of functional psychology, as has been
pointed out in a critical review by Tilquin (1935).

Tolman apparently has the credit of first clearly formulating
the concept of intervening .variables (1935, 1938). The pri-
mary task of any psychological experimenter is to observe what
a given individual does in response to a given situation. What
the experimenter knows in advance is the situation and such
facts about the individual as his heredity, age, and past experi-
ence (this ideal being more attainable in animal than in human
experiments) . In a series of experiments the situation is varied
or individuals of varying heredity, age, or experience are com-
pared. Whichever factor is varied is the "experimental varia-
ble," also called the independent variable, while the resulting
behavior shows the dependent or -behavior variable. The ex-
perimenter's task is to observe the behavior under the different
experimental conditions to discover the relation of the behav-
ior variable to the experimental variable to work out the
"function" (in the mathematical sense, page 29), represented
schematically by the equation,

where B stands for behavior variables, S for situation variables,
and A for antecedent variables such as heredity, age, and pre-
vious experience.

io8 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

So far, what the experimenter has is an elaborate answer to
our question "What?" But he would like also to attack the
question "How ?" He tries to imagine the internal process lead-
ing from the given situation to the observed response. In terms
of another familiar formula, S O R, he tries to imagine
what goes on in O between S and R. The intervening process
must vary with the experimental variables, and so give rise to
the behavior variables. The intervening variables, which he
imagines, have no scientific value unless they can be tied in with
the experimental variables on the one hand and with the be-
havior variables on the other. The best example is hunger,
conceived as a demand for food or an active tendency to seek
food. The animal's demand for food is not directly controlled
or observed, but it can be tied to a certain experimental variable,
the time since last feeding. And it can be tied to a certain re-
sponse variable, speed of eating when food is found. Tolman
finds at least two kinds of intervening variables useful in ex-
plaining animal behavior : demand variables and cognitive vari-
ables. In the class of demands are sex hunger, demand for a
safe spot in face of danger, and demand for a good bed after
prolonged activity. The cognitive or "know-how" variables in-
clude perception of objects, recognition of previously explored
places, motor skill, etc. The cognitive variables might be called
abilities and answers to the question "How?" while the demands
would be motives and answers to the question "Why?" If the
hypothetical intervening variables can be successfully tied in
with the experimental and behavior variables, they make up an
acceptable theory of behavior.

We said that Tolman had no real quarrel with many psy-
chologists not properly regarded as belonging to the school of
behaviorism. His main quarrel (1938) is with the associ-
tionists, both old and new, especially perhaps with Thorndike,
Pavlov, and the behaviorist next on our list.

Clark L. Hull (born 1884, professor at Yale) was well
known as a productive psychologist for a decade before he came
out as a champion of behaviorism. Unlike the other prominent
behaviorists he was not a graduate of the animal laboratory.
Tolman might have claimed him as a behaviorist on the strength

BEHAVIORISM 109

of his important experiment on the establishment of concepts
(1920), since that was a purely objective study. Without dis-
paraging the introspective work of his predecessors in the study
of concepts, which had yielded only qualitative results, Hull
pointed out that the "functional and quantitative" development
of the subject still awaited the invention of suitable objective
methods, and he showed how the Ebbinghaus memory methods
could be adapted for the purpose. This work was notable for
the excellence of its experimental design, though it was later
criticized from the Gestalt standpoint because it defined each
class of objects by a "common element" present in each member
of the class rather than by a "common form" of the members.
That Hull did not at the time consider his work behavioristic is
shown by his incidental use of mental istic terms like mental ac-
tivity, focus of consciousness, memory images, and unpleasant-
ness. But the emphasis was strongly on objective methods and
functional laws.

Hull's early work was directed also to the projection of an
elaborate system of aptitude tests (1928) and to the develop-
ment of practical statistical methods, including the invention of
a machine for computing correlations (1925). Also notable
was his experimental work on hypnosis and suggestibility
(1933). Brother psychologists were surprised to see him de-
sert these early interests and devote his energies to the working
out of a theory of behavior based on Pavlov's laws of condi-
tioning.

Always the inventor, Hull was evidently fascinated by the
problem of designing a well-geared conceptual machine, a theo-
retical system from which definite laws of behavior could be
logically deduced for submission to the test of experiment.
The conflicting schools meant to him that psychology had not
yet advanced to a truly scientific stage of development. Various
broad theories were being offered, but only in very sketchy out-
line, none of the theorists having the patience to work out the
implications of a theory far enough to make sure whether it
could predict phenomena not yet observed. Good work was be-
ing done by the experimentalists in the testing of particular hy-
potheses, but what was lacking was a comprehensive system of

no CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

concepts, a "hypothetico-deductive" system. Such a system,
much like geometry, starts with certain postulates and defini-
tions which can be combined and yield logical deductions. The
deduced propositions must be as logical as those of geometry,
once the premises are granted. Of course in an empirical sci-
ence like psychology the deduced propositions must be put to
test in the realm of observable facts. When the predicted results
are not verified the postulates and definitions must be re-exam-
ined in the hope that some minor revisions will save the system
as a whole. The enterprise may run on for many years, paying
its way as it goes by the mass of scientific knowledge gathered
by the experimenters who test the hypotheses derived from the
system (1935).

The postulates of the system, or some of them, may be
known in advance to be true statements of fact so much the
better but some of them will probably be "intervening varia-
bles/' only to be validated indirectly as essential parts of the
whole system. Hull gives credit to Tolman for the fruitful
idea of intervening variables as well as for the concept of molar
behavior (1943, page 31). One of Hull's important interven-
ing variables is drive, akin to Tolman' s demand. On the whole,
however, Hull's system is very different from Tolman's.
Where Tolman regards cognition as a fundamental factor in
behavior, Hull believes this function can be derived from his
fundamental postulate of stimulus-response association ( 1930).
Hull is definitely one of the "new associationists," while Tol-
man's negative attitude toward association is much like the at-
titude of the Gestalt school.

Hull gave a brief "miniature" view of his system in 1937,
a rigidly "mathematico-deductive" presentation in 1940, and a
more complete and generally intelligible treatment in 1943. He
makes full use of Pavlov's principles of reinforcement and ex-
tinction. He means also to make full use of Pavlov's law for
the establishment of a conditioned response, but it must be said
that he does not follow Pavlov very closely. He accepts the
substitute-stimulus theory of the conditioned response, which
we have discussed on page 61. One of his main postulates
(1937, page 16; 1943, page 178) is that any stimulus occurring

BEHAVIORISM in

"in close temporal contiguity" with a reinforced response be-
comes connected with that response so as to evoke it later (after
enough repetitions of this event). This statement implies that
the conditioned response is the same as the unconditioned re-
sponse, only attached by conditioning to a new stimulus;
whereas the conditioned response usually, perhaps always, dif-
fers to some extent from the unconditioned and has, indeed, the
characteristics of a preparatory response. Hull's statement
does not specify, as Pavlov's did, that the conditioned stimulus
must begin before the unconditioned. And while Hull says
that any stimulus occurring close in time to a reinforced re-
sponse becomes connected with it, Pavlov says that the condi-
tioned stimulus must be such as to get the animal's attention.
Of course Hull is at liberty to deviate from Pavlov in choosing
his own postulates, but then he has the job of explaining Pav-
lov's results, which would seem to be quite contradictory to
Hull's postulates.

Hull does not often speak of himself as a behaviorist, believ-
ing perhaps that the name of behaviorism properly belongs to
Watson's system, which differs greatly from Hull's both in
form and in content. Hull often calls his concepts "objective"
or "naturalistic," and he endeavors to free them from any trace
of introspection, mere intuition, and anthropomorphism. For
Thorndike's "satisfaction," which seemed to imply a conscious
state, Hull substitutes "cessation or reduction of a need." All
admissible concepts, even though referring directly to "molar"
behavior, must refer ultimately to bodily processes. And noth-
ing should be assumed to go on in the organism that could not
go on in an elaborate physicochemical robot (1943, page 27).
What we ordinarily call mental processes must be regarded as
complications of physicochemical processes. Now that we are
becoming familiar with calculating machines capable of doing
certain kinds of "mental work," it is easier to believe that learn-
ing machines and thinking machines could be invented. Hull
himself devised a machine that could work out syllogisms, and
with his students he indicated how some of the simpler learning
processes could be mechanically or electrically imitated (1937,
page 29). No attempt was made to discover the actual brain

ii2 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

processes in learning, but the fact that a physical mechanism
could * 'learn " was regarded as significant. Hull believes that
his system of behavior concepts can cover the facts of expecta-
tion, purpose, and guiding ideas. "What, then, shall we say
about consciousness? Is its existence denied? By no means.
But to recognize the existence of a phenomenon is not the same
thing as insisting upon its basic, i.e., logical priority. Instead
of furnishing a means for the solution of problems, conscious-
ness appears to be itself a problem needing solution." He goes
on to challenge anyone to start with well-defined conscious proc-
esses and work fut a logical system that will predict actual be-
havior in animals or men (1937, page 30).

Whatever may be the merits of his system, Hull soon gath-
ered around him at Yale a very active and productive group of
young investigators, a new school of behaviorism. And his sys-
tem has awakened lively interest in his fellow-psychologists in
many places, though it must be added that his chief fellow-
behaviorists, as Tolman and Lashley, have been sharply critical,
and so has Skinner, the last behaviorist on our list.
/ Burrhus Frederic Skinner (born 1904, professor at Indiana
and at Harvard), while younger than the other behaviorists
mentioned, was an active contributor in the early 1930's to the
new birth of behaviorism which occurred at that time. In 1931
he laid down a program for the study of behavior from the ex-
perimenter's point of view. What the experimenter can do is to
apply known stimuli and note the organism's response. He can
describe behavior in terms of correlated stimulus and response.
Skinner proposed to regard any S-R unit as a "reflex" in a
broad meaning of that term. Traditionally a reflex is limited
to unlearned and involuntary responses, but Skinner proposed
to prune away these restrictions and to call any S-R unit a re-
flex. In this sense all behavior is composed of reflexes, or at
least the experimenter's task consists in the study of such units.

The psychological experimenter is concerned with overt be-
havior and not with the internal mechanism of the behavior.
He is not concerned with the physiologist's reflex arc nor with
the synapses in the nerve centers. Skinner thus adopted the
"molar" point of view.

BEHAVIORISM 113

Besides the stimulus, other conditions are under the control
of the experimenter, and his job is to discover how the response
depends on these other experimental variables as well as on the
stimulus. His entire job is to work out the relations schemati-
cally represented by a formula wfcich we have already consid-
ered (page 107) :

where A stands for a condition controlled by the experimenter
and madevthe experimental variable in an investigation. The
laws of behavior will be statements of the variation of response
produced by known variations of the stimulus and other ex-
perimental conditions. These laws will be "functions" in the
mathematical sense and will be made as quantitative and mathe-
matical as the data permit.

For an easy example, take the familiar reaction time experi-
ment with human subjects. The subject is to react as quickly
as possible to a sound. If the sound is very weak, the reaction
is slow ; increase the sound intensity and the reaction becomes
quicker. Vary the sound intensity systematically and you can
work out a function or curve showing the relation of the reac-
tion time to the intensity of the stimulus, an ^-variable. For an
^-variable you might take the age in children and work out an
age curve. In reaction time work the J?-variable is the reaction
time itself, also called the latency of the response. Another
TtNvariable often used is the strength of the response; for ex-
ample, the amount of saliva secreted in Pavlov's conditioning
experiment (page 57). In an "extinction series" the stimulus
in question is the conditioned stimulus, say the sound of a bell,
but this is held constant, the variable condition being the num-
ber of trials since the last reinforcement, an ^-variable. The
strength of the response diminishes as the extinction series ad-
vances.

So far there is no special novelty in Skinner's behaviorism,
except perhaps for the use of the word reflex to cover all vari-
eties of stimulus-response units. Novelty appears in his in-
troduction (1932) of the simplified form of puzzle box which
is known today as the Skinner box. This experiment, as we

ii 4 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

have already seen (page 64) bridged the apparent gap between
Pavlov's conditioning and Thorndike's trial and error. Learn-
ing of this simplified problem was very rapid, but extinction was
slow, and the many studies since made with this apparatus are
largely concerned with the rate of extinction under different
conditions. This type of experiment gave Skinner occasion to
divide his "reflexes" into two classes, the respondents and the
operants. In a respondent a known stimulus elicits a response ;
in an operant there is no known stimulus, but an apparently
spontaneous response is "emitted" by the organism. No doubt
there may be some internal stimulus, such as a hunger pang, but
from the experimenter's point of view there is no stimulus be-
cause he does not apply or observe any. The eliciting stimulus
is beyond his control and so is not one of his experimental vari-
ables. His concern is wholly with the ^-variables, and the
functions he works out come under the simplified formula

The experimenter does of course provide stimuli. When
the rat presses the bar that secures food, stimuli from the bar
show him where to press ; these are guiding or discriminative
stimuli, but not eliciting stimuli. It would be equally reasona-
ble, of course, to say that stimuli from the bar elicit the response
of pressing when the rat is in the state of hunger. But Skinner
wishes to avoid any reference to inner states of the organism
and to deal wholly with controllables and observables. Accord-
ingly he says that the bar-pressing response is simply emitted
by the organism, though guided by stimuli from the bar and
other objects.

The operant has another property not included in the defi-
nition but implied in the name. It operates on the environment ;
it is instrumental (page 63) ; in the Skinner box it procures
food. The typical respondent, such as the conditioned flow of
saliva in Pavlov's experiment, may prepare the organism for
what is to come, but does not produce environmental effects
(unless the interior of the mouth is regarded as part of the en-
vironment). Behavior consists mostly of operants, and the
study of conditioned operants and their extinction is presuma-
bly the best lead toward a science of behavior. Such a science

BEHAVIORISM 115

will be engaged in studying operant behavior its acquisition,
guidance, and extinction in relation to experimental conditions.

Obviously Skinner's behavioristic program differs from
Hull's or Tolman's. He does not, like Hull, set up a system of
hypothetical concepts from which deductions are made to be
tested by experiment. Skinner goes so far as to say that he
does not make any use of hypotheses (1938, page 44), but a
careful reading of his book will detect some hypotheses very
usefully employed. Without guiding hypotheses, it would seem,
the experimenter would be reduced to trying out any and all
^4-variables, perhaps in alphabetical order, and assembling his
results in a long series of graphs. Skinner certainly would not
subscribe to any such mechanical program of research, but he
does not make very clear what principles should be the guides
in selecting significant experimental variables. Presumably he
would be guided as other scientific workers are by the current
state of the science and the problems which are leading to sig-
nificant results. What he does make clear is his judgment that
Hull's hypothetico-deductive program is less promising than a
program of working out the relations of behavior to known en-
vironmental conditions (1944). Skinner's hope undoubtedly
is that the simpler laws or "functions/' when well established,
will prove to be related in such a way that they can be combined
into higher and more inclusive laws. For example the laws of
conditioning and of extinction may be combinable into higher
laws covering both conditioning and extinction. It seems to be
impossible in any science to predict the future course of investi-
gation far in advance to lay down once and for all a system-
atic plan of what is to be undertaken so much depends on the
impact of new and unexpected discoveries. Skinner's system,
aside from the limited set of behavioral laws which he regards
as already established, amounts to a methodology, a set of prin-
ciples governing the collection and treatment of data and the
choice and definition of behavioral concepts.

Tolman's system is regarded by Skinner (1938, page 437)
as in many respects similar to his own, but as suffering from the
use of the maze experiment, which requires behavior of much
greater complexity than the Skinner box does, with the conse-

ii6 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

quence that elementary laws of behavior never come out clearly.
Besides, the heavy use of "intervening variables" in Tolman's
system does not appeal to Skinner, who makes only sparing use
of them and then only for convenience. Hunger, for example,
is a convenient term to use because the hungry state affects be-
havior in several ways, but to define hunger we must report the
time since last feeding, the rate of feeding (i.e., of bar-pressing
in the Skinner box), or some other observed fact. So the hun-
ger variable is reduced to the status of an actually observed
variable ; and the same can be said* of such an intervening varia-
ble as anxiety (1938, page 24; 1940; Estes and Skinner, 1941).
In speaking of an animal's state of hunger or anxiety we are
prone to mean something akin to our own subjective feelings
and desires, but such "empathy" must be avoided if we wish to
limit our psychology to laws of behavior.

Skinner does not by any means intend to limit his psychology
to the rat in the box, though he finds this setup excellent for
fundamental investigations. Human verbal behavior, he be-
lieves, can be brought under the same laws of conditioning and
reinforcement. Quite a number of the younger psychologists
declare themselves adherents of his type of behaviorism.

"OPERATIONISM" IN PSYCHOLOGY. If Skinner's school is
to have a name, "radical operationism" could be suggested,
but his right to any exclusive claim on such a name would imme-
diately be challenged by adherents of many other schools. In a
symposium on operationism as viewed from several angles,
Skinner had this to say ( 1945, page 270) :

Operationism may be defined as the practice of talking about (1)
one's observations, (2) the manipulative and calculational procedures
involved in making them, (3) the logical and mathematical steps which
intervene between earlier and later statements, and (4) nothing else.

It is this underlining of the negative aspect of the operational
principle that is characteristic of Skinner. The principle is
accepted also by Tolman and Hull, but they make freer use of
hypotheses and intervening concepts than he would allow.

The operational principle was clearly formulated by the
physicist P. W. Bridgman in 1927, It has to do with the mean-

BEHAVIORISM 117

ing of scientific concepts, and provides a logical method of
stripping from a concept irrelevant shades of meaning that may
have become attached to it and of ruling out of court any con-
cept that is not truly based on scientific observation. The prin-
ciple is that the meaning of a concept is limited by the operations
required to observe and measure the phenomenon in question.
"In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of
operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding
set of operations/' What do we mean by length, for example
the distance between two points ? Yes, but by what operation
do we measure the distance ? As physics has extended the meas-
urement of length from ordinary terrestrial distances to astro-
nomical distances at one extreme and to subatomic distances at
the other, very different methods of measurement have come
into use, and the question arises whether length means the same
.thing when measured in these different ways. Some operation
is required for checking the results of one method against those
of another. This problem and the parallel one of time measure-
ment became acute in physics in connection with the theory of
relativity.

In psychology the importance of operational definitions was
promptly appreciated. In fact psychologists had already been
insisting on such definitions in relation to certain important
measurements. In memory experiments, for example, the at-
tempt is made to measure "retention" so as to work out the
curve of forgetting. Now retention may be measured by the
recall method or by the relearning or saving method, but the
saving method gives higher retention scores than the recall
method. In presenting your results, then, you must specify the
method used. According to the operational principle, retention
means nothing but the recall score or else the saving score, until
by some further operation the two scores are correlated.

The more notorious psychological example is that of intelli-
gence. What is intelligence? Psychologists found it difficult
to frame an acceptable definition. But in regard to intelligence
testing it was clear enough that "measured intelligence is what
the tests measure/' And it was necessary to specify the par-
ticular test by which intelligence was being measured, since the

ii8 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

intelligence quotients obtained by different tests did not agree
exactly, because of differences in their materials and construc-
tion. The IQ values obtained in a given study are defined by
the "operation" comprising the specific test used, the mode of
administration, and the standard arithmetical computation.

However, the idea that intelligence is "what the tests meas-
ure'* and nothing else, is unsatisfactory and really absurd.
Consider the situation of a psychologist who undertakes to
construct a new intelligence test. "What is intelligence?" "It
is defined by the operation I am going to use in measuring it ;
it is what my test will measure, and nothing more can be said."
His whole concern, then, would be to construct a test that will
measure what it measures, i.e., in the psychologist's terms, a
test with good "reliability." He has no concern with "valid-
ity" ; as a strict operationist he does not care whether his new
test will predict the intelligence measured by other tests, or
school success, or success in any vocation. Actually the testing
psychologist does care a great deal about validity ; he works out
the correlations of his test results with certain "criteria" ac-
cording to the scientific or practical use to be made of the test.
In general a scientific concept is a tool, and the scientist wants
to know not only how the tool is constructed but also what it
will do. In psychology anyway a concept must be tied to a
measuring operation on one side and to its use, scientific or
practical, on the other. Perhaps the same can even be said of
physical length and time.

The requirement of operational definitions has been hailed
by the behaviorists as speaking in their favor. For, they argue,
the meaning of a concept depends wholly on the experimenter's
operations in securing the relevant data. The experimenter ar-
ranges a certain objective situation, applies certain stimuli, and
records the subject's responses. All these operations are strictly
objective. Even if the experimenter gives a human subject cer-
tain verbal instructions, as in the method of impression (pages
18-21), and if the subject reports seeing or not seeing the
given stimulus, still the experimental operations are overt, objec-
tive and public. A visiting scientist looking on could verify all
the experimenter's operations and records. Here we encounter

BEHAVIORISM 119

the same difficulty as once before (page 83) : the crucial part
of the whole operation is the observation by the subject, and this
cannot be verified by the visiting scientist nor by the experi-
menter either, since it is a private event in the subject's organ-
ism which, however, he is able to report. The concept of a
visual after-image, for example, cannot be validated unless the
subject's report is accepted as evidence of a visual event.
Therefore the complete operation cannot be stated in objective
terms. But the same thing seems to be true of any scientific
operation. v Always there is an observer reporting what he sees
or hears. Always this private event, is an essential part of the
whole operation. The operational principle, so understood, can
be accepted by any school of psychology and has indeed been
accepted by those whose work on sensation and perception lies
quite outside the genuine province of behaviorism (Boring,
.1945 ; Stevens, 1935, 1939).

CHAPTER 5

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY

If we were required to name the most significant date in the
history of our contemporary schools of psychology, we could
not do better than to select the year 1912. Simply as the date
of Watson's first promulgation of behaviorism that year would
be of outstanding historical importance. But several other im-
portant developments took place at just about that time. The
debate between structuralists and functionalists had perhaps be-
gun to die down a little. The modern associationism of Thorn-
dike and of Pavlov had made its appearance a decade earlier
and was very much on the upswing. Thorndike made the full
statement of his views (the earlier ones) in 1911 and 1913, and
the psychological significance of Pavlov's conditioned reflex was
just beginning to be appreciated. Psychoanalysis, too, was
already a decade and more old, but the year 1912 was a turning
point in its history, for it was just about then that the cleavage
between Freud and two of his early adherents, Adler and
Jung, took definite shape, and it was just about then that Freud
began to revise his earlier views and shift over to his quite dif-
ferent later theory. McDougall's purposivism, first emerging
to view in 1908, received its full formulation in 1912; Adolf
Meyer's organ ism ic psychology had already been announced,
and the name psychobiology was proposed a few years later;
and Mary Calkins was just putting the finishing touches on her
self psychology. Finally, the year 1912 saw the first announce-
ment of the important school of Gestalt psychology. 1

*For much fuller accounts of the Gestalt psychology than the one
given here see Ellis, 1938; Elmgren, 1938; Hartmann, 1935; Petermann,
1932.

120

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY 121

Founding of the Gestalt School

In 1912 it happened that three young German psychologists,
who had previously been together for some years as research
students at the University of Berlin, were located in and near
the city of Frankfurt. These three men were Max Wertheimer
(1880-1943), Kurt Koffka (1886-1941), and Wolfgang Koh-
ler (born 1887, now professor at Swarthmore). Each of
them had already produced psychological work of some distinc-
tion. Wertheimer had shown how the free association test
could be used for the detection of an individual's hidden knowl-
edge, as in examining persons suspected of a crime. Koffka
had done important work on imagery and thought. Kohler had
specialized effectively on problems of hearing. These three
friends had become profoundly discontented with the dom-
inant psychology represented by Wundt, the "brick-and-mortar
psychology" as they called it, the bricks being the sensory ele-
ments and the mortar mere association by contiguity. A collec-
tion of elements deprived of meaning and plastered together by
meaningless associations seemed to them a travesty of the
meaningful experience of human beings. Conscious experi-
ences are not only complex as Wundt had said but they are
also meaningful, and the type of introspective analysis which
pushes the meaning aside in order to get at the bare sensory
elements may do good service for the special student of the
senses but at the cost of losing the larger values of psychology.
These men did not share Watson's disgust with all introspec-
tion ; quite the contrary, they believed that excellert psychologi-
cal data could be gained from "direct experience" and that the
dynamics of behavior was more clearly revealed in direct expe-
rience than in external observation. And they admitted that
analysis was necessary, only the analysis must not destroy the
meaning and value of experience or behavior. Science in spite
of its magnificent achievements seemed to many young intellec-
tuals of the day to be depriving human life of all significance by
reducing its values to mere illusions ; but our three friends be-
lieved the trouble to lie in the scientist's infatuation with "ele-
ments" and in his effort always to work "from below upward"

122 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

and never "from above downward," from the meaningful whole
down to parts which are still meaningful because of their role in
making up the whole. If a cause and its effect are taken as
separate events, Hume was right in asserting that no necessary
connection between them can be seen (page 42), but if the
entire happening, cause and effect included, is viewed as a whole,
it makes sense and cause and effect are meaningful parts of the
whole. The Humean and associationist skepticism should not
blind the psychologist to the reality of meaningful experience.
Wertheimer and his two younger associates were convinced that
they had the germ of a new and revolutionary method of attack-
ing all the problems of psychology.

In the Frankfurt laboratory in 1911 and 1912, Wertheimer
was conducting experiments on the seeing of motion, and
Koffka and Kohler were serving as subjects. The problem was
to account for the motion we see in looking at a motion picture.
The motion picture camera takes a rapid series of snapshots
which are "stills" ; nothing moves perceptibly in any one still or
the result is a blur and not an appearance of motion. In projec-
tion each snapshot stands still on the screen, and the light is cut
off while the shift is made from each frame to the next, for if
the picture were allowed actually to move on the screen you
would see a blur rather than a moving object. Therefore if
you saw what is physically presented on the screen, you would
see a rapid series of snapshots separated by intervals of dark-
ness. You do not and cannot see what is physically taking place
on the screen. You cannot see the dark intervals because the
visual sensation outlasts the physical stimulus and holds over
till the next exposure, provided the interval is short. (If it is
too long, you see some flicker.) Thus retinal lag bridges the
time gaps between the successive still views. But what bridges
the space gaps and enables you to see an object in the picture
moving smoothly along instead of jerking from one place to
another as it actually does in the series of views? That is the
problem.

Wertheimer was attracted to this problem because the whole
experience of seeing an object move in the picture evidently had
an important and meaningful property (the motion) which was

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY 123

not to be found in the separate still views. The problem could
be attacked by study of the conditions that must be met for
motion to appear. He simplified the "picture" to the limit, mak-
ing it consist simply of a vertical line which could be given an
apparent motion to the right or left. The experimenter exposes
to view first one line and then a similar line a little to the right
or left. A short blank time interval separates the two expo-
sures. Wertheimer found the length of the blank time interval
important. If it were as long as one second, the observer simply
saw onfc still line and then the other still line, in full agreement
with the physical facts. If the interval were cut down to one
fifth of a second the observer continued to see the two still lines
in succession. But when the interval was further diminished
the observer began to get a glimpse of something moving across
from one position to the other ; at one fifteenth of a second the
motion was very clear, a single line appearing to move across
from one end position to the other. With shorter time intervals
the motion became less clear, and at one thirtieth of a second no
apparent motion remained but the two presented lines seemed to
stand side by side. All these effects are even clearer if the two
lines, A and B are exposed repeatedly, A-B-A-B-A-B . . ., one
at a time in alternation ; at the one-fifteenth second interval the
side-to-side swing is very striking and at one thirtieth of a
second the two lines stand steadily side by side.

Wertheimer varied the experiment in several ways. He ex-
posed a vertical followed by a horizontal line ; and the observer
saw a line swinging around through ninety degrees. By suit-
able arrangements he could make one line appear to move to the
right and another line simultaneously move to the left just as
in a movie two figures are often seen to move in different direc-
tions at the same time. This result was important as ruling out
the eye-movement explanation of the apparent motion. It had
been suggested that the eyes by moving from one position to the
other created the impression of motion ; but the eyes could not
move in two directions at the same time ! Another old explana-
tion was that all you really see is the series of still views and
that you then infer the motion ; for if a thing is here one mo-
ment and there the next moment, it must have moved from here

124 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

to there in the interval. Against this theory Wertheimer ap-
pealed to direct experience: Are you aware of the separate
positions first and then of the motion, or do you get a direct
sensation of motion? He could also appeal to the peculiar
effects of different time intervals. If the interval is too long,
you see two separate lines in succession and do not infer any
motion; if the interval is too short, you see two separate lines
side by side and no motion; but if the interval is just right you
get the clear impression of one line in motion. Wertheimer
concluded that when the interval was right, the brain response
to the first position merged by a continuous process into the
response to the second position, so that there was actual motion
in the brain.

Wertheimer's experiment on visual movement was certainly
interesting and important, but we may query why it was re-
garded as important enough to inaugurate a new school of
psychology. Well, it was a clear case of a whole which was not
a mere sum of parts. An object seen in motion is not merely
seen in a series of positions ; in fact the separate positions are
not seen distinctly because they merge into the motion which is
clearly seen. A snapshot of a person running or walking often
catches him in what looks like a very odd position. You can
scarcely believe that he took that position in the course of his
movement; and yet the camera did not lie. You saw him in
that position, or rather you saw him passing through that posi-
tion. You saw his movement as a dynamic whole. Seen move-
ment was important to the Gestalt psychologists as a clear
example of the dynamic whole, the whole which dominates its
parts. Another clear case was the shape of an object. "Shape"
in German is Gestalt, and to see why this school called them-
selves the Gestalt psychologists we need to go back two decades
from 1912 and take notice of an important forerunner of the
Gestalt school.

Gestalt Qualities, Form Qualities

The fact that we see shapes as well as colors and shades is
obvious enough, but the older psychologists made little of this

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY 125

fact. We remember that Thomas Brown early in the nine-
teenth century had emphasized the seeing of relations (page
44). Relations are akin to shapes ; when we see the front of a
church as taller than the rear, we are seeing a relation and we
are seeing a shape. It was Christian von Ehrenfels (1859-
1932), an Austrian philosopher-psychologist, who in 1890
brought the problem of shape out into the open. What he called
a Gestalt quality, or form quality, is present in a whole but not
present in any of the parts making up the whole. We are
reminded of "mental chemistry" (page 43). Take the same
collection of parts and arrange them in different ways and you
get different wholes possessing different qualities. For example
take the notes of the musical scale : arrange them in one order
and rhythm and you have one tune; give them another order
and you have a different tune. The tune is not present in the
notes taken separately, but only in the whole arrangement. A
skeptic might say, "What have you got there besides the notes?
Nothing !" The answer is that the arrangement must be just
as real as the notes, since different arrangements give different
tunes which have different effects on the listener. If the skeptic
is not convinced you can bring forward another fact : the same
tune can be made of entirely different notes. That is, the tune
can be transposed from one key to another and still be the same
tune. If it is transposed into a higher key it may sound more
brilliant; if into a lower key, more mellow. But it remains the
same tune and is recognized as such. When you recognize a
tune, it is not the notes that you recognize but the tune itself.
To hear a tune, then, is a real experience, not decomposable into
the experiences of hearing the separate notes. The tune has a
quality of its own, a form quality.

There are many other examples. Using a dozen red blocks
you can build patterns and other structures of many shapes, the
patterns and structures being as real as the blocks ; and you can
"transpose" any one pattern or structure from red to blue, if
you happen to have a dozen blue blocks available. A dress-
maker can make "the same dress" out of a variety of materials,
as well as different dresses out of the same material. The point
for psychology is that the same pattern can be seen and recog-

126 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

nized in spite of differences of material, and that different pat-
terns can be distinguished in spite of sameness of material.
More in general, patterns and shapes can be seen, heard, recog-
nized, and appreciated. They are psychologically as real as the
elementary tones and colors.

From 1890 on the psychological theorists were forced to
admit the reality not only of sensory elements such as tones and
colors but also of shapes and patterns. You hear tunes as truly
as you hear tones, and you see squares and circles as truly as
you see colors and shades. But by what psychological process
do you get the patterns ? Do you sense them as you sense tones
and colors, or do you construct them by some higher mental
process? There soon arose an Austrian Gestalt school which
adopted the second alternative (see von Ehrenfels, 1937; Bor-
ing, 1929, pages 431-440). In this view tones and colors and
other elementary sensations are raw materials provided by the
senses, while the patterns are constructed by the observer. The
composer constructs a tune by putting notes together in a certain
arrangement, and the listener also has to exercise some construc-
tive ability in order to hear a tune rather than a mere jumble of
notes.

This theory of the Austrian Gestalt school was rejected by
the\ Berlin Gestalt school, the school which was founded at
Frankfurt in 1912 by psychologists who both before and after
that date were closely associated with the University of Berlin
(and who later came over to the United States). This is the
group which is known today as the Gestalt school^ without
qualification. Their argument was that a higher mental process
of combining and constructing was not required in simple cases
of seeing or hearing patterns, because the sensory process itself
is a process of organization. Sensations are not raw materials.
The stimuli reaching the sense organs are raw materials, unor-
ganized, uncombined. But the nerve impulses from the sense
organs on reaching the brain immediately interact, attracting
and repelling each other and so organizing themselves into pat-
terns. "Organization/* a favorite word in Gestalt psychology,
is likely to create a false impression. It sounds as if there were
an organizer in the form of some higher mental process which

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY 127

imposed organization on unorganized sensations the view of
the Austrian school which the Berlin school rejected. Sensa^.
tions are self -organizing or the sensory field as a whole is
self^TganTzing that is what our Gestalt psychologists mean.

Factors in Organization

In a perfectly uniform visual field, such as you can secure
approximately by closing the eyes in a light room, there is no
observable organization. But as soon as the field is uneven,
spots begin to appear, figures against a background, lines, con-
tours, and other signs of organization (Koffka, 1935, pages
110, 124) . They are as directly experienced as colors and tones
or as the motion in Wertheimer's experiment. Organization at
a sensory level occurs whenever shapes and patterns are heard
or seen, while organization at a higher level, more dependent on
the use of past experience, takes place when figures are named
and objects recognized.

As we open our eyes we find nothing in sight, let us suppose,
except a green blotch on a gray background. We unhesitatingly
see the blotch as a coherent whole, a vague shape standing out
from the background. We could scarcely force ourselves to see
part of the green area combined with part of the adjacent gray
as a unit, and we should find it even more difficult to see a part
of the green area united with a more distant part of the gray.
Why is this? Why do we spontaneously see compact, uni-
form areas as units? The associationists some of them
had answered that this manner of seeing was the result of
past experience, that we learn to take compact spots for ijnits
because we so often find such spots to be objects that we can
manipulate or that are of some practical importance. If we
have had to learn this lesson, we have certainly learned it well,
for it is almost impossible for us now to see in any other way.
So there is good evidence in direct experience for the Gestalt
theory which says that we do not have to learn to see a compact
blotch as a unit, since the primary brain process in seeing is a
dynamic system and not an assembly of little separate activities.
The visual area of the brain, in the Gestalt theory, is not like a

128 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

telephone switchboard, the elements of which remain separate
till connected by the operator's cord (corresponding to an asso-
ciation). Instead, the brain switchboard is a dynamic system
such that the elements active at a given time interact, those that
are close together tending to combine, and those that are similar
also tending to combine, while those that are unlike and far
apart remain separate.

This primitive organization does not consist simply in com-
bination; separation is equally important. The laws of aggre-
gation are at the same time laws of segregation. William
James in a famous passage (1890, I, 488) had vividly insisted
on combination but he had not regarded separation as equally
primitive. He said,

The law is that all things fuse that can fuse, and nothing separates
except what must. . . . The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and
entrails all at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.

This passage has often been misquoted by omitting the little
word "one" in the last line, so giving the impression that James,
of all men, was arguing for atomism, which is the very view he
combated over and over again. But the Gestalt psychologists
are probably right in insisting that things separate as naturally
as they combine, according to such factors as distance and dis-
similarity. When the baby first opens his eyes upon the world,
he certainly does not see a world of objects as he will later, but
if there is some compact bright splash in his visual field, due to
a face bending over his crib, this probably stands out against the
blooming background. If he sees the face as a separate blotch,
he is making a start toward seeing it as a face. If he did not
naturally take a blotch as a unit separate from the background,
his task of coming to know objects by sight would be very diffi-
cult (Koffka, 1925, page 145).

Wertheimer (1923) made effective use of dots and lines
scattered over the background in demonstrating important fac-
tors in aggregation and segregation, also called "field forces" or
"principles of organization." Dots are likely to be seen as if
falling into groups, and the question is under what conditions a
group is easily segregated from the mass. One favorable condi-

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY 129

tion is nearness or proximity of the dots to each other. An-
other favorable condition is similarity (including equality) of
the dots. If the field contains dots of two shapes, or better still
of two colors, those which are alike can easily be seen as form-

Fig. 1. The Proximity Factor

Fig. 2. The Similarity Factor

Fig. 3. The Oosure Factor

ing a group. Another favorable condition is that the dots form
a closed figure or a continuous curve. This principle of "clo-
sure" is very important in the Gestalt theory. If a figure is
drawn with small gaps in it, the gaps are apt to be overlooked or
disregarded by an observer. Sometimes, indeed, the gaps stand
out as the striking thing about a figure, but on the whole the

130 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

tendency is to close up small gaps. This tendency to close a
gap is regarded as revealing a fundamental principle of brain
dynamics, a tendency of the brain activity to bridge a gap, like
the tendency of an electric current to jump a small gap in the
circuit. Tension is built up on both sides of the gap. With
the gap present there is a state of unbalanced tensions, but
closure brings equilibrium. The sensory brain activity tends
toward equilibrium or minimum tension, just as other continu-
ous physical systems do drops of water, soap bubbles, or elec-
tric networks. The physics of this theory has been handled very
competently by K6hle/( 1938, 1940). ^

The tendency to close a gap is akin to the tendency to over-
look irregularities, and in general to see as "good" or "preg-
nant" a figure as possible under the given conditions. A figure
is "good" if it is symmetrical, simple, or in some such respect
appealing to the observer. A figure is "pregnant" if the nature
of the whole figure is carried out as fully as possible by the
parts. If the star figure shown here is seen as a gappy figure,
the observer will tend to emphasize and exaggerate the gaps
and make it as gappy as possible. What is sometimes called
"Wertheimer's law" or principle seems to include both preg-
nance and good figure : "The principle contends that organiza-
tion of a field tends to be as simple and clear as is compatible
with the conditions given in each case" (Kohler, 1938, page
251).

Besides these organizing factors which do not depend on
higher mental processes or on past experience, Gestalt theory
recognizes two other factors which do so depend : the factor of
familiarity and the factor of set or attitude. If some of the
dots in a collection make up the outline of a face or of any fa-
miliar object, such as a letter of the alphabet, it is easy to see
that figure. And if the observer is actively looking for a certain
figure he is more likely to find it than if he had no such inten-
tion. If you try hard you can force the dots of Figure 1 into
three groups instead of the more natural four. The Gestalt
psychologists warn us not to overemphasize these traditional
factors of familiarity and set, for we are much too prone to

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY 131

explain everything by them and neglect the more direct and
primitive factors in organization.

For our own satisfaction we may take the liberty of restat-
ing and classifying Wertheimer's factors of organization. We
have, then :

1. Peripheral factors, present in the given collection of stim-
uli. Here we have proximity, similarity, continuity, and closed
figure.

2. Central factors, originating in the organism and imposed
on the stimuli : familiarity and set.

3. Reinforcing factors, analogous to the reinforcement of a
conditioned response, or to the law of effect. Here we would
place the factors of pregnance and good figure. If, while you
are looking at a mass of dots or lines, some figure begins to
emerge that is simple, symmetrical, like an object, or definite
in any way, your natural reaction is to emphasize that figure
and bring it out as fully as possible. This is a kind of "confirm-
ing reaction" (page 66), a reinforcement of the emerging
figure, and at the same time a manifestation of Wertheimer's
law. If this suggestion should succeed in bridging the gap
between two schools as divergent as the Gestalt and neo-asso-
ciationist, it would be a very desirable closure.

^ The Dynamic "Field" in Gestalt Theory

To understand the Gestalt theory of organization we must
examine more closely the use made of the field concept. Since
the work of Faraday and Maxwell the field and its character-
istics are very important in the science of physics. The mag-
netic field and lines of force between and around the poles of a
horseshoe magnet are brought out in the familiar figure pro-
duced by the use of iron filings. The electric field is demon-
strated by experiments on induced currents. When you lead a
current of electricity through a circuit of copper wire, you may
suppose as the older physicists did that you have confined the
electricity to the wire, and you have so confined the actual cur-
rent, but an electric field surrounds the wire and extends out
some distance as shown by the fact that a current is induced in

i 3 2 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

a neighboring circuit whenever the current in your wire starts
or stops or is increased or decreased in intensity the principle
utilized in the induction coil and the transformer. The Gestalt
psychologists attempt to apply this physical concept of a dy-
namic field not only figuratively but literally to the visual field,
to the organism, and especially to the cerebral cortex. v

The contrast between a dynamic field and a machine is
brought out clearly by Kohler (1947, pages 100-135). In the
action of a machine two factors are operative : the power sup-
plied and the structure of the machine. The power or energy
supplied would act in all directions if it were not restricted or
"constrained" to produce motion in only one direction pre-
scribed by the structure of the machine. This structure is a
system of constraints which determine what effect the energy
shall produce. For a very simple example of a machine take
a ball rolling along a groove. The energy may be supplied by
gravitation if the groove slopes downward or by a thrust given
the ball. The groove evidently supplies no energy but it con-
strains the movement of the ball, making it roll in a certain
curve, for example. Or consider what happens in one cylinder
of an automobile engine when a spark ignites the explosive mix-
ture. The heated gas tends to expand in all directions, but the
rigid wall of the cylinder restricts the motion and only the pis-
ton moves to any extent. The still surface of a pond is rela-
tively free from constraints; if you apply energy at a certain
point by dropping in a stone, the resulting wave moves in all
directions.

The organism is constructed like a machine in some respects.
The muscles are attached to the bones by tendons, so that when
kinetic energy is generated in a muscle its tendon pulls in one
certain direction. The nerves, like insulated wires, constrain the
nerve currents to go in certain prescribed directions, as from
the retina to the interbrain and thence to the occipital lobe. But
in the cortex or any mass of gray matter there would seem to
be less constraint, more freedom, more chance for pure field
effects. A nerve impulse coming in from the retina, like the
stone dropped into the pond, would start a circle of waves in
the cortex, but these would be electric waves. A rapid series of

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY 133

nerve impulses, such as comes into the cortex from any stimu-
lated point, would generate a rapid series of waves in the cor-
tex and throw part of the cortex into a specific pattern of
electric tensions, a pattern centered at the point which directly
receives the nerve impulses from the retina. Just as two stones
dropped simultaneously into the pond at different points pro-
duce a pattern of interacting waves, so two simultaneously stim-
ulated points of the retina would give a definite pattern of
electric tensions in the cortex. We may think of the pattern as
analogous to two sharp hills with a valley between, the valley
and sloping hillsides being as much a part of the pattern as the
hilltops. In seeing the two points, then, the observer gets not
merely two points, but rather two points in relation. The rela-
tion consists physically in the cortical pattern of electric waves
and tensions. If the two retinal stimuli are brought nearer to-
gether, the pattern becomes sharper (the slopes steeper). Any
factor that flattens the pattern weakens the relation and makes
the points look farther apart. Now there is a factor that flat-
tens the pattern : continued stimulation of the same two retinal
points, giving continued activation of the same cortical pattern
of electric currents, produces increasing * 'polar ization" in the
cortex. In effect, resistance is built up to the currents. The
pattern flattens out, the two points become physically less closely
related and so look farther apart than at first. (This crude
sketch is intended to give some idea of the remarkable studies
of "figural after-effects" and their physical explanation, re-
ported by Kohler and Wallach, 1944.)

If the cerebral cortex is a free field for dynamic interaction,
the old "machine theory" of the nervous system must be given
up so far as the cortex is concerned, though it may and probably
does hold good of the nerves and of the vast system of nerve-
fiber connections in the brain. The older psychologists had
thought of each little item of stimulation coming in along the
sensory nerves to the brain as remaining an independent unit in
the cortex, so that the total sensation at any moment would be a
mere collection or "mosaic" of sensory items. This machine
theory seems to offer no explanation for the relations and pat-
terns that we have been speaking of and that are so real in ac-

^4 UJiViEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

tual sensory experience. Each sensory item would have to
remain separate from all others, according to the machine
theory as viewed by the Gestalt psychologists. They do not do
full justice to the possibilities of a machine theory. One pro-
nounced anatomical characteristic of the cortex and other nerve
centers is the convergence of nerve fibers. Each cell has con-
tact on the receiving side with several or many axons from dif-
ferent regions. So the various items of sensory stimulation,
even if they do not interact, certainly coact or work together
in producing the next phase of the total response. Within the
framework of a machine theory, broadly conceived, a psycholo-
gist who regarded a pattern as a response to a combination of
stimuli could perfectly well subscribe to Kohler's conclusion
(1947, page 103):

Our view will be that, instead of reacting to local stimuli by local
and mutually independent events, the organism responds to the pattern
of stimuli to which it is exposed ; and that this answer is a unitary proc-
ess, a functional whole, which gives, in experience, a sensory scene
rather than a mosaic of local sensations.

Just because the Gestalt psychologists reject the machine
theory we must not assume that they accept the vitalistic rather
than the mechanistic view of the organism. They are strongly
against vitalism, and that is indeed one reason for their empha-
sis on field dynamics. The field is a physical reality and at the
same time corresponds to the psychological realities of behavior
and experience. The dynamic field is a molar affair in the same
sense as behavior is molar (page 105). Direct experience is
molar ; a sensory pattern is molar, capable of analysis but pos-
sessing distinctive characteristics as a whole. I f we wish, as the
Gestalt psychologists do wish, to fit the world of behavior and
direct experience into the physicochemical world of natural
processes, we must look for fields and patterns in the physical
world. Especially we must ask what physical patterns of brain
processes can correspond with the patterns of behavior and
direct experience. Some correspondences are easily found.
When we hear a sound grow softer and die away, the cortical
process doubtless has the pattern of decreasing intensity. When

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY 135

we see a figure standing out as a unit from its background, the
occipital cortex doubtless is active in such a way that a certain
physical process is segregated from its surroundings.

In general, Gestalt theory postulates an isomorphism between
patterns that we see or hear and the corresponding brain proc-
esses (Kohler, 1938, pages 185-232; 1947, pages 61-63, 301;
Koffka, 1935, pages 53-68). The meaning of isomorphism
may be understood by thinking of a map as compared with the
country which it represents. The map is very different from
the country, just as our conscious experience is very different
from any brain process. But certain shapes and relations in
the map hold good of the country. What is higher up in the
map is farther north in the country. What appears on the map
as a wiggly line is present in the country as a river. If we could
inspect a person's brain processes as well as we can see a map,
and had learned the correspondences, we could read off his ex-
periences as we read a map. Or the person himself could use
his own experience as a map of his brain processes. So vague
and unrealistic a prospect would have no appeal to the Gestalt
psychologists, but as good experimentalists they try to derive
from the postulate of isomorphism definite hypotheses which
can be tested by psychological experiments, an excellent example
being their work on figural after-effects, already mentioned.

Self and Environment in Direct Experience

The Gestalt psychologists object to behaviorism on several
counts. They do not object to an emphasis on objective meth-
ods and indeed agree that the final test of any hypothesis should
be objective. But when the older behaviorists proposed to re-
gard all behavior as composed of reflexes and conditioned re-
flexes, Gestalt psychologists made the same objection to this
proposal as they had made to the brick-and-mortar psychology
of Wundt and Titchener and the associationists : behavior no
less than sensory experience shows us wholes that are not
merely the sums of parts but have their own properties as
wholes, and obsession with elements is never going to reveal the
essential properties of the wholes.

136 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

While both the earlier and the later behavior ists have agreed
that conscious experience, even if real, is not a fruitful field for
scientific study, the Gestalt psychologists approach the dynamics
of behavior from the side of sensory experience, and with some
success, as indicated in the preceding sections of this chapter.
The sense physiologists had studied such subjective phenomena
as color mixture, contrast, and after-images, and had learned
a good deal regarding the mechanism of the sense organs and
even regarding the brain processes in sensation. The Gestalt
psychologists go further by discovering principles of aggrega-
tion and segregation operative in sensory experience which
must also 1^ principles of brain activity. Pavlov regarded the
conditioned reflex as a window for viewing the higher nervous
activity, and motor behavior in general is such a window, but
sensory experience is another window affording a view from
another side, and perhaps a clearer and more direct view than
can be got from the motor side. Apart from brain dynamics,
sense perception has proved to be a very fertile field for experi-
mental study even during these years of relative neglect by the
behaviorists.

*But the principal objection of Gestalt psychology to behav-
iorism has to do with the stimulus-response or S-R formula.
The formula has meant different things to different psycholo-
gists, no doubt, but the behaviorists have meant by S the sum
of stimuli acting on the sense organs at a given time, and by
R the motor response. The dash or arrow between S and R has
seemed to imply a direct connection between sensory stimulus
and motor response, as if there were no intervening processes
of any consequence. Stimulus and response are the objectively
observable facts, and behaviorism as originally conceived was
not to go beyond them. Watson's "implicit behavior" and the
newfangled " intervening variables" (page 107) do of course gc
beyond the objective data. And Watson really went beyonc
the objective data when he defined a stimulus as "any object ir
the general environment or any change in the tissues" ( 1925
page 6). The object out there is not the stimulus reaching ou
eyes or other sense organs. To identify the object with th
stimulus is to assume in the organism the ability to perceive th

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY 137

object on receiving the stimulus. The behaviorist tacitly as-
sumes in the organism this process of perception intervening
between stimulus and response. He takes it for granted and
overlooks its importance. As Kohler puts the matter (1947,
pages 164, 165, 200) :

The stimulus-response formula, which sounds at first so attractive, is

rfv^^*^^^<s^_-s^>^ H- ^^. -*v_/*<_*-/v^/' fv-As^A-f^*.*'

actually quite misleading. In fact, it has so far appeared acceptable
solely because Behaviorists use the term "stimulus" in such a loose
fashion. . . . When the term is taken in its strict sense, it is not gen-
erally "a stimulus" which elicits a response. ... A man's actions are
commonly related to a well-structured field, most often to particular
thing-units. The right psychological formula is therefore: pattern of
stimulation organisation response to the products of organization. . . .
The stimulus-response formula . . . ignores the fact that between the
stimuli and the response there occur the processes of organization, par-
ticularly the formation of group-units in which parts acquire new char-
acteristics.

The Gestalt psychologists learned their "principles of organi-
zation" from the study of sensory experience, but they have
gone on to apply these principles to behavior in the broadest
sense. Koffka (1935) made a valiant attempt to work out a
comprehensive Gestalt theory covering learning, memory, emo-
tion, voluntary and involuntary action, and personality. He
tried to be as concrete as possible but could not help being
sketchy and very abstract in spots, because some parts of the
subject have not been directly studied by the Gestalt school.
His painstaking discussions sometimes amount mostly to raising
unsolved problems and pointing out inadequacies in the usual
"functional" treatment of the subject/u^A^^t *^ ^\^

Koffka's approach to behavior is certainly deserving of care-
ful attention. We should regard behavior, he says, not as com-
posed of responses to stimuli but as governed by a field, the
organismic field of interacting forces, a field that is self -organ-
ized into definite though changing patterns. This organismic
field is of course physiological, but as operating in behavior and
conscious experience it can be better called psychophysical. Its
operations are physicochemical, cellular, or what we have called
"molecular" (page 105), but they are at the same time "molar/'

138 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

occurring in patterns corresponding to significant units in ex-
perience and behavior. Some of these patterned operations are
unconscious (the "unconscious" being part of the molar-physio-
logical field), but some of them are conscious and make up the
field of direct experience. There is no sharp, fixed boundary
between the field of conscious experience and the rest of the psy-
chophysical field, arid conscious experience is open to influences
from the rest of the psychophysical field such as unconscious or
only vaguely conscious desires. The field of direct experience,
along with externally visible behavior, is what the psychologist
has to work with, or work from, since it provides his observa-
ble facts. And a great deal can be learned from the study of
direct experience. ( <H * *~N.SY^^ }

The field of direct experience, as we all know it in adult life,
has two poles, the ego and the environment. That is, we are
aware of ourselves as surrounded by an environment. These
two poles are like the poles of a magnet, with lines of force or
stress between them. They are in constant and shifting inter-
action. Presumably the child does not at first make any distinc-
tion between the self and the not-self. But he discovers that
his body is a unit distinct from anything else. Some things are
in front of him, other things behind him, while he himself is in
between. The great qualitative difference between the definite
visual and auditory sensations and the background of bodily
feelings may play a part in segregating the self from the en-
vironment. Tensions develop between himself and persons in
the environment and thus the polarity of self and not-self is
sharpened. The ego is not a mere pole; it is complex, struc-
tured into subsystems. Yet it maintains its identity in the flux
of environmental happenings, without ever becoming static. It
is never "completely balanced, completely at rest. ... It is al-
ways going somewhere" (Koffka, 1935, page 332). The main
point for the Gestalt theory is that there are always tensions
within the ego as well as between the ego and the environment.

In a typical experience, I am doing something in the environ-
ment. The environment I respond to is of course the envi-
ronment as it appears to me, and the appearance may not
correspond perfectly to the reality. I respond to the apparent

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY 139

environment, which Koffka accordingly calls the "behavioral
environment." He introduces this concept with a striking ex-
ample (1935, pages 27-28)

On a winter evening amidst a driving snowstorm a man on horse-
back arrives at an inn, happy to have reached a shelter after hours of
riding over the wind-swept plain on which the blanket of snow had
covered all paths and landmarks. The landlord who came to the door
viewed the stranger with surprise and asked him whence he came. The
man ^pointed in the direction straight away from the inn, whereupon
the landlord, in a tone of awe and wonder, said: "Do you know that
you have ridden across the Lake of Constance?" At which the rider
dropped stone dead at his feet.

In what environment, then, did the behavior of the stranger take
place ? The Lake of Constance. Certainly, because it is a true proposi-
tion that he rode across it. And yet, this is not the whole truth, for the
fact that there was a frozen lake and not ordinary solid ground did not
affect his behavior in the slightest. . . . There is a second sense to the
word environment according to which our horseman did not ride across
the lake at all, but across an ordinary snow-swept plain. His behavior
was a riding-over-a-plain, but not a riding-over-a-lake.

~X \VM xcAfc, ,,< <

CA^

The geographical environment in this case was a lake, while
the behavioral environment was a plain. Behavior which is well
adjusted to the apparent or behavioral environment does not
always fit the physical, real, or geographical environment. The
physical situation may be deceptive or at least difficult to grasp,
our senses have their limits, and our desires may blind us to
the real facts. Persons as well as things are not always what
they seem. We may fail to discern their true attitudes and in-
tentions, so that our behavioral social environment differs more
or less from the real or geographical social environment. The
behavioral environment is different for different individuals
even when they are in the same geographical environment. It
differs according to their sevcraLnseds, interests, and abilities.
One who is interested in gardening sees a nice garden plot in
the spring beckoning him to spade it up and plant things, while
to another person the same plot is merely bare ground with no
appeal whatever. When a person is dreaming, his behavioral

i 4 o CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

environment is a dream world very different frcgjgijfhe
where he is sleeping. <***>*,$ ^x^ to AN **. a^^j^uA^ **- *

Nowwhere is a person's behavioral environment^ Is it
outside or inside him.' 1 From his own point of view it is cer-
tainly outside. Here I am with a desk in front of me, a lamp
behind me, and somebody playing the piano in the next room.
If I fall asleep and seem to hear a military band playing on the
parade ground, that environment is still outside me from my
own point of view. But you, the psychologist, looking at me,
say that my dream is wholly inside me, just as the horseman's
plain was present only in his imagination. Even when I wake
up and resume writing at my desk, you say that my behavior
is governed by my perception of the environment and not by the
environment directly. From the geographic environment stim-
uli reach my sense organs and enable me, if awake, to perceive
things more or less correctly. My perceiving (and remember-
ing) process is inside me, and the result of that process, my
behavioral environment, is also inside me from your point of
view. My motor reaction to the desk is governed by my per-
ception of the desk, and this perception is certainly in me and
not in the desk. You as a psychologist are talking about proc-
esses, while I am talking about the results of these processes. My
processes of perceiving, remembering, desiring take place in my
organism, and as a result I perceive my organism surrounded
by the environment, quite in accordance with the "geographical"
facts. It is easy to become confused here, as Kohler has shown
(1938, pages 126 ff.), but one thing is clear enough: stimuli
from outside enable the organism to perceive the environment
more or less correctly, and the organism's behavior is governed
by the environment as perceived.

When anyone is asked to report what he sees, hears, tastes,
smells, or touches, he reports things and other environmental
facts, as a rule, and not the stimuli received which serve him as
indicators. He is reporting his behavioral environment as part
of his conscious experience. When an animal's behavior is cor-
rectly adjusted to such environmental facts as the direction of
a sound or the size and distance of a visible object, that animal
is using stimuli as indicators in the same general way as a hu-

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY 141

man being, and the psychologist, without assuming conscious
experience in the animal, is still entitled to say that the animal's
behavior is governed by a behavorial environment.

All this is familiar and acceptable enough to all psychologists
except perhaps the most orthodox behaviorists. What, then, is
the Gestalt psychologist's reason for insisting on it so strongly ?
There are two main reasons. First, the behavioral environ-
ment, as contrasted with an assemblage of stimuli, is organised,
and behavior is governed by this organized field and not directly
by the stimuli. This point has already been sufficiently empha-
sized. Second, the Gestalt principles of organization are held
to explain why it is that the behavioral environment corresponds
as well as it does with the geographical environment. A bunch
of stimuli that are close together and similar gives rise to a
segregated whole in the psychophysical brain field. Now such
a bunch of stimuli very often comes from a definite object in
the environment. Thus the principles of proximity and simi-
larity make us see the environment as containing a multitude of
definite objects ; and to this extent the behavioral environment
corresponds to the geographical. The principles of continuity
and closure operate to close accidental gaps in the stimuli re-
ceived. The "central" factors of set and familiarity certainly
are very important perhaps more important than the Gestalt
school is inclined to admit in exploring the environment and
building up an acquaintance with it, part by part. And a great
deal could be said for the factors of pregnance and good figure,
which we (not the Gestalt psychologists) have regarded as
factors of reinforcement (page 131). In spite of many dis-
crepancies between the behavioral and the geographical en-
vironments, between appearance and reality, a good measure of
agreement is guaranteed, according to the Gestalt theory, by
the forces of the psychophysical field within the organism which
receives the stimuli from the external world. Many "molar"
characteristics of the physical world patterns and relations
are reproduced in the psychophysical field and in the individual's
direct experience and so made available as guides for his behav-
ior in the environment. His motor behavior is determined in

i 4 2 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

the same general way by the field forces ; but this side of the
theory has not been worked out into very definite form.

Insight and Productive Thinking \/*

Two of the most interesting studies produced by the Gestalt
school have to do with problem solving. These are Kohler's
book on The mentality of apes ( 1917 in German, 1925 and 1927
in English) and Wertheimer's Productive thinking (1945).
Other Gestalt studies of problem solving which amply deserve
more than this passing notice are those by Duncker (1935,
1945) and by Katona (1940).

Just before the first world war, in 1913, Kohler was made
director of an anthropoid station at Teneriffe in the Canary
Islands, maintained by the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
Kohler proceeded to Teneriffe and began psychological studies
of chimpanzees. Marooned there during the war, he had time
for the thorough study shown in his book. The problem he un-
dertook was whether the chimpanzee, representing probably the
most intelligent group of subhuman animals, showed any genu-
ine intelligence. By intelligence Kohler meant something more
than trial and error in the solution of a novel problem. He
meant insight, a seeing into the problem. Thorndike had been
convinced by his experiments on cats, dogs, and monkeys that
these animals attacked a problem by trial and error, i.e., by im-
pulsively trying one thing after another until something suc-
ceeded, and that they learned by repetition and the law of effect,
the successful reactions being stamped in and the unsuccessful
jOnes stamped out. Though Thorndike 's experiments had not ex-
pended to the anthropoid apes, the general impression left be-
hind by his work was that trial and error represented the only
animal line of attack on a problem. Kohler entertained serious
doubts of this conclusion and believed that Thorndike's associa-
tionist background had led to ill-conceived experiments and
false interpretation of results.

Thorndike had used mazes and puzzle boxes blind situa-
tions, not lying open to the animal's inspection. He did this in
order to give the animals something new to be mastered. If he

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY .14^

had teft a clear, unobstructed path to the goal, the animals would
have gone straight to the goal without any problem to solve.
Kohler agreed that there must always be some obstacle ; the ani-
mal must be required to take a roundabout path, a detour, liter-
ally or figuratively, to reach the goal. But Kohler held that the
animal should nevertheless be able from the start to survey the
whole situation, so that if he had the power of insight he could
solve the problem without blind trial and error. The pattern or
structure of the situation should be visible, and the question
should be whether the animal could grasp the pattern and act
accordingly. 2 (

A very simple example of a detour problem with insightful
solution is given by Kohler. A dog was brought into a strange
yard containing a length of fence, and when the dog was near
the middle of the fence some food was placed directly before
him on the far side of the fence. Instead of trying impulsively
to squeeze through, the dog almost immediately made a dash
around one end of the fence to the food. The dog saw the way
to the goal even though it was a detour. In a complicated maze,
an animal cannot see the entire path to the goal and is bound
to show trial and error. Thus the maze does not give the ex-
perimenter a chance to see whether insight is possible for the
animal. Kohler's chimpanzees solved with ease any problem
which consisted literally in a roundabout path to a goal, if only
the whole path were in clear view. Other kinds of "detours"
gave them more trouble. ^VixwY^v-e ^ ** A*>^<*CSC^.

While a chimpanzee is confined in a barred cage, a banana" is
placed on the ground outside at too great a distance to be
reached by the hand, but with a string tied to it and laid along
the ground to the cage. This single-string problem is easily
solved, but if several strings are laid on the ground, all extend-
ing in the general direction of the banana but only one being
attached to it, a chimpanzee often pulls the wrong string.

a Kohler was anticipated in this criticism of Thorndike's work by the
English scientist, L. T. Hobhouse (1901), who devised a variety of experi-
ments similar to those later used by Kohler, tried them on several kinds of
animals, and reached the conclusion that what he called "practical judg-
ment," the ability to respond to patterns and relations, was within the power
of animals such as the cat, dog, and monkey.

i 4 4 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY
Prompt insight is prevented by the complexity of the visual

pattern and by the animal's haste.

The reaching-stick problem is simple when a suitable stick is
laid on the ground between the cage and the banana, but be-
comes difficult if the stick is placed far away from the banana,
especially if it lies at the back of the cage. A compact visual
pattern is apparently a great help in gaining quick insight.

The chimpanzees learned rather quickly to use a box as a
stool for reaching a suspended banana, but the use of two boxes,
one to be piled on the other for reaching a still higher objective,
was a difficult problem though solved (with some assistance)
by several of the animals. While they evidently appreciated
the value of a high stool, they showed no insight in the matter
of stability of construction, being content to pile the boxes care-
lessly and depend on their own agility to reach the objective
before the structure collapsed.

^The prize performance was the solution by the most intelli-
gent chimpanzee of the jointed-stick problem. He was given
two pieces of bamboo which could be fitted together into a long
stick long enough to reach a banana that could not be reached
by either stick alone. After an hour spent in fruitless angling
with the single sticks and other trial-and-error behavior, he gave
up but continued idly playing with the two sticks. Happening
to get them jointed together he immediately used the long stick
for pulling in the banana and other things as well ; and next
day he showed almost perfect retention of what he had learned.

The behavioral evidences of insight in these cases are (1)
the sudden transition from helplessness to mastery; (2) the
good retention; and (3) what psychologists call "transfer."
Insight gained in one situation can sometimes be carried over
and utilized in another situation which has the same pattern or
structure though not the same details. If the idea of piling
boxes to reach a banana has been grasped, it should be trans-
ferable to a situation where a trunk and a suitcase are available
for reaching an apple. Insightful behavior does not consist in
separate responses to separate stimuli but in an integrated re-
sponse to the pattern of the whole situation. A problem

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY 145

amounts to a "gap" in the present situation, insight amounts to
perceiving the gap, and insightful behavior closes the gap.

Insiglij ordinarily means a seeing below the surface of
things, but this could not have been Kohler's meaning, since he
insisted that the essential structure of the, situation should be
aboveboard and open to inspection. Insight may of course go
much deeper, but it consists essentially in seeing the situation
as an organized whole. A rudimentary form of perceptual in-
sight is illustrated by a "transposition expcijrnerjt," introduced
by Lashley and independently by Kohler, and much employed
by still other animal psychologists. An animal is first trained t(5
find food in a box marked by a certain shade of gray. Two
boxes are always placed before him, A and B, box A being
marked with a patch of light gray paper, box B with a medium
gray. The two boxes vary in position, but the food is always
in B, the darker of the two. When the animal has learned to
choose B consistently, box A is removed and a new box C,
darker than B, is substituted. Will the animal still choose B,
responding to the same specific stimulus as before? As a rule
he chooses C, the darker of the two visible boxes. What he has
learned, therefore, is to choose the darker of two, not a particu-
lar shade of gray. He perceives the lighter-darker pattern or
relation, and chooses the darker term of the relation.

This whole experiment does not meet Kohler's requirement
that the problem should be openly presented to the animal, for
the food is not visible and there is nothing to indicate, at the
outset, where the food will be, if anywhere. The animal has to
try one box or another and run the chance of making an error.
He usually makes many errors before settling down to a con-
sistent choice. But what he learns is response to a relation be-
tween stimuli (or objects) and not response to an isolated stim-
ulus. Insight in this rudimentary form consists in perceiving
relations, perceiving them well enough to be governed by them
in behavior.

In this experiment and many others the animal (or human
being) learns by trial and error, or at least after some trial and
error. Whether the trial-and-error behavior makes any con-
tribution to the solution of a problem, or is simply so much

146 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

waste motion, is a question for experimental study, and there
have been many studies devoted to the question. We cannot
pause to discuss this matter thoroughly, but will merely con-
sider the relation of trial and error to Gestalt theory. The Ge-
stalt psychologists speak very disparagingly of trial-and-error
behavior and seem to regard it as waste motion for the most
part, though they admit that sometimes a blind action of the
animal changes the situation in such a way as to give him a
clearer view (Kohler, 1927, page 193). It would seem that
trial-and-error behavior must always be needed whenever it oc-
curs. For the Gestalt theory is not that we ought to organize
the field but that we always do organize it. The field, includ-
ing the ego and the behavioral environment, organizes itself,
and behavior is governed by the resulting organization. If the
behavior consists in a false move, that error was dictated by the
organized field. The move was an error because the behavioral
environment did not conform to the real or geographical en-
vironment. The false move makes some change in the environ-
ment or in the individual's relation to the environment, resulting
in a new organization and a new move. When the successful
move occurs, it occurs because the just preceding false move has
so altered the behavioral environment as to make it conform to
the real environment. Therefore the last of the false moves is
necessary for insight. And we could argue back in this vein,
step by step, and reach the conclusion that the whole series of
false moves is necessary, given the organism and environment
as they are at the outset.

Thorndike's cat in the puzzle box, for example, sees the
space between two particular bars as a way out, but on trying
to squeeze through there finds it not a way out after all. The
cat's behavioral environment is changed to that extent, but sev-
eral other false leads may have to be explored and eliminated
before the door button stands out as something to be tried.
Even this successful move does not usually clarify the situation
completely for a cat, her perception of such a device as a door
button being pretty vague.

While the Gestalt psychologists have demonstrated the value
of insight, they have not disproved the value of trial and error.

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY 147

By trial and error is meant exploratory or manipulatory behav-
ior that is relatively "blind" in the sense of lacking foresight
of the result of a move that is tried. Such blind exploration is
inevitable when the situation itself is blind, as it often is in real
life, animal or human; and even when the "geographical" situ-
ation is completely open to inspection, the "behavioral" situation
may be different because of poor observation. By insight is
meant good observation, perception of the situation as a whole,
or perception of those parts of the situation that provide a route
to the 'goal.

If it is true that problem solution depends on perceptual or-
ganization and so on the field forces present at the moment so
that errors as well as genuine solutions are bound to occur is
there nothing that can be done to improve man's ways of attack-
ing his problems, nothing to make his thinking more produc-
tive? A teacher can so present problems as to favor insight and
can foster in his pupils a genuine problem-solving attitude ; and
the human individual can be his own teacher, once he grasps the
principles of Gestalt psychology. Such was Wertheimer's mes-
sage in his last book (1945). His case material ranged from
the solution of simple geometrical problems by young children
up to a personal study with Einstein of the thought processes
that produced the theory of relativity. At all levels Wertheimer
found examples of "genuine, fine, clean, direct, productive proc-
esses," though he also found "factors working against those
processes as, e.g., blind habits, certain kinds of school drill,
bias, or special interests" (1945, page 189)^

Wertheimer's advice for one who would be a productive
thinker is to let the whole dominate the parts and never to lose
sight of the problem as a whole even while devoting the neces-
sary attention to details. Avoid "piecemeal" thinking, which is
sure to be blind. Concentrate on the "structure" of the situa-
tion, get that clearly in view and locate the gap in it which
constitutes the problem. In scrutinizing details, be always
"looking for structural rather than piecemeal truth," asking
yourself what role each detail plays in the structure of the whole
situation.

The science of logic, as Wertheimer and many others have

148 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

pointed out, tests the validity of a conclusion but does not show
the actual process of reasoning that leads a thinker to his con-
clusion. For example, the logical demonstration of a proposi-
tion as customarily given in a textbook on geometry enables you
to meet the objections of any skeptic and prove to him that the
proposition is valid; but if you work out the demonstration as
an "original," your own thought process is very different from
the formal demonstration given in the book. Other psycholo-
gists have emphasized the exploratory, zigzag, trial-and-error
process that goes on in actual reasoning ; such terms were very
distasteful to Wertheimer, who emphasized instead the need
for grouping and regrouping, organizing and reorganizing, cen-
tering and recentering the data. You may have to change your
point of view, but you should always face toward the goal and
take no step blindly. Proceed from above downward, from
the whole to the parts. The piecemeal attack is sometimes very
painstaking and conscientious, but it is blind, stupid, slavish,
pedantic.

Wertheimer experimented in teaching children how to find
the area of a rectangle by regarding it as divided into little
squares so many rows, each made up a certain number of
squares, so that the area could be found by multiplying the num-
ber of squares in a row by the number of rows, i.e., by multi-
plying the base by the altitude. When he was sure that the
child had a "structural" understanding of the area of a rectangle
he presented an oblique parallelogram, usually a long, slender
one, and asked the child how the area of the parallelogram
could be found, suggesting that it be compared with a rectan-
gle. Many older children, as well as adults, gave the "associa-
tionist" type of answer: "I haven't learned that yet," or, "I
used to know that but I've forgotten." But some, even of the
younger children, reached a "fine, genuine, original" solution.
They saw that the middle portion of the parallelogram was like
a rectangle and that only the oblique ends were troublesome;
and then they saw that one end could be taken off by a vertical
cut and fitted on at the other end so as to make a complete rec-
tangle out of the parallelogram.

Wertheimer (and also Katona, 1940) experimented with a

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY 149

variety of mathematical and quasi-mklhematical problems, seek-
ing methods of leading children to see into the problems and not
depend on blind following of rules. They believe that school
teachers tend to depend too much on authority and on blind,
repetitious drill in the application of authoritarian rules. They
believe that in this way children are "educated" to depend on
rules and not on their own intelligence. They believe that the
associationist and connectionist psychology, applied to educa-
tion, supports the traditional emphasis on drill, and that only
the Ge&alt psychology offers any hope of improvement^^^^

Some facts, to be sure, like the names of objects, are just
facts and have to be learned by association strengthened b)
repetition. "Repetition is useful, but continuous use of me-
chanical repetition also has harmful effects. It is dangerous
because it easily induces habits of sheer mechanized action,
blindness, tendencies to perform slavishly instead of thinking,
instead of facing a problem freely" (Wertheimer, 1945, page.
112).

Trial and error, in Wertheimer's view, can play no part in
productive thinking, except as an interference. He insists that
it is possible to move straight toward the solution of a problem,
"never losing sight of the deeper issue, never getting lost in
petty details, in detours, bypaths" (page 123). Progress may
be slow and hesitant at times, but never blind or dependent on
chance successes. It is only necessary "to look at the situation
freely, open-mindedly, viewing the whole, trying to discover,
to realize how the problem and the situation are related" (page
102). Often it will be necessary to take a fresh point of view
so as to get a new perspective. Even a "whole-view" may prove
to be superficial or one-sided, and even a constant urge toward
the goal may blind the thinker to the possibilities of the given
situation. Wertheimer reports in some detail two examples of
his own solution of mathematical problems, and he insists that
trial and error played no part in his thinking, even though many
hours or days were required to reach a solution. "There was
no trial and error with regard to formulas, no trying of hy-
potheses. . . . Each step was a step in a consistent line of
thinking; there were no arbitrary steps, no blind trial and er-

i 5 o CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

ror" (pages 155, 159). In spite of this strong assertion, there
are instances in the reports of his trying a lead that he had to
abandon because it was getting nowhere. In his interesting
analysis of Einstein's progress toward the theory of relativity,
again, there are clear instances of the same sort. "For years
Einstein tried to clarify the problem by studying and trying to
change the Maxwell equations. He did not succeed. ... In
whatever way he tried to unify the question of mechanical move-
ment with the electromagnetic phenomena, he got into difficul-
ties. . . . But although these attempts did not lead to a
solution, they were by no means blind. At that stage it was
wholly reasonable to test such possibilities" (pages 171, 188).
K No one, certainly, would accuse Einstein of stupidity or of
trying leads without some good reason. But he was "blind" in
one important respect : he could not see his way through to his
goal. Everyone is blind in this respect when confronted by a
genuine problem, for if he could see through from the start to
the finish there would be no problem. Even in mathematical
problems such as Wertheimer used in his experiments, some
exploration is necessary; and in concrete matters of fact every-
one agrees that exploration is necessary. Now when you ex
plore you do not know in advance what you are going to find.
You may find what you want or you may not. Even when you
find nothing of positive value, you at least eliminate possibilities
that looked promising at the start.

Wertheimer's advice to the would-be productive thinker is
all to the good, even though he does not succeed in deriving
from Gestalt principles any sure way of being productive all
the time. The "field forces" will not always keep you out of
blind alleys. On the contrary such factors as proximity and
similarity are responsible for many misleading first impressions.
The tendency to closure must sometimes be resisted for fear of
adopting premature conclusions (pages 110, 195). "Good fig-
ure" is something to be found rather than something given in a
problematic situation. "Set" is splendid when it takes the form
of an "attitude of looking for the objective structural require-
ments of a situation, . . . facing the issue freely, going ahead
with confidence and courage" (page 64). But set is a danger-

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY 151

ous handicap when it takes the form of excessive eagerness to
reach the goal or the form of a blind reliance on habitual rou-
tine procedures (pages 113, 195). The recall of past experi-
ence can be a great help in understanding a novel situation, but
it is only too likely to lead to a piecemeal attack or to a super-
ficial view based on the apparent familiarity of the present situ-
ation. In short the field forces operate to produce errors as welj
as genuine solutions.

Wertheimer's main contention, after al^js^thai^humaruhe-
ings_desire^o_ think clearly^ and are able To do so. "To live in a
fog ... is for many people an unbearable state of affairs.
There is a tendency to structural clearness, surveyability, to
truth as against petty views" (page 199). And according to
Gestalt theory, as opposed to the skeptical philosophy of Hume
and the associationists, truth is attainable if we approach our
problems "from above" and resolutely aim at structural under-
standing. To see evidences of clear thinking in children espe-
cially, or in his students, gave Wcrtheimer great joy. He was,
as Kohler assures us (1944), a man of "extraordinary mind"
and also "an unusually good man."

Lewin's Field Theory

Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) may be counted either as an adher-
ent of Gestalt psychology or as the founder of a closely related
school. He began his career and chose his line of work before
the Gestalt debut in 1912, but was later associated with
Wertheimer and Kohler at the University of Berlin, where he
studied and taught before migrating to the United States in
1933. For ten years he was professor of child psychology at
the State University of Iowa, and here, as previously in Berlin,
he attracted and trained a considerable number of active ad-
herents.

Lewin began his scientific career as an associationist, but
with a particular interest in motives and will. His early work
(1917, 1922) convinced him that the association theory re-
quired some radical revision. Associations, he said, were not
motors, sources of energy, but merely constraints, links, con-

i 5 2 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

nections, like the couplings between the cars of a railroad train
which do nothing except transmit the energy supplied by the
locomotive. You have strong associations, for example, be-
tween common objects and their names, but these associations
do not force you to name every object you see. If you have
some motive for naming them, the associations enable you to do
so easily; but without some motive the associations have no
driving force. Even as passive couplings, associations are nev-
ertheless of great importance, according to Lewin, and in this
respect he diverged from the views of the major Gestalt psy-
chologists who sought to get away from the notion of machine-
like links or connections and to explain memory as well as
perception in terms of dynamics. Lewin said much later ( 1940,
page. 16) :

Psychology cannot try to explain everything with a single construct,
such as association, instinct, or gestalt. A variety of constructs has to
be used. These should be interrelated, however, in a logically precise
manner.

Throughout his three decades of psychological activity
Lewin consistently devoted himself to what we may broadly
call the motivation of human behavior. & Associative machinery
ana instinctive machinery as well must be activated by driving
forces, by needs and quasi-needs, the latter being temporary in-
terests or intentions. This line of investigation differed con-
siderably from the studies of perception and problem solving
characteristic of the older Gestalt psychologists, who perhaps
felt that the time was not ripe for such an extension, though
we find Koffka using Lewin's results in his own attempt to
write a comprehensive Gestalt psychology. Again, while Lewin
had much to say of psychological forces, he did not attempt to
relate them closely to physical forces, nor did he show much
interest in the "isomorphism" of direct experience with brain
dynamics (see Kohler, 1938, page 357; Koffka, 1935, pages
4-7-48). His interests led toward social rather than physiologi-
cal psychology. The "field" of which Lewin had a great deal
to say is not the brain field isomorphic with the individual's di-
rect experience, but rather the environment containing one or
more individuals. At least that is the general impression one

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY 153

gets from his published work. He does, however, regard the
person as a field containing parts in interaction. He says
(1940, pages 33, 36):

The possibilities of a "field theory" in the realm of action, emotioji,
personality arejirmly established The basic statements of a field theory
are that (a) behavior has to be derived from a totality of coexisting
facts, (b) these coexisting facts have the character of a "dynamic field"
in so far as the state of any part of this field depends on every other
part of the field. . . . According to field theory, behavior depends neither
on the .past nor on the future but on the present field. . . . This is in
contrast both to the belief of teleology that the future is the cause of
behavior, and that of associationism that the past is the cause of bejiavjojv

Lewin's field is thus the "life space^ ^containing trie person
and his psychological environment" (1938, page 2). The psy-
chological (or behavioral) environment is of course the en-
vironment as perceived and understood by the person; but,
more than that, it is the environment as related to his present
needs and quasi-needs. Many objects which are perceived are
of no present concern to him and so exist only in the back-
ground of his psychological environment. Other objeats have
positive or negative "valence" positive if they promise to meet
his present needs, negative if they threaten injury. Objects
of positive valence attract him, while objects of negative va-
lence repel him. The attraction is a force or "vector" directed
toward the object, the repulsion a vector directed away from
the object. A vector tends to produce "locomotion" in a certain
direction. Often two or more vectors are acting on the person
at the same time, and then the locomotion is some kind of a
"resultant." The locomotion called for by the vectors is often
impeded or completely blocked by a ' 'barrier. " J^Z^^X+L*^

Some of these concepts call for a little further explanation.
Locomotion includes any sort of approach or withdrawal, as
for example turning the eyes toward a beautiful object or away
from an ugly one, listening to agreeable music or attending to
something else if the music is uninteresting. When you are
planning what to do tomorrow, your life space is not the room
where you are now sitting but rather the place where you expect
to be tomorrow, and your present locomotion in that anticipated

i 5 4 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

environment consists in deciding on one course of action rather
than another, according as the resultant of present vectors im-
pels you toward one or the other.

Barriers are very important in the theory. A barrier is a
"constraint" which has no valence at the outset and exerts no
force until force is exerted on it, when it offers a certain amount
of resistance. It may yield when force is applied to it or it may
prove to resist your utmost efforts. How rigid it is you can
discover only by trying it out, by exploration. A box stands in
the way of getting something you want, but how heavy the box
may be you have to discover by trying to move it. Some plan
of yours may not entirely please your friend, but how much re-
sistance he will put up you have still to discover. (Evidently
some trial and error are necessary when an unexplored barrier
stands in the way to any goal. ) A barrier found to be impassa-
ble is likely to acquire a negative valence such as leads to an
angry attack or execration.

An awakened need is a state of tension in the person, a readi-
ness for action but so far without any very specific direction. A
suitable object, when found, acquires a positive valence. So a
vector is set up directing locomotion toward the object. Ex-
cessive tension (hunger, for example) may blur the individual's
perception of the environment, prevent his finding an object
of suitable valence, and so prevent the establishment of a defi-
nite vector. Again, frustration by a barrier, by increasing ten-
sion, may result in random or ill-directed activity (1938, page
160).

Lewin felt the need of some kind of mathematics to foster
exact reasoning on problems of motivation and behavior. Sta-
tistics, so much used by psychologists, did not meet his require-
ments because he wished to deal adequately with the "single
case" so as to predict an individual's behavior in a concrete
situation ( 1935, page 68) . He needed two things : some means
of mapping the life space at a given moment so as to show all
the possible goals and routes to the goals; and some means of
taking account of the motives determining which one of the
possibilities will be chosen by the individual. No existing form
of mathematics was exactly suited to Lewin's requirements, but
he found he could do fairly well with a combination of topology

GJESTALT PSYCHOLOGY

and vector analysis topology for mapping the Iffe space, vector
analysis for taking care of the motives (1936, 1938, 1940; see
also Leeper, 1943). He used only the rudiments of these two
branches of mathematics but elaborated his own system both
in the form of diagrams and in that of equations. One advan-
tage of mathematical treatment is that the symbols used must
be carefully defined. In order to apply mathematics to a con-
crete problem, we must define our symbols (1) conceptually,
by relating one symbol to another, as for example by relating
the concepts of need, valence, and vector to each other; and
also (2) operationally, by indicating how the facts covered by
our concepts are to be observed and measured. The operational
definition enables us to secure our data, while the conceptual
definition enables us to treat the data mathematically (1938,
page 13). The diagrams and equations have some value at
least in laying the situation distinctly before die investigator^
They should also suggest hypotheses to be tested by experiment,
and Lewin found his diagrams useful in this respect, as his pu-
pils have also. One difficulty is that the resultant of two vectors
cannot be found in the ordinary way by the parallelogram of
forces. If a person sees one desirable goal to the north of him
and another equally desirable one to the east, he does not ad-
vance eagerly to the northeast. He makes a choice. Probably
he "restructures the field," sees it so that the two vectors are no
longer equal in force. But about all that can ordinarily be done
with divergent vectors is to regard them as directly opposed to
each other, so that only their relative strength needs to be con-
sidered. Even with this and other limitations, Lewin's mathe-
matics is regarded by many psychologists as a good start toward
fertile experimentation in the study of motivation. V^;^f w

However that may be, Lewin was certainly ingenious in de-
vising novel types of experiment in motivation. The following
problems, among many others, have been fruitfully attacked
by him and his students : tension toward completing a task that
has been interrupted; the release of tension by a substitute ac-
tivity when the original task cannot be resumed ; level of aspira-
tion; satiation; anger; frustration; effects of autocratic and
democratic atmospheres in work and play groups. (For ref-
erences and summaries see Lewin, 1935, 1940, 1947.)

CHAPTER 6

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS

We come now to a school of psychology which did not, like
those we have studied, originate in psychology itself. It origi-
nated in medical practice and from the effort to find some cure
for the neuroses, some thorough scientific treatment for these
baffling conditions. It is a school of psychiatry in the broad
sense of that term. But it has built so impressive a theory about
its practice as to challenge the attention of all psychologists. It
could be called a psychology of behavior, though it is removed
very far from behavioristic methods and concepts. It some-
times uses the name "depth psychology," because of its concern
with unconscious motives and conflicts. It has sometimes called
itself "emotion psychology/' so marking its revolt against the
intellectualistic emphasis of much nineteenth century psychol-
ogy. It has little use for the academic psychology of the human
or animal laboratory or for the mental tests of the psychologists.
Learning, perception, thinking favorite topics of the psycholo-
gists have appeared to the psychoanalysts as relatively super-
ficial or at least as of little use in their medical practice. Their
revolt against the academic psychology, then, has so far con-
sisted mostly in leaving it severely alone.

As a movement within psychiatry, psychoanalysis was a re-
volt against the dominant * 'somatic" tendency of the nineteenth
century (page 8) and a springing into new life of the "psy-
chic" tendency. Convinced at last that brain lesions could not
be found in some mental disorders, psychiatrists were turning
to the patient's emotional stress, weakness of will, suggestibility,
and irrational habits. The history of this psychiatric develop-
ment is a story by itself. It is partly the history of hypnotism.
Brought to medical and scientific attention by Mesmer in 1780,
hypnotism led a checkered career for a century, being associated

156

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 157

with a great deal of charlatanism and almost universally re-
jected by the medical profession until the days of the famous
rival schools of Paris and Nancy, along in the sixties, seventies,
and eighties of the nineteenth century. The Paris school was
dominated by Charcot (1825-1893), the leading neurologist of
his day, a striking personality and a great teacher. Charcot
made a special study of hysteria. He found that persons sub-
ject to hysteric fits could also be put into deep hypnosis, and he
used this fact in treating hysteria, as well as for interpreting
hypnosis, which he inferred to be a peculiar pathological state of
the organism. This view was vigorously opposed by the Nancy
school, who taught that a mild form of hypnosis could be in-
duced in nearly all normal subjects and regarded it as simply a
passive and receptive state produced by suggestion. They used
it in the treatment of neurotic conditions. The strife between
the two rival French schools was very keen.

Charcot had many pupils who became prominent in the study
and treatment of the neuroses. Morton Prince of Boston
(1854-1929) used hypnosis and suggestion in the treatment of
"double personality," and is well known to psychologists for his
experiments on split consciousness and for his theory of the
"co-conscious." Pierre Janet of Paris (1859-1947) performed
many experiments on automatic writing and similar unconscious
or dissociated performances (1889). In the nineties and later
he devoted himself intensively to the study and treatment of the
neuroses. Following up Charcot's work, he found that hysteri-
cal patients were able under hypnosis to recall experiences that
seemed in the waking state to be entirely forgotten (1892).
Emotional shocks were thus recalled, and particular symptoms
such as the hysterical paralysis of one arm were traced back to
their source. Moreover, if during hypnosis suggestions were
made by the physician to the effect that "that's all past and gone
now," the hysterical symptoms connected with the emotional
shock disappeared (though the patient was likely to develop
other symptoms later, originating in other emotional shocks).
Janet went on to investigate other forms of neurosis, the
phobias and obsessions, which he grouped under the inclusive
name of psychasthenia and treated by re-education rather than

158 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

by hypnosis and suggestion ( 1903). He held that the neuroses
are due fundamentally to a condition of "low mental tension"
or inability to get up enough energy to meet the emergencies
and difficulties of life. Given this primary condition of low
tension and general feeling of weakness and insufficiency, the
individual would react to particular difficulties by developing
particular symptoms. Janet's work, slightly antedating psycho-
analysis, was beginning to exert considerable influence on both
psychology and psychiatry when it was overtaken by the more
dramatic conceptions of Freud and rather thrown into the
shade.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), though a native of what is
now Czechoslovakia, lived in Vienna from the age of 4 until
the Nazi invasion of 1938. His interest in psychological prob-
lems was late in developing. As a young boy he became much
absorbed in reading Bible history, and this interest remained
with him and came to the fore in some of his last writings.
In the classical preparatory school, the "gymnasium," he was
a brilliant student, evidently suited to an intellectual career along
some line, but what line it should be was not clear to him. Civi-
lization, human culture, and human relationships attracted him
most, rather than natural science, but Darwin's theory of evolu-
tion, then new and much in the air, opened up a scientific
approach to the understanding of the world. After some hesi-
tation, then, Freud registered as a medical student at the Uni-
versity of Vienna, having indeed no desire to be a physician, but
aiming at the basic sciences. He found physiology most to his
liking and worked for six years in the physiological laboratory.
Of the clinical branches, only psychiatry had much appeal for
him. Finding that he had no immediate chance of earning his
livelihood in pure science, he decided to go into medical practice
and in 1882 switched from the physiological laboratory to the
hospital, where he specialized as much as possible on the nervous
system, its anatomy and organic diseases such as paralyses,
aphasia, and the effects of brain injuries in children. The nerv-
ous diseases seemed to offer a good field not yet well developed
in Vienna. The fame of Charcot was heard from the distance,
and Freud in 1885 went over to Paris and studied with the mas-

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 159

ter for a year. He was much impressed by Charcot's use of
hypnosis in the treatment of hysteria. Charcot scarcely antici-
pated the psychological views regarding hysteria reached by
either of his pupils, Freud or Janet, but he had got far away
from the old view that it was essentially a woman's disease (the
name being derived from the Greek hysterOj the womb), and
he was able to demonstrate the condition in male patients. On
returning to Vienna Freud reported to his medical colleagues
on Charcot's methods and results, including male hysteria, and
was ridiculed by his colleagues for accepting such an absurdity.
A few such rebuffs confirmed Freud's already formed convic-
tion that his place was bound to be "in the opposition."

It was at this time, in 1886, when Freud was just about 30,
that he married and settled down in Vienna as a nerve special-
ist engaged in private practice. Since the neuroses were a
neglected field in Vienna, he built up his practice in that direc-
tion. In hypnosis he had a method of treatment which pro-
duced remarkable cures in many hysteric patients. But he soon
found difficulties with the method. For one thing, the "cures"
were apt to be only temporary, and, for another, many neurotic
patients could not be hypnotized. This indifferent success that
he was meeting led him to make another pilgrimage over to
France, this time to examine the work of the Nancy school,
which claimed to hypnotize practically all comers and to have
great success in the use of curative suggestions given to hypno-
tized patients. He was somewhat disappointed to be informed
by the Nancy doctors that their success was not nearly so good
with private patients as with the charity patients in the clinic.
It seemed that the private patients were too sophisticated to ac-
cept the suggestions wholeheartedly. Freud returned to Vienna
and continued work on his private patients with the hypnotic
method, though with only moderate success. He greatly de-
sired to find some more reliable method.

Development of the Psychoanalytic Method

The name psychoanalysis, as Freud later insisted, should
properly be restricted to the theory and practice developed and

160 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

named by him. Hypnosis, as he employed it at first after the
examples of Charcot and the Nancy school, was a form of men-
tal healing or psychotherapy but could not be called mental
analysis since it did not undertake to analyze or investigate the
patient's mental condition or the experiences that gave rise to
the maladjustment. Janet was beginning to use hypnosis for
such analytic purposes, but Freud owed nothing to Janet, whose
work he got to know only later. Freud did owe a great deal to
his friend Joseph Breuer (1842-1925). Breuer was an emi-
nent physiologist who had made important contributions to the
study of respiration and of the semicircular canals, but who was
devoting himself mostly to general medical practice. Quite
incidentally he had undertaken to treat a severe case of hysteria,
a gifted young woman who was incapacitated by a whole swarm
of symptoms paralyses, memory losses, and states of mental
confusion. Breuer treated this patient by use of hypnosis, and
he found as Janet did that under hypnosis a patient could re-
member emotional experiences that had given rise to specific
symptoms. But Breuer's patient led him one step further to-
ward psychoanalysis : she reported that after remembering an
emotional experience and "talking it out" with him while under
hypnosis she then found herself free from the particular symp-
tom that dated from this experience. Breuer followed up this
suggestion from the patient and succeeded after many such ses-
sions in getting all her symptoms talked out and "abreacted,"
as he said, so that she was able to resume her normal life.
Freud took a keen interest in the new method and tried it out
successfully on other patients. Breuer and Freud collaborated
in publishing their results in 1893 and 1895. They called their
new method one of mental catharsis, because it worked by elimi-
nating sources of disturbance from the patient's emotional sys-
tem.

In spite of this promising beginning Breuer refused to
continue this work or to make any further use of his cathartic
method. For one thing, he was fully occupied with his general
practice and preferred not to branch out into the treatment of
hysteria, and there was apparently another reason which became
clear to Freud later. Breuer's patient, when the long series of

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 161

hypnotic sessions was about to terminate in complete cure, de-
clared that she could not bear to part from him because she had
fallen violently in love with him. This unexpected abreaction
disconcerted Breuer and led him to conclude that the new
method created difficulties for the physician who wished to
maintain a strictly professional attitude. Freud soon ran into
the same difficulty but was not so easily disturbed. Pondering
the psychology of the situation, he concluded that it was not his
own personality that was attracting these women but that he
was being taken as a substitute for the real and original object
of their love. The love was simply transferred to him. If he
could continue to treat them while maintaining the professional
attitude, he might even make use of this transference as a step
toward cure. Besides the loving and dependent attitude of the
patient toward the analyst, a hostile, resentful attitude emerged
from time to time, but this rebellious attitude also could be re-
garded as transferred to the analyst from previous authorita-
tive persons such as the patient's parents in childhood. It was
years before the theory of transference was fully worked out,
but in time the techniques for managing and using it came to
have a dominant place in psychoanalytic practice.

Freud believed that the use of hypnosis made the transfer-
ence difficult to manage, and that was one reason for his de-
cision to give up hypnosis. Another reason was that he desired
to extend his practice so as to treat neurotic persons who were
not easily or deeply hypnotized. Hypnosis was a great aid in
quickly recovering the lost memories, but even in the waking
state it should be possible for the patient to get at them if only
enough effort were applied. He still had his patients relax
physically on a couch while he sat behind them where he could
watch without being watched. Then he urged them to search
their memory and kept insisting that they could remember the
origin of their present troubles if they persisted long enough.
This was a strenuous procedure for both doctor and patient, and
not always successful.

Freud was then led to take a most important forward step in
the development of his method. He got his patients to relax
mentally as well as physically. Instead of urging them to search

1 62 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

in memory for the source of their trouble, he told them to
relax and let ideas come up spontaneously. Borrowing a
psychological term he called this the method of "free associa-
tion," while admitting that the association was not entirely free
since it was controlled to some extent by the whole situation of
the patient on the couch in the doctor's office. The patient is
not making a social call but has come for relief from his neuro-
sis. So the ideas that come up spontaneously will be concerned
directly or indirectly with the patient's personal problems. The
doctor relaxes his firm hold on the reins and gives the patient
his (or her) head. The doctor makes very few comments and
tries to interfere as little as possible with the free course of the
patient's thoughts. But the patient must accept the "funda-
mental rule of psychoanalysis" he must promise to give
prompt expression to every idea that comes up, however embar-
rassing, unimportant, irrelevant, or even foolish the idea may
appear.

Freud soon took another step which always seemed to him
very important in the development of psychoanalysis. Some-
times it happened during the process of free association that the
patient remembered and reported a dream, and Freud found
that the dream made an excellent starting point for free asso-
ciation. The patient recounts a dream of the night before and
then lets his mind play freely about each item of the dream.
The items are followed up remorselessly in the hope of unearth-
ing significant memories which will fit together and reveal the
"complex" from which the patient is suffering. Freud believed
that the "manifest dream," which the patient could remember,
was a mere disguise for the real or "latent dream," and that
free association would lead from the manifest toward the latent
dream. In dreaming, he believed, one is attempting to find
some gratification for unfulfilled wishes. They may be current
daytime wishes as when the polar explorer dreams of warm,
green fields, or they may be deep-lying but unfulfilled wishes
dating from childhood. Believing that an analyst should him-
self be analyzed, Freud undertook a self-analysis by study of
his own dreams through free association, meanwhile working
out an elaborate theory of dreams which he published in 1900

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 163

as Die Traumdeutung (The interpretation of dreams) which he
always regarded as his greatest work. His most interesting
book is perhaps the Psycho pathology of everyday life (first
German edition, 1901) in which he applies the method of free
association to the analysis of slips of the tongue and lapses of
various kinds and shows how they can reveal hidden wishes and
complexes. From that time his work began to awaken the
lively if dubious interest of many psychologists.

Equjpped with his new technique of free association and
dream analysis, Freud proceeded to treat neurotic individuals
with considerable success. By reviving forgotten emotional
experiences he succeeded in removing hysterical symptoms and
neurotic fears and inhibitions. But it often happened that cases
dismissed as cured came back later with slightly different com-
plaints. Such has been the experience of all who have attempted
to cure the neuroses. Freud, as was usual with him, far from
being baffled, remained confident of the value of his method and
concluded that he simply had not pushed his analysis deep
enough and far enough back in the patient's life as if he had
so far penetrated only the outer layers of the neurosis without
reaching its core. Instead of being satisfied when he had re-
covered recent memories, he felt himself gradually forced back
to childhood and even to infancy.

At first Freud believed, with Charcot and Breuer, that the
neurosis originated in some particular emotional shock that the
patient had experienced. Therefore he probed further and fur-
ther back in the patient's forgotten memories to find the shock-
ing episode. Many of the neurotic women who consulted him
were brought by dream analysis to recall emotional shocks of
later childhood. They thought they remembered being sexually
attacked or seduced by their fathers, uncles, or older brothers.
Shocked himself by the apparent frequency of such occurrences,
Freud took occasion to check up on some of these stories and
found that they had no basis in fact. This spurious result of
his dream analysis really baffled him for a time, but he soon
recovered his poise. What the patient had sincerely remem-
bered, he concluded, was some daydream or fantasy of child-
hood or early youth. Such an imaginary episode might be as

164 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

important in the patient's life history as if it had been an ob-
jective event, because it embodied a childish wish. The day-
dream of later childhood pointed back to an unfulfilled wish of
earlier childhood. If the analysis could be pushed away back
to that wish of early childhood, the core of the neurosis would
be reached. If dream analysis could enable the adult patient to
recover the lost memories of early childhood and to live over
again the wishes of that period, a radical cure of the neurosis
could be achieved.

Push the analysis back to early childhood? But that is a
practical impossibility, if it means that the adult by any amount
of free association and dream analysis is to remember the events
of his first few years with any approach to completeness. Only
a few scraps of the rich experience of those first years are ever
recovered. However perhaps the intellectual recall of those
early events is not the essential requirement. What is needed
may be, rather, the revival of the emotional attitude of early
childhood. Even a very scrappy recall of the early experiences
may suffice to bring back that attitude and make the adult a
little child again, emotionally. If this childish attitude, this
unrealistic desire, is now brought out into the open, the neurosis
will be revealed in its true infantile colors and perhaps give way
to a better adjustment under the guiding hand of the analyst.
Something like this was Freud's view of the psychoanalytic cure
of a neurosis.

When the patient thus revives his childish emotional atti-
tudes, without clear memory of the persons and events of his
childhood, the door is thrown wide open to transference. He
directs his emotions toward the analyst. If the child's father
was the object of love and also of defiance, the analyst as a
father substitute becomes the object of the transferred emo-
tional attitudes. Sometimes the patient is full of love and en-
thusiasm for the analyst, but at other times he shows extreme
rebellion and even hate. Both the positive and the negative
transference reveal phases of the child's attitude towprd his fa-
ther, and both phases must be worked through with the help of
the experienced and understanding father substitute, the ana-
lyst. As the analysis approaches its goal, positive transference

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 165

is all to the fore. The patient would be left with a childish de-
pendence on the analyst unless one further step were taken, con-
sisting in the weaning of the patient from the transference.
The childish desires, now freed from their original objects,
must not be allowed to remain fixed on the analyst but must
find an outlet in harmony with the present situation of the adult
patient.

Freud laid great stress on the necessity of helping the patient
overcome his "resistances." Oftentimes "free association" does
not operate freely ; it seems to be blocked as if the patient were
coming dangerously near to some memory or idea which is too
painful or terrible or shameful to be faced as if some emo-
tional attitude were stirred which he is unwilling to recognize
as his own hatred, for example, toward someone near and
dear to him, or unlimited selfishness. As a neurotic patient he
admits he is in trouble, but he still has a very good opinion of
himself and tends to repel any memory or any insight that
would shame him. By degrees, under the guidance of the ana-
lyst, he begins to face the facts, though it is a painful process.

The forgotten experiences and unadmitted desires and atti-
tudes that came to light in free association were so often of a
sexual nature that Freud early came to emphasize the predomi-
nant if not exclusive importance of sexual difficulties and con-
flicts in the causation of any neurosis. Hostility motives and
ambivalence (love and hate for the same person) also came to
light but were regarded as arising from frustration of sex de-
sires. From dream analysis he came to believe that certain
types of objects in the manifest dream were regular symbols for
sexual objects and processes. So there were regular symbols
for the male and female genital organs and for copulation, there
were father symbols and mother symbols, there were symbols
for secret love or hate. Equipped with a knowledge of these
symbols, the analyst could quickly penetrate the disguises of a
dream and discern the patient's hidden complexes. Having
thus reached a diagnosis the physician would, according to cus-
tomary medical practice, proceed at once to "prescribe." But
if he told the patient what he had discovered, he was met with
incredulity and resistance. A less authoritarian procedure had

166 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

to be devised. Apparently Freud quickly went through the
three stages which he outlined in a much later book (1920,
pages 17-18) ':

At first the endeavors of the analytic physician were confined to
divining the unconscious of which his patient was unaware, effecting a
synthesis of its components and communicating it at the right time. . . .

Since the therapeutic task was not therehy accomplished, the next
aim was to compel the patient to confirm the reconstruction through his
own memory. In this endeavor the chief emphasis was on the resist-
ances of the patient; the art now lay in unveiling these as soon as pos-
sible, in calling the patient's attention to them, and . . . teaching him
to abandon the resistances.

It became increasingly clear, however, that the aim in view, the
bringing into consciousness of the unconscious, was not fully attainable
by this method either. The patient cannot recall all of what lies re-
pressed, perhaps not even the essential part of it. ... He is obliged
rather to repeat as a current experience what is repressed. ... As a
rule the physician cannot spare the patient this phase of the cure; he
must let him live through a certain fragment of his forgotten life.

Freud's determination to effect a radical cure by penetrating
to the core of every neurosis and working back to its origin in
early childhood forced him to abandon any hope of expeditious
treatment. Three sessions a week for many months or even a
couple of years were found to be required. The single analyst
could handle only a few cases in the course of a year, and ana-
lysts could not be multiplied rapidly, since each analyst must
first be analyzed himself and then work for two years under
supervision before starting practice on his own account. Thou-
sands and thousands of neurotic persons must be deprived of
the benefits of psychoanalysis, not only now but for generations
to come. The medical schools teach many difficult subjects of
no practical use to the psychoanalyst and they train the student
against rather than for psychoanalysis by giving him respect
only for physical causes of diseases and objective methods of
diagnosis. Freud reached the conclusion that the practice of
psychoanalysis should not be limited to the medical profession;

* Quoted passages are taken from the translations of Freud's works listed
in our Bibliography, pages 259-260.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 167

it should rather be a profession on its own account (1926).
Most of Freud's followers, being medical themselves, have re-
jected this one suggestion of the master, no matter how ortho-
dox they are in other respects. As to the expanding group of
consulting psychologists, many of them doubtless make some
use of Freud's methods, but few are orthodox enough to seek
for radical cures by the "classical analysis" such as Freud pre-
scribed. They align themselves more nearly with those medical
followers of Freud who seek to simplify the treatment so as to
benefit a larger number of more or less neurotic individuals.

Even in the early days before 1913, some of Freud's follow-
ers attempted to simplify the psychoanalytic procedure by con-
centrating on the patient's present problems and maladjustments
instead of working back to childhood. Freud vigorously op-
posed any such attempt, being convinced in his own mind "that
the actual conflict of the neurotic becomes comprehensible and
solvable only if it can be traced back into the patient's past
history" (1914, page 55). The innovators accepted Freud's
decree that they were no longer entitled to call themselves psy-
choanalysts but continued to carry on under other names. Then
came the first world war with its large crop of soldiers suffering
from "shell shock/' soon better named "war neurosis.'* What
could the Army psychiatrists do for these soldiers ? There was
no time for a classical analysis reaching back into childhood,
and yet some of Freud's conceptions and procedures were found
useful. In the second world war limited psychoanalysis has
been combined with the use of hypnosis, hypnotic drugs, or
simple relaxation to get back lost memories of emotional shock
in battle (Pascal, 1947).

Of recent years and perhaps especially since Freud's death,
those who call themselves psychoanalysts and do all honor to
Freud as the father of the movement are showing considerable
freedom in modifying his methods. Not always do they ana-
lyze dreams or employ the typical free association. Not always
do they have the patient recline on a couch; sometimes they
face him as man to man, seeking to establish an atmosphere of
well-wishing and understanding, though still at the professional
level. Instead of aiming at a revival of the experiences and

i68 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

emotional attitudes of childhood, they find it better in many cases
to lead the patient's thoughts toward unconscious (unrecog-
nized) motives and attitudes in his present life. They find that
many analyses can be brought to a satisfactory termination in
much less time than Freud required (Alexander and French,
1946). They may combine psychoanalysis with some use of
hypnosis and much use of occupational and recreational therapy
(Menninger, 1938). They may even instruct selected patients
in methods of self-analysis and depend a good deal on what
these patients can do for themselves with rather infrequent
consultations with the analyst (Homey, 1942).

Consulting psychologists are naturally much interested in the
method called "nondirective therapy" which has arisen within
their own ranks. It could claim to be a lineal descendant of
psychoanalysis but is so very heretical that no one could call it
psychoanalysis, least of all the nondirective therapists them-
selves. It resembles psychoanalysis in that the client (corre-
sponding to the psychoanalyst's patient) does most of the
talking and that his talking helps him to a better adjustment. It
differs in that the therapist's remarks do not attempt to lay bare
the client's hidden motives but simply show a warm appreciation
of the client's expressed feelings with encouragement to go on
and express himself further. The therapist's aim is not even to
diagnose the client's difficulty, but rather to provide a "warm,
permissive psychological atmosphere" over a sufficient time so
that the client may achieve some insight into his difficulties and
mobilize his constructive forces for a positive advance in his
way of life. The technique is more difficult than it sounds in
this sketchy description, and also more successful than would be
expected (Rogers, 1942). In a sense, nondirective therapy has
evolved from psychoanalysis by getting rid of the medical func-
tions of authoritative diagnosis and prescription. It may also
be contrasted with the original talking-out or cathartic method
by saying that its great concern is not to eliminate disturbing
factors but to stimulate the positive, constructive tendencies of
the individual.

In the preceding account of the development of psychoanal-
ysis as a method of examining and treating neurotic patients,

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 169

Freud's theories have been left to one side. It probably would
be possible to use the methods without accepting the theories.
Freud's technical terms, standing for his theoretical concepts,
have not been introduced as yet, with the exception of transfer-
ence and resistance. These two concepts were regarded by
Freud as a direct expression of facts observed by him in the
behavior of his patients, but they do involve his interpretation
of the facts, as will appear in the next section on Freud's psy-
chological theories. It is Freud's theory rather than his method
that constitutes a school of psychology.

Freud's Earlier Psychology

Freud's interest in psychoanalytic work was twofold from
the start: he needed a practical method for treating the neu-
roses; and he hoped to make progress in his lifelong quest for
insight into the deep, underlying realities of human life. His
experience with the neuroses was promptly worked over into
psychological concepts which he found intellectually satisfactory
and used freely in describing his observations. By 1905 he had
worked out what we may call his earlier psychology, and this re-
mained the widely known psychoanalytic doctrine until 1913 and
later. About that time he began to develop a more advanced
psychology which was not intended to replace the earlier theory
except where new observations forced him to revise his earlier
views. It was intended, rather, to go deeper and to provide a
systematic, even though speculative, conceptualization of the
forces operative in individual and social behavior. .To many of
his adherents, it is safe to say, the earlier theory remains the
more significant.

We will first attempt to bring out the main elements in
Freud's earlier system. He always insisted that it was not in-
tended to be a complete system. It did not pretend to cover
most of the topics usually included in a textbook of psychology,
but aimed to explain what all other psychologists were neglect-
ing or leaving unsettled. It dealt almost wholly with motives
and their conflicts and with the effects of conflict, especially as
found in the neuroses. We shall not need to examine his the-

170 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

ories of the neuroses in any detail, for he relates the motivation
of the neuroses to that of normal everyday behavior and
emotion.

THE UNCONSCIOUS. The earliest of Freud's theories to
take shape, according to his autobiography ( 1946) was his firm
belief in unconscious mental or "psychic" processes. Experi-
ments which he witnessed at Nancy in 1889 impressed him
strongly. On awaking from a hypnotic trance the subject may
be entirely unconscious of what has happened during the trance
( "posthypnotic amnesia"), though he remembers it if put back
under hypnosis. Breuer's patient and many patients treated by
Freud could remember while under hypnosis past experiences
which seemed entirely forgotten while the patients were awake.
These memories, then, had not been really forgotten but had
sunk into the unconscious from which they could not be sum-
moned by the conscious self. So far, Freud's concept of the
unconscious did not differ from that formed by earlier students
of these phenomena, though some earlier authorities had spoken
of "unconscious cerebration" as presumably a physiological
process. 2 Freud preferred to stick to psychological terms. He
believed that the complex process of planning and deliberating
could go on in the unconscious. He even said that the whole
psychic life was primarily unconscious, with the quality of con-
sciousness only sometimes superadded (1946, page 41).

UNCONSCIOUS MOTIVES. Freud's conception of the uncon-
scious soon took on a special emphasis that was new and
original. It appeared to him that the unconscious consisted
essentially of motives. Those memories which his first patients
got back while under hypnosis were, to be sure, memories of
persons and events, but they were shot through with strong but
unfulfilled wishes. A young woman's sense of duty to her sick
father forced her to give up her love affair that was the kind
of memory that often came to light. Such a "forgotten" wish
might still be very much alive in the unconscious, with queer

'For example, Carpenter (1876), who also refers to many others hold-
ing similar views, among them the elder Oliver Wendell Holmes. A more
recent term for unconscious mental work is incubation.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 171

effects on conscious behavior. That young woman developed a
hysterical paralysis which gave expression to her unadmitted
desire to be rid of the duty of nursing her father. In his Psy-
chopathology of everyday life Freud assembled hundreds of
examples of lapses, errors, and automatisms all of which under
his hands were made to reveal more or less hidden motives.

Freud did not spare himself in these analyses. In one in-
stance he had a lapse of memory which certainly appeared
remarkable. In going over his account book at the end of one
year he was mystified to find the name of a patient occurring
repeatedly, though he had no notion who that patient could be
a patient in a sanitarium seen daily for several weeks during
the previous summer. Finally he remembered it was a young
girl whom he had treated successfully for a hysterical condition
and finally let go though she was still complaining of some ab-
dominal pain. Two months later she was dead of cancer in the
abdomen. He had made a regrettable error in diagnosis and
his unfulfilled wish was that he had done a better professional
job. From such examples, interpreted in his characteristic
manner, Freud reached a new theory of forgetting : anything
once well known was never forgotten though it might be ban-
ished to the unconscious. Without going quite so far as to
assert that intentional forgetting accounted for all failures of
memory, he did say there was good reason to suspect some mo-
tive in any pronounced case.

He said the same thing about any slip of the tongue or any
"accident" such as losing or breaking anything. Every such
act, he suspected, was intentional, though the intention might
be unconscious. A bride loses her wedding ring a sign that
she has a smoldering wish to be free again or at least to be free
of her present bridegroom. Freud and his early followers
seemed to take a malicious pleasure in pointing out such unad-
mitted motives in their patients and acquaintances.

In any specific case the hidden motive might be found by
means of free association, just as in the analysis of a dream.
Freud had also certain guiding principles that seemed to him
good leads toward an unconscious motive. One such guiding
principle was that what is forbidden must be desired. Unless

i 7 2 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

people desired to do a thing, prohibitions against that thing
would not be necessary. What is strongly forbidden must be
strongly desired. What is abhorrent and shocking must be
very strongly desired. To kill one's own father is an extremely
abhorrent deed, and the laws against such conduct have some-
times been exceptionally strict. Therefore there must be a
strong and common desire in the unconscious to commit this
particular crime. Incest, or sex relations between near relatives,
is another extrashocking crime but why? Freud's guiding
principle led him to conclude that the individual must harbor
strong unconscious desires for incestuous relations. A similar
guiding principle was that what is feared is probably desired,
the fear being a mask for the unconscious desire. There is of
course a perfectly rational fear in real danger, but the irrational
and excessive fears such as the phobias of neurotic persons call
for some explanation. The behaviorists would call them condi-
tioned fears, but Freud suspected an unconscious and forbidden
wish. In the same way, extreme solicitude for some person's
welfare might mask an unconscious desire to do him injury.

PSYCHIC DETERMINISM. An event is "determined" if it has
a cause. It is fully determined if it has a sufficient cause so that
in every detail its character follows necessarily from the ante-
cedent conditions, nothing being left to chance. Determinism is
the belief or scientific postulate that all events in nature have
their sufficient causes. As applied to the human organism de-
terminism means that every act or thought or emotion has its
sufficient causes, though these may be very complex and difficult
to disentangle because of the complexity of the organism and of
the environment. Freud believed heartily in determinism. He
would not admit that any act "just happened" or that it was due
to "free will." He pointed out that important actions and deci-
sions are always ascribed to motives, and that it is only in
unimportant matters that we are inclined to say that we could
have acted this way or that but just decided arbitrarily to act in
this way rather than that. Where there is no conscious motive
there must be an unconscious one, he asserted. A slip of the
tongue or any sort of "accident" must be motivated by some

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 173

hidden desire. It is aimed at a certain goal, and though it may
not fully reach its goal it interferes with the conscious purpose
of the moment and produces unexpected results. A dream is
not mere play of imagination but is governed by an unconscious
wish and aimed at the fulfillment of that wish.

A "psychic cause/* according to Freud, is a wish, motive, in-
tention. Such a cause has to work through the bodily mecha-
nisms, including brain structures and connections, but these
belong v to physiology rather than psychology. Freud apparently
relegated to physiology all studies of conditioned responses and
of factors favorable or unfavorable to efficiency of learning and
accuracy of perception. For him, motivation was practically
the whole field of psychology.

Freud's psychic determinism, as applied to the neuroses,
meant that every abnormal symptom has an aim, being driven
by an unconscious motive. In a valuable survey of the schools
of abnormal psychology, McDougall (1926a, pages 1-19)
showed that Freud differed from his predecessors in basing his
view of the neuroses on motivation. His predecessors and
even his contemporary, Janet, had regarded a neurosis as an ex-
pression of the subject's weakness of "low mental tension."
But Freud believed that the neurotic symptoms were more than
signs of weakness. He probed for unconscious motives and
found them to his own satisfaction and that of his followers.
If the neurotic subject did not want his phobia or obsession con-
sciously, he did want it unconsciously, just as the hysteric
patient already mentioned wanted her paralysis as a release from
the restricting obligation to nurse her sick father. Freud's
later followers, even when departing from him on other ques-
tions of theory, have clung to psychic determinism. Every
symptom, they believe, has a meaning in terms of unconscious
motives and unconscious satisfactions. Any symptom, any slip
of the tongue, any dream, they assume, points toward an uncon-
scious motive, and if that motive can be brought to light and
squarely faced by the patient, there is a chance of dealing with it
rationally, and so advancing toward a cure. (The possibility of
dealing rationally with a motive, however, implies that the pa-
tient's understanding and grasp of the situation and his power

174 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

to learn new and better ways of managing his life can be potent
causative factors. If so, psychic determinism is not limited to
motives, and dynamic psychology broadens out to include a vast
field of psychological investigation which Freud brushed aside
as of no great value.)

RESISTANCE AND REPRESSION. The unconscious motives do
not lie dormant. From time to time, at least, they become
urgent and seek to emerge into conscious behavior. But they
are not pretty, pleasant motives. When they threaten to emerge
they awaken anxiety, shame, and a guilty feeling in the con-
scious self, which therefore resists and tries to hold them down.
So Freud interpreted the difficulty often encountered in the at-
tempt to revive old memories. The unconscious motive presses
up and outward, and the conscious self exerts a contrary force,
pressing down and inward. In sleep the conscious self relaxes
its vigilance and allows the unconscious motives to emerge to a
certain extent, provided they disguise themselves in the symbol-
ism of the manifest dream. If they emerge too openly, they
throw the sleeper into a panic or awaken him altogether.

How did these unconscious motives first become uncon-
scious ? There must have been some force resisting them in the
first place, equivalent to the force which now resists their
emergence. From this reasoning Freud was led to his theory of
repression. The drives of life are originally unformed and un-
conscious, but they take shape by becoming attached to objects
in the environment. They become a longing for this person, or
a hate for that person, or love and hate for the same person.
Such wishes may be unacceptable, and then there are two ways
of handling them. They may be consciously rejected and dead-
ened, so that they are later remembered as affairs of the past
without any present driving force. Or they may be violently
thrust down into the unconscious, where they retain their driv-
ing force but can no longer be remembered because of the con-
tinued resistance of the conscious self. When treated in this
second way, they were said by Freud to be repressed.

Because the unconscious motives are sometimes very urgent,
the conscious self resorts to various stratagems or "defense

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 175

mechanisms" to protect itself against them. One of these goes
by the rather confusing name of reaction formation, which here
means about the same as "leaning over backwards," i.e., exag-
gerating the opposite motive. A person you love and admire
may at times arouse in you a feeling of hostility and detestation
which is very distressing, and you react by inflating your love
and admiration as much as possible. A less obvious mechanism
to meet this situation is called projection, which means that, re-
fusing to admit your hostility to your friend, you take him to
be hostile to you ; he and not you is the guilty party, so that
your feeling of guilt is transformed into a feeling of being
wronged.

These mechanisms were not regarded by Freud as conscious
devices, deliberately thought out and adopted. They were "un-
conscious," and the same was true of resistance and repression.
Conscious resistance was present, too, as when a patient in the
process of free association came upon something that he pre-
ferred not to tell the analyst because it was too personal and
embarrassing. But unconscious resistance was shown by the
patient's genuine difficulty in following up certain leads and get-
ting back certain memories. Now there is an obvious theoreti-
cal incongruity here, since the "conscious self" is unconsciously
resisting, unconsciously "projecting," unconsciously "reacting."
Some revision was needed either in the concept of the conscious
self or in that of the unconscious or in both ; and we see here
one of the reasons leading Freud to his later system.

PERSISTENCE OF SPECIFIC WISHES. Freud was always
looking for hidden wishes, and the wishes he looked for were
wishes of the past still alive in the unconscious. The dream, he
thought, aims to fulfill not a wish of the present moment but a
wish repressed at some time in the past. The neurosis, he
thought, is motivated by some repressed wish dating from the
past. We have seen how Freud was forced to search further
and further back till he reached the patient's early childhood.
You may say that everyone accepts the years of childhood as
the formative period, but Freud's view went beyond the truism
that experience leaves permanent effects on a person's character

176 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

and personality. He meant something much more definite. He
assumed that particular experiences live on in the unconscious
and that the specific wishes of childhood, when repressed,
remain active in the unconscious and express themselves in
dreams, lapses, and neurotic symptoms.

Consider in this connection the matter of transference. The
actual fact is the patient's positive or negative emotional atti-
tude toward the analyst. But in Freud's view this attitude is
transferred to the analyst from some other person such as the
patient's father. In Freud's view the patient's original child-
hood wishes have persisted and now fasten on the analyst as a
father substitute. Suppose that we were interpreting the pa-
tient's emotional attitude toward the analyst without assuming
the persistence of the specific wishes of childhood. The pa-
tient's present situation in relation to the analyst, we should
observe, is similar to the child's situation in relation to his
father ; and free association by bringing back childhood mey ~
ories has revived the emotional attitude o.f childhood. There-
fore, we would conclude, the patient responds to the analyst as
he used to respond to his father. That would not be transfer-
ence in Freud's sense, because there would be no transferring of
a specific wish from childhood to the present. Freud's interpre-
tation may or may not be better, but it is certainly an interpreta-
tion rather than a bare statement of fact, and it rests upon the
rather bold assumption that the wishes of the past remain
unchanged, though they may find new objects ?s substitutes for
the lost objects of the past.

As we shall see, Freud's belief in the persistence of specific
wishes and his view of transference are not accepted by some of
his followers, nor, indeed, by many other psychologists.

INFANTILE SEXUALITY. The widespread excitement over
Freud's early writings was due especially to the fact that he
wrote with great freedom and in a very interesting style about
the sex life of men and women, making many surprising state-
ments as he went along. The first of these statements was to
the effect that neuroses are due to sexual maladjustments. He
did not accuse the neurotics of loose living; quite the contrary,

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 177

he said that they had excessively repressed their sexual desires.
Nor, on the other hand, did he advise free sex expression as a
cure of the neuroses this was the "wild psychoanalysis" which
he took pains to condemn. What was needed was to get back to
the original cause of the repression, and following this trail he
seemed always to be led back to early childhood. The second of
his surprising statements was that the individual's sex life began
in infancy and not at puberty. He ridiculed the sentimental ex-
pression, "innocent childhood," for he believed he could demon-
strate strong sex desires and malicious tendencies in the young
child. He said that his theory of infantile sexuality was "a the-
oretical extract from very numerous experiences" experiences,
that is, of the analyst in obtaining free associations from his
neurotic patients. He continued as follows (1914, page 10) :

At first it was only noticed that the ... actual impressions had to be
traced back to the past. . . . The tracks led still further back into child-
hood and into its earliest years . . . the autoerotic activities of the early
years of childhood . . . and now the whole sexual life of the child made
its appearance. . . . Years later, my discoveries were successfully con-
firmed for the greater part by direct observation and analyses of chil-
dren of very early years.

The sex drive of the infant has not nearly the intensity that
it will have in adolescence when the sex glands and hormones
have matured, and it does not yet have the definite aim of the
sexually excited adult. It is diffuse rather than sharply focused,
Freud said. It aims simply at bodily pleasure from any organ,
from the mouth, from the anus, from the genitals. It is auto-
erotic, not yet being directed toward any other person as a love
object. It first gains satisfaction from the mouth in sucking.
The sucking of a hungry baby, to be sure, is driven by hunger
and not by the sex urge, but when a baby who is not hungry
sucks his thumb or a pacifier with apparent pleasure, he cannot
be motivated by hunger but must be driven by the pleasure-
seeking motive, the rudimentary sex motive in Freud's concep-
tion. Somewhat later the young child gets pleasure from his
bowel movements and may delay evacuation so as to obtain
stronger sensation. Still later he obtains pleasure from manip-

178 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

ulating the genital organs. At each of these stages oral, anal,
genital his erotic activity is likely to encounter restriction and
frustration from the social environment. He may adjust him-
self adequately to the social demands, or he may react by first
intensifying and then repressing the particular activity. When
he represses, he "fixates" this particular urge in the unconscious
where it persists unchanged, though it may obtain partial satis-
faction through some form of "sublimation" which is socially
tolerated or even approved. So the oral-erotic individual is
acquisitive, the anal-erotic thrifty and orderly, the repressed
genital-erotic ultraconscientious.

Still other pleasurable activities of the child were regarded
by Freud as belonging under the general head of sexuality : bit-
ing things and putting them in the mouth; rhythmical move-
ments of the arms and legs in the baby, swinging and seesaw in
the older child ; tearing things apart and throwing things down ;
showing off and looking at things especially, of course, expos-
ing one's own naked body or looking at that of another person ;
and, in short, any activity which seems to afford the young child
sensuous and natural pleasure. At a higher level Freud in-
cluded under sex gratification all affectionate behavior and
comradeship originating in the infant's attachment to the nurs-
ing mother. Love for art or music, too, he included under the
sex impulse. Whatever we say in ordinary language that we
love or love to do is classed by Freud as sexual. Well, you say,
that is simply his use of terms ; he chose to define sexuality as
equivalent to love and pleasure-seeking in the broadest sense.
But we must notice, on the other side, that Freud objected
strenuously to anyone who attempted to "dilute" his theory by
desexualizing it. He insisted that affection was truly sexual
and that thumb-sucking gave the baby genuine though rudi-
mentary sexual pleasure. He insisted that his conception of
sexuality was strict as well as broad (1905, 1916).

THE EGO AND LIBIDO MOTIVES. One of Freud's basic
assumptions was that of a polarity of motives. There must be,
he felt, two main opposed trends of motivation two great
forces acting in opposite directions. If an unconscious wish

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 179

striving to emerge into conscious behavior is resisted, there
must be some resisting force. In the earlier theory which we
are now considering he adopted as his two main motives the
traditional biological instincts of self-preservation and repro-
duction. Self-preservation is represented by hunger, fear of
danger, self-assertion, which he called ego motives. Reproduc-
tion is represented by the fully fledged sex desire of the adult,
but also by any kind of pleasure-seeking which cannot be
brought under the head of self-preservation. Hence his broad-
strict conception of the libido or sex motive.

The ego was also regarded as the conscious self and in touch
with the environment. While libido seeks for immediate and
uninhibited pleasure, ego is confronted by the realities of the
physical and social environment which often make it dangerous
to gratify a desire. Ego can learn and does learn to avoid pleas-
ures which will result in punishment. In daydreams and in the
unconscious a person follows the "pleasure principle/* but in
waking life he is subservient to the "reality principle."

THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX. Though the child's libido is at
first autoerotic and not focused on any external love-object, in
the course of the first few years it begins to attach itself to some
person or persons. Usually the boy's libido fastens on the
mother, the girl's on the father. This is an instinctive hetero-
sexual tendency, Freud believed, and it is usually helped along
by the preference of the mother for her son, and of the father
for his daughter. The boy, in demanding sexual love from his
mother, comes into rivalry with his father, and the girl becomes
a rival of the mother for the father's love. So arises the "fam-
ily romance" or "Oedipus situation" which is most clear-cut in
the case of the boy.

Oedipus, the lame hero of Greek legend, as will be recalled,
was exposed to the elements by his father, the king of Thebes,
with a spike through his feet, because an oracle had predicted
that this child would slay his father and marry his mother. He
was rescued by a shepherd and adopted by the king of a neigh-
boring state, where he grew to early manhood in ignorance of
his true parentage and of his predicted fate. On one occasion,

i8o CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

however, when he visited the oracle, he was told that he would
slay his father and wed his mother. To avoid such a calamity
he remained away from his adopted home, but in his wanderings
he encountered his true father, quarreled with him, and slew
him. As he continued his wanderings he arrived at Thebes,
where by solving the riddle of the Sphinx he freed this city
from a long-standing pest and was consequently proclaimed
king and given the widowed queen to wife. Years later, after
four children had been born to the innocently guilty pair, the
truth came out and poor Oedipus, in despair, put out his eyes.
He lived miserably ever after.

Of this legend Freud needed only the bare outline. Oedipus
unwittingly killed his father and married his mother just what
the little boy of four or five years desires. But the boy does not
merely hate his father ; he loves him as well, admires him, and
has long taken him as the model to be imitated. His adored
ideal has become his hated rival, and his chosen love-object
spurns him. Terrible conflict rages within him, and there is
nothing left for him but renunciation and repression. This
heroic feat the normal boy accomplishes. He puts the past be-
hind him so thoroughly that the vivid experiences of early child-
hood are forgotten (Freud's theory of the loss of childhood
memories). And, what is more important, the boy identifies
himself with his father, takes him into himself, and adopts as
his own both the positive precept, "Thou shalt be like thy
father/' and the prohibitions, "Thou shalt not hate thy father
nor covet his wife." These laws of conduct and feeling become
the basis of the boy's conscience which Freud in his later system
renamed the "superego/' When the boy has successfully solved
the Oedipus problem, he is freed from the urgency of his infan-
tile libido and can enter upon the relatively calm and educative
period of sexual latency which lasts until puberty.

The girl meets a similar problem at about the same age, but
it is more complicated and less dramatic, as far as Freud could
make out. Usually, too, the drama is complicated by an admix-
ture of homosexual tendency in either boy or girl. As Freud
saw the matter much later (1923, pages 42-43) :

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 181

One gets the impression that the simple Oedipus complex is by no
means its commonest form, but rather represents a simplification or
schematization which, to be sure, is often enough adequate for practical
purposes. ... A boy has not merely an ambivalent attitude towards his
father and an affectionate object-relation towards his mother, but at the
same time he also behaves like a girl and displays an affectionate femi-
nine attitude to his father and a corresponding hostility and jealousy
towards his mother. It is this complicating element introduced by bi-
sexuality that makes it so difficult to obtain a clear view of the facts.

To the practicing psychoanalyst the simpler form of the
Oedipus problem is more useful because it can more readily be
understood by the neurotic patient. The patient who accepts
this theory finds it possible to overcome his resistances and
take a calm view of his present conflicts. If a conflict can be
seen as one dating from infancy it will be approached more ob-
jectively by the patient. Perhaps not so useful to the psycho-
analyst but more likely to square with the facts is Fromm's view
(1947, page 157) that the child's hostility to the like-sexed
parent stems from rebellion against authority and not from
sexual rivalry. Certainly rebellion against parental authority
and jealousy among siblings are observable facts, but they need
not arise from frustrated infantile sexuality or bisexuality un-
less these terms are used in a very broad sense indeed. Freud
himself recognized some such possibility in the passage just
cited, when he went on to say, "It may even be that the ambi-
valence ... is not . . . developed ... in consequence of rivalry/'
But the more mystical idea has an appeal for the neurotic
patient.

Freud's Later Psychology

Freud was not contented to leave his theory as it stood in
1905. He continued to mull over it and modify it year after
year for the next two decades. His life quest, we remember,
was not so much to cure the neuroses as through the study of
his patients to reach an understanding of the deep forces of
human life, social as well as individual. He had other reasons,
too, for seeking to make his theory more comprehensive. Some
of his earlier followers, especially Jung and Adler, who will be

182 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

considered later in this chapter, began to diverge so much from
his own views as to eliminate themselves, he held, from the psy-
choanalytic movement. Yet they had some good ideas which he
wished to incorporate in his own system. Jung wished to ex-
pand the concept of libido and have it include all the motives of
life, and Adler believed that the ego motives rather than the
sex motives were responsible for the neuroses. Such views
amounted to an abandonment of the psychoanalytic theory, so
Freud believed, and yet he saw some merit in them and believed
that his own theory could cover them if it were perfected. An-
other motive was to make psychoanalysis adequate for treatment
or at least interpretation of the psychoses as well as the neu-
roses. Dementia precox (or schizophrenia) was a special chal-
lenge. Analysis was not successful with schizophrenic patients,
but it did seem that their trouble, their withdrawal from reality,
indicated a disturbance of ego rather than of libido. So from
1914 on we find important changes beginning to take shape in
Freud's theoretical writings.

NARCISSISM. In the old Greek tale of Narcissus, this hand-
some youth, untouched by the charms of a beautiful maiden,
falls in love with his own reflection in a glassy pool and is trans-
formed into a flower that bends over the water. A narcissist,
accordingly, would be a person in love with himself, and the
term had been applied to a person, male or female, who obtained
his sexual satisfaction from admiring himself in a mirror and
caressing his body as if it were that of another person. Much
more common than this frank, nai've narcissism, Freud believed,
were less conscious forms of self-love w x hich he chose to call by
the same name ( 1914a) . The schizophrenic is withdrawn from
the world, has lost his interest in persons and objects, and seems
to be wholly absorbed in his own self. Freud said that the
schizophrenic has withdrawn his libido from the external world,
probably because of disappointment or disillusionment in love,
and has centered his love life on himself. Because of this ex-
treme narcissism he is distinctly abnormal, psychotic. But an
individual may be narcissistic to a degree without being de-
ranged. Just as a lover "sees with eyes of love" instead of

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 183

viewing the loved person objectively, so the moderately nar-
cissistic individual will view himself lovingly rather than coolly
and objectively, overrating his charms and merits and under-
rating his faults. By this standard everyone is somewhat nar-
cissistic, Freud was quite willing to believe, but some much
more than others. One who always craves love and admiration,
without feeling love and admiration in return, is strongly
narcissistic.

PRIMARY NARCISSISM. Self-love, Freud argued, must pre-
cede object love, since the infant has at first no perception of
objects but only a vague (unconscious?) awareness of himself.
But why should the infant love at all before he has found an
object to awaken his libido? Freud conceived of libido as a
form of instinctive energy or excitation arising in the organism
from biological sources like the action of sex hormones. It is
generated from within, seeks an outlet but at first finds no out-
let, and is dammed up within as self-love. When the child has
begun to explore the environment and find suitable objects
(persons), his libido goes out to them. It goes out to the
mother especially. It is sure to encounter some rebuffs and
frustrations and then is drawn back, partially at least, into the
self. The more object-libido, the less self -libido, and vice versa.
The normal condition after early childhood is for part of the
libido to be directed toward external objects (persons) while
part remains attached to the self, the proportions varying from
time to time and from individual to individual.

The concept of narcissism was evidently very congenial to
Freud and yet it caused him considerable embarrassment on the
theoretical side. Here he had self-love, or ego-libido, combin-
ing the two major instincts which he had regarded all along as
polar opposites. How was he now to account for the conflict of
motives which was basic to his whole theory of the neuroses?
He could not go along with Jung and regard the libido as a uni-
tary and all-inclusive instinct. He still had the polarity of self-
libido versus object-libido, but he needed some sharper and
more drastic conflict of motives. So it seemed to him, and he

184 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

apparently labored several years before reaching an acceptable
solution.

LIFE AND DEATH INSTINCTS EROS AND THANATOS. Fi-
nally (1920) Freud took the bull by the horns and said to
himself, in effect: "Very well. The instincts of self-preserva-
tion and propagation of the species, though having different
immediate goals, are ultimately alike in being aimed at growth
and increase of life. Let them be combined into an inclusive
life instinct, and what have we got left to oppose them ? What,
indeed, except a death instinct!" The assumption of a basic
death instinct was not absurd to a thoroughgoing motivationist
like Freud. Since death is the matier-of-fact goal of life, there
must be inherent in living matter an urge or tendency toward
that goal. There must be a primal, unconscious drive toward
death, and it must be present in every individual from the begin-
ning to the end of his life. Polarity enough ! Eros and Thana-
tos Eros the principle of life and growth, Thanatos the
principle of decay and death ; Eros the loving and constructive,
Thanatos the hateful and destructive.

If, however, there is a death instinct, it must somehow mani-
fest itself in the feelings and behavior of human beings. Here
Freud could reason as he did in the case of narcissism. Just as
the libido is generated within the organism but attaches itself to
external objects, so also with the death instinct. It manifests
itself for the most part not as a desire to die but as a desire to
kill. Turned outward it is the urge to destroy, injure, conquer.
It is the hostility motive, the aggressive tendency, which cer-
tainly manifests itself abundantly. Finding something outside
to destroy, it does not need to destroy the self. But when frus-
trated in an external aggression it is likely to turn back upon
the self as a suicidal tendency. Its scope, like that of libido,
must be very wide. It is not limited to homicide and suicide but
covers the milder forms of aggressiveness, whether directed to-
ward the self or toward external objects. Self -punishment and
self-condemnation are included, and so are jealousy among
rivals and rebellion against authority.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 185

INCREASING EMPHASIS ON HOSTILITY AND AGGRESSIVE-
NESS. From the viewpoint of this later theory of motives, it
seems strange that Freud did not accept the basic role of hos-
tility much earlier. He had much to say of hostility even in his
early writings. The unconscious wishes that were fulfilled in
dreams were often spiteful wishes such as the childish desire for
the death of a brother or sister. In the Oedipus complex the
boy becomes hostile to his father as the one who is frustrating
his love Demands on his mother. But in the earlier theory
Freud was satisfied to regard hostility as merely a self-evident
corollary of frustrated libido. The libido was energy which
could be displaced from one object to another and even from
one emotion to another or from one kind of behavior to an-
other. So the transformation of love for the mother into
hostility for the father seemed possible without any new drive
coming into play. The love-hate ambivalence manifested in the
feelings and actions of friends and lovers all came from the
libido drive. And the cruelty of the sadist who obtains sexual
satisfaction only when subjecting his love mate to torture could
also, so it seemed at first, be merely a distortion of the libido.
But with the death instinct accepted, Freud's view of sadism
changed. "How can the sadistic drive which aims at injury to
the loved one be derived from the life-sustaining Eros? Must
it not stem from the death instinct?" (1920) And the love-
hate ambivalence must be a fusion or alloy of the two basic
drives rather than a mere distortion of libido alone. Any con-
crete motive is a fusion of love and hate, of constructiveness
and destructiveness.

Man's constructive activities are at the same time destructive.
To build a house he chops down trees. Any action on the en-
vironment destroys or at least disturbs the existing state of
affairs. The muscles are primarily the agents of aggression,
and in any dealing with the environment aggression leads the
way, with Eros joining forces later. Such statements are found
in Freud's later works.

In his earlier thinking on social psychology Freud empha-
sized the conflict between the sexual demands of the individual
and the restrictions made necessary by social life. In his later

N

i86 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

works he laid at least equal emphasis on the natural hostility of
man to man as the great obstacle to civilization (1930). The
individual's demand for justice and fair play arises from jeal-
ousy. Each child in a family wants to be the favorite but
finally backs down to the extent of saying, "If I cannot be the
favorite, neither shall you. We will all be equals" (1921).
Eros tends to bind men together in families, clans, and ever
larger groups, always with love and justice within the group but
with hostility and aggression for outsiders. Civilization de-
velops through the conflict and fusion of these two major
drives.

The difference between Freud's earlier and later theories of
motivation can be brought out by reference to family life.
Since the family is based on the reproductive function and cen-
ters in the sex act, the earlier theory regarded family life as
wholly motivated by the sex instinct. Freud ridiculed anyone
who failed to see a woman's behavior in childbirth as a clear
example of sex behavior driven by libido. Since the mammary
glands are sex organs, nursing the baby is sex behavior, and by
extension all care of the child is sex behavior. The child, being
born into this sexually motivated milieu and participating in its
activities, is necessarily sex-motivated when he nurses, when he
is bathed, when he is loved and protected in any way. His de-
mands on the family are sex demands, and even his jealousy
and rebellion when his demands are not fully met are direct
derivatives of the sex motive that dominates his entire life in
the family circle. So far the earlier theory. But with the rec-
ognition of a primary destructive tendency the picture changes.
Now the baby comes into the world with a primary tendency to
fight his environment. This aggressive tendency accounts for
his rebellion and jealousy. By itself it would make life impos-
sible in the family group, but the erotic tendencies come to the
rescue and by fusing with the destructive tendencies lead to be-
havior which is a workable balance between love and hate.

The death instinct was a bitter pill for many of Freud's
loyal followers, nurtured as they had been on the libido theory.
It gave a harsher picture of human life. To Freud it was more
and more convincing in his old age (1932, pages 124-143;

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 187

1940) , passed in a period of wars and persecutions. He became
more conscious of an aggressive tendency in himself. He had
always been a "good hater" according to the testimony of his
most devoted disciples (as Reik, 1940, page 6; Sachs, 1944,
page 1 16). His early "debunking" of so-called "innocent child-
hood" was followed late in life by works tending to "debunk"
religion (1927, 1937). Though he believed these efforts to be
only what was demanded by his loyalty to the truth as he saw it,
psychoanalysis itself would indicate that the aggressive motive
must have furnished the fundamental drive.

In Freud's earlier theory maladjustments were traced to the
repression of libido, and a considerable change would be re-
vealed by any emphasis on the repression of the aggressive
tendency. Without going quite so far himself, Freud certainly
came near it in such statements as these :

What we have recognized as true of the sexual instincts holds to the
same extent, and perhaps to an even greater extent, for the other in-
stincts, for those of aggression. . . . The limitation of aggression is the
first and perhaps the hardest sacrifice which society demands from each
individual [1932, p. 143].

The holding back of aggression is unhealthy, creates illness [1940,
p. 14].

Some of Freud's relatively orthodox followers of the present
day speak confidently of repressed aggression as the source of
neuroses. Franz Alexander (1942, pages 167, 232), while de-
fending the general theory of the Oedipus complex, believes its
essence is not the boy's sexual demand for the mother, but
rather "a possessive attachment to the person on whom the child
depends for satisfaction and security, and jealousy and hostility
against competitors." These hostile impulses, if carried out,
bring quick punishment and have to be repressed. "The repres-
sion of hostile impulses thus becomes the most significant fact
in the domestication of the human animal and is, in conjunction
with anxiety, the core of every neurosis."

No one has been more confident of the hostility motive than
Karl Menninger (1938, pages, 81, 427; 1942, pages 128, 134,
167). He regards Freud's death instinct as an important the-

i88 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

ory but not so well established as the wish to kill or destroy and
the wish to be punished for wrongdoing. The suicidal tendency
springs from the wish to be punished rather than from any
demonstrable wish to die. In normal behavior the erotic and de-
structive tendencies are fused, as Freud said, with destructive-
ness taking the lead. The newborn child "begins to respond to
the irritations of the outside world, meeting them first with
hostility, then with tolerance, finally with affection. ... In the
normal course of development, the constructive energies begin
to assume dominance." It is the aggressive tendency rather
than libido that undergoes sublimation, as it does in both work
and play, and psychotherapy consists very largely in finding
suitable outlets for aggression.

An orthodox and yet discriminating presentation of Freud's
theories, both early and late, is found in the work of Otto
Fenichel. He did not accept the polarity of life and death in-
stincts and argued that no basic polarity of motives is necessary.
"Of course, the existence and importance of aggressive drives
cannot be denied. However, there is no proof that they always
and necessarily come into being by a turning outward of more
primary self -destructive drives." Aggressiveness is rather a
mode of responding to environmental conditions, and conflict
of motives also can result from environmental conditions rather
than from any basic internal polarity (1945, pages 54, 59).

EGO, ID, AND SUPEREGO AS PARTS OF THE PSYCHE. An-
other major alteration in Freud's theory, made at about the same
time as his shift from the ego-libido polarity of motives to the
life and death instincts, had to do with his doctrine of the un-
conscious. A belief in the reality and importance of uncon-
scious mental processes was fundamental in Freud's thinking
throughout his life. At first he regarded the unconscious and
the conscious as the two component parts of the mind (or soul) .
There was, indeed, a "preconscious," consisting of memories
and wishes that could easily be summoned into full conscious-
ness, but the conscious and preconscious belonged to one system
as opposed to the unconscious material which lay beyond the
reach of the conscious mind. The conscious self was in touch

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 189

with the environment through the senses and acted on the en-
vironment by use of the muscles. It was engaged in perceiving,
thinking, remembering, and acting. The unconscious was con-
stantly striving to emerge into conscious behavior but was held
down by the conscious self. The conscious self was also called
the ego, and the ego had the task of resisting the unconscious.

But this simple scheme ran into the difficulty already men-
tioned (page 175). It was found that patients under analysis
were not aware of their own resistances. Consciously they
were trying to recall certain experiences or to engage in "free
association," but unconsciously they were resisting. The ego,
as the resister, was therefore acting unconsciously. It must be
partly conscious and partly unconscious. The ego is the mana-
ger, the executive, but it exerts its control unconsciously in large
measure. If we picture the whole psyche as a sphere like the
earth the outer crust is the ego which makes contact with the
external surroundings and also with the interior. It is conscious
externally and unconscious internally. The interior of the
psyche, which Freud now named the id, is wholly unconscious
(1923).

The id consists primarily of drives, inherited instincts, or
urges. These are not quiescent but continually strive outward
toward satisfaction in behavior. But the id has no direct access
to the environment ; it has no sense organs or muscles. It does
not know anything, it cannot do anything of itself. It is unor-
ganized, unstructured, like a boiling cauldron of mixed desires,
libido and destructiveness seeking an outlet. The only outlet is
through the ego, which at first is little developed and offers little
resistance to the surging of the id. But the ego learns from ex-
perience. It gets to know the dangers of the environment and
the necessity of restraining the id. Its job is to take over the
instincts from the id, as far as it can, and make them conform
to the reality principle. But when it "represses" a desire of the
id, this repressed desire and its associated objects and experi-
ences are driven down and added to the id, so making it even
more troublesome than before. When the ego is strong enough
to master a desire, making it bide its time and take its humble
place in a rational plan of life, then the ego is performing its

190 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

own proper function. Psychoanalysis helps maladjusted per-
sons to substitute rational control for frightened repression and
so to build up the ego at the expense of the id. "Where id was,
there shall ego be" (1932, page 106).

As if the ego's task of controlling the id were not enough, a
third part of the psyche emerges in early childhood to complicate
the problem. Because the child is made to feel his weakness and
inferiority in comparison with his parents and other adults, he
takes these superior beings as models, "identifies" with them
and builds up an ego-ideal, which is himself as he aspires to be.
But these superior beings are not simply admired; they are
feared. They punish him; they tell him he is naughty; they
have rules of right and wrong which he must obey. Finally he
adopts these external commands as his own internal laws of Con-
duct and keeps watch over himself to make sure he does not dis-
obey. So the ego is split into two : the doer or executive which
remains the ego proper, and the watcher and moral critic which
is the superego.

The superego corresponds to what we ordinarily call con-
science, so far as conscience means a blind feeling of right and
wrong rather than a knowledge of what is good for us and
socially valuable. The superego says "Thou shalt" and "Thou
shalt not" without saying why. It cannot explain its commands
because the source of its authority is buried in the unconscious.
Freud believed that the rudiments of the superego were inher-
ited from primitive mankind and that it took shape largely in
each child's struggle with the Oedipus complex (page 179).
Some neurotic patients are excessively conscientious. They are
never satisfied with their own behavior but always accuse them-
selves of sins of omission and commission. They feel guilty
for acts which they have not performed if they have merely
thought of doing them, and they may go through elaborate
rituals of self -punishment, making life miserable for them-
selves and their friends. They admit that their guilty feeling is
irrational, but they cannot get away from it. Their superego
is fierce and relentless. In general Freud held that the super-
ego is motivated by the aggressive tendency turned inward
against the ego.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 191

All the instinctive motives, except fear, belong primarily to
the id. The superego appropriates some of the aggressive tend-
ency for use against the ego. The ego, so far as it succeeds in
mastering the instincts and making them contribute to organized
living, has all the motives at its disposal, while its own peculiar
motive is the need for security, revealed by its fears and
anxieties.

The proverb tells us that one cannot serve two masters. The poor
ego has a still harder time of it ; it has to serve three harsh masters, and
has to do its best to reconcile the demands and claims of all three. These
demands are always divergent and often seem quite incompatible; no
wonder that the ego so frequently gives way under its task. The three
tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id. ... The ego . . .
feels itself hemmed in on three sides and threatened by three kinds of
danger, towards which it reacts by developing anxiety when it is too
hard pressed. ... I must add a warning. When you think of this
dividing up of the personality into ego, superego and id, you must not
imagine sharp dividing lines . . . we must allow what we have separated
to merge again [1932, p. 103].

As to the merits of Freud's later system, he himself points
out one difficulty in the last words quoted. This dividing of
the individual into distinct entities which are always warring
against each other gives an unreal picture of what actually goes
on in thought, feeling, and behavior. For scientific purposes, to
be sure, we require not so much a realistic picture as a working
model, a conceptual framework in which we can think clearly
and predict what behavior will occur under given circumstances.
Did Freud himself in his later works find his system of scien-
tific value? In some passages he indicates that it was of defi-
nite value, while in other passages he seems to be struggling
with its complexities. The ego remains a somewhat ambiguous
concept. In contrast with the id or superego it is the active,
executive function. In contrast with the libido it is still the
instinct of self-preservation. In contrast with the external
world it is the entire individual, as it must be in narcissism, for
the ego that is loved is not the executive function but the self as
a whole. One must say, too, that if Freud overdid the libido in
his early theory, he overdoes hostile aggression in the later

i 9 2 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

theory. Aggression is an ambiguous word, sometimes implying
anger and hostility, sometimes vigor and initiative. It must be
a mistake, so we feel, to regard all human activity as either
erotic or destructive, in any reasonable sense, or as combining
the two in some kind of fusion. There must be outgoing, con-
structive motives that are not erotic, and energetic, enterprising
motives that are not belligerent. A sculptor and a mineralogist
stand before a block of marble. The sculptor says : "I love that
stone ; I want to hug it to my heart. I hate it ; I want to smash
it into powder. So I will compromise by carving it into the
form of a beautiful girl." The mineralogist says: "I love it, I
hate it, so I will compromise by cutting a thin section of it which
I can examine through a microscope to bring out its inner struc-
ture." Must not other motives be present to govern the de-
voted attention which these two people will give to a block of
stone ?

Freud himself was a man of marvellous energy and enter-
prise, a man of intense devotion to his work a keen observer, a
fearless and original thinker. However his motives may be
psychoanalyzed, and however his theories may be finally evalu-
ated, he was a stimulating pioneer whose important place in the
history of psychology is amply assured. And we must not for-
get that his primary contribution was to the understanding and
treatment of the neuroses. His invention of the psychoanalytic
method and his recognition of motives and their conflict as
important factors in the causation of neuroses, and probably
also of psychoses, are acclaimed by psychiatrists of all schools
though they may differ from him considerably on many matters
of theory and practice.

The psychoanalysts of today vary among themselves in
theory and practice and feel free to differ from Freud more than
was the case two or three decades ago. Yet they all honor
Freud as the founder and master. Since we cannot hope to do
any sort of justice to the many who deserve our attention, we
must content ourselves with brief accounts of a few, beginning
with Jung and Adler, already mentioned as being early dis-
senters. These two men were not pupils of Freud in the full
sense, for they had both embarked on their careers before com-

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 193

ing under his influence. For a few years they were contented
to accept his leadership, especially in such matters of technique
as free association and dream analysis, but their ideas soon
showed so much divergence from Freud's that he was unwilling
to have them call themselves psychoanalysts. Freud found it
possible to incorporate some of their ideas in his later system,
and some of their ideas have been revived by later psychoan-
alysts. Neither Adler nor Jung has had anything like Freud's
great following, and the same can be said of several other early
adherents of Freud who broke away because of more or less
serious theoretical heresies.

Alfred Adler and the School of "Individual Psychology"

It was about 1912, ten years after psychoanalysis had begun
to attract some medical adherents, that cleavages first appeared
in the group that had gathered around Freud in Vienna and in
the young international association of psychoanalysts. Alfred
Adler (1870-1937) of Vienna differed from Freud in several
respects, most noticeably at first by his emphasis on ego rather
than libido as the great motivating force in life and the source
of neurotic difficulties. On separating, or being separated, from
Freud's group, Adler started a rival school of "individual psy-
chology/' so named to emphasize the importance of individual
differences in personality, dependent on differences in early en-
vironment, which were relatively uninteresting to Freud.

The "infantile sexuality" which was so much stressed by
Freud seemed to Adler a strained interpretation of the little
child's behavior. Much more obvious and fundamental in Ad-
ler's view were the child's resistance to domination and eager-
ness to dominate. The child is actually weak and inferior in
many ways to those around him and at times feels inferior, but
he combats this feeling by asserting himself as far as possible
and by aspiring to grow up and be superior. Everyone, Adler
said, has a fundamental will for power, an urge toward dom-
inance and superiority. If an individual feels himself inferior
in some respect, he is driven by this feeling of inferiority to-
ward a goal of superiority. He strives to make himself superior

i 9 4 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

or at least to put up a pretense of superiority. He is driven
toward compensation of one kind or another. He may gen-
uinely compensate for an inferiority by well-directed effort, as
JDemosthenes overcame stuttering by practice in speaking on the
seashore with pebbles in his mouth and became the greatest
orator of Greece, or as Theodore Roosevelt overcame his frail
physique by ranch life and became a "rough rider" and an ex-
plorer. Or the individual may compensate for inferiority in one
respect by achievement in some other direction, as the boy who
is muscularly weak may find he can shine in school. Many a
man whose success in life makes us suppose him proud and per-
fectly sure of himself turns out, if we come to know him
intimately, to have suffered from strong feelings of inferiority
which he has not wholly overcome. In short, Adler regarded
the self-assertive impulse rather than the sex impulse as the
major drive, and as the drive most likely to be frustrated by the
environment. It was likely to generate hostility toward com-
petitors, antisocial attitudes, and the maladjustments of neurosis
and psychosis.

But how can this individualistic, aggressive tendency be held
in check so that community life may be at all possible? Adler,
no less than Freud, was forced to provide a polarity of motives,
though disinclined to appeal to heredity and innate drives. The
child has at least a native capacity for friendly, loving response,
and this germ will develop into a loyal cooperative spirit if the
child is properly treated in the first few years. The mother, as
the young child's closest associate, has the task of developing
this spirit by establishing a genuine human relationship with her
child. She makes a mistake if she pampers the child and allows
him to dominate over her without limit, or she may make the
contrary mistake by dominating over him at every point and
seeking to break his independent spirit. What he needs is to
get the spirit of give-and-take, cooperation, interest in people.
With this basic social attitude established, the child is prepared
to meet the problems of life with confidence and without
hostility.

Of course the mother cannot be held solely responsible. The
entire family situation with which the child has to cope in his

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 195

first few years stimulates him to develop a certain attitude to-
ward life SL certain "style of life" in Adler's well-known
phrase. The pampered child expects always to command and
let somebody else do the work. The bullied child takes the atti-
tude of trying to escape to a safe distance. The oldest child in
a family tends toward a conservative attitude, seeking to keep
what he has and not be displaced by the second child, who tends
to adopt the radical attitude of changing things in his favor.
These attitudes or styles of life, formed in the first few years,
are extremely persistent. Each individual adopts his style early
in life and maintains it as he meets the problems of youth and
adult life. Thus Adler, no less than Freud but in a very differ-
ent way, laid great stress on the family situation as formative
of the individual's character.

While not questioning the importance of the sex impulse,
Adler did not allow it the fundamental role assigned to sex in
Freud's earlier theory. The first problems of life are not sex-
ual, and by the time the urgent problems of sex are encountered
the individual's style of life is already formed. The sex life has
to find its place in a total style of life with its goal either of
selfish or of socialized superiority. When psychoanalysis at-
tempts to center everything about sex it gives a distorted picture
of the individual's activities. Sexual impotence or frigidity, for
example, may be merely an unconscious stratagem enabling a
person who lacks social feeling to get the better of the partner.
Of the three typical problems of life community living, occu-
pation, sexual love it is the social task that the child meets
first, and his social adjustment sets the pattern for his approach
to the other problems as they arise. If the child's social atti-
tude is one of courage and cooperation, ready both to give and
to receive, he can later take up the sex interest into this style of
life and succeed in love and marriage. But if the child's social
attitude is an anxious seeking to outdo his associates, sexuality
will later be used as a means to this same end.

The neurotic, according to Adler, instead of suffering from
repressed sex complexes, is hampered by a style of life that
lacks a proper balance between the individualistic and the social
drives. His goal of superiority is not realistic for community

196 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

living, and he has to substitute pretense for genuine achieve-
ment. His unconscious aim is to score a fictitious superiority
by evading difficulties instead of conquering them. In Adler's
words ( 1930, pages 41, 46, 47) :

The problem of every neurosis is, for the patient, the difficult main-
tenance of a style of acting, thinking and perceiving which distorts and
denies the demands of reality. ... As the work of Individual Psychol-
ogists has abundantly proved, an individual goal of superiority is the
determining factor in every neurosis, but the goal itself always origin-
ates in ... the actual experiences of inferiority. ... 'If I were not so
anxious, if I were not so ill, I should be able to do as well as the others.
If my life were not full of terrible difficulties, I should be the first.' By
this attitude a person is able still to feel superior. . . . His chief occupa-
tion in life is to look for difficulties. . . . He does this more to impress
himself than others, but naturally other people take his burdens into
account and ... he wins his way to a privileged life, judged by a more
lenient standard than others. At the same time, he pays the cost of it
with his neurosis.

In examining a patient the Adlerian psychologist seeks to
discover the patient's style of life and the peculiar goal of su-
periority adopted in childhood and still followed in some way or
other. His position in the family and the general family situ-
ation in childhood, his early memories, his likes and dislikes,
his "heroes" from history or fiction, his occupational choices
in childhood and later, all provide clues. His present manner
of standing, walking, and sitting may reveal his "style." His
way of shaking hands may be revealing, and even the posture
he takes in sleeping. "When we see a person sleeping upon the
back, stretched out like a soldier at attention, it is a sign that he
wishes to appear as great as possible. One who lies curled up
like a hedgehog with the sheet drawn over his head is not likely
to be a striving or courageous character. ... A person who
sleeps on his stomach betrays stubbornness and negativity"
(1930, page 215). Such sweeping statements, of which Adler
made an enormous number, give the impression that he must
have trusted a great deal to his own intuition and experience
without being able to convey his methods, in writing anyway, to
those who might wish to follow them. In practice, the "indi-

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 197

vidual psychologist" bases his conclusions on a comprehensive
view of the patient's behavior traits (Wexberg, 1929).

Dream analysis was accepted by Adler as one of Freud's
major contributions to psychotherapy. But the dream should
not be regarded merely as a fulfillment of old wishes; rather,
it can serve to reveal the patient's emotional attitude toward his
present problems. It is a symbolic rehearsal of an act that the
patient must soon perform in real life and indicates his personal
attitude toward this act. A man whose style of life was charac-
terized by doubt and hesitation, being on the point of getting
married, dreamed that he was halted at the boundary between
two countries and threatened with imprisonment a compara-
tively easy dream to interpret in Adler's way. Adler inter-
preted the plot of an entire dream rather than the associations
obtained from the separate items. He discarded the reclining
couch of the Freudian technique, preferring a more direct, con-
versational approach, free of constraint and with a "good
human relationship" of social feeling between patient and thera-
pist, both cooperating in the task of understanding the patient.
Tact must be employed by the therapist to avoid the appearance
of preaching or moralizing. The patient cannot be forced; no
demands must be made on him, but he can be led gently to the
point of seeing how he has been trying to achieve superiority
"on the useless side of life" while missing his opportunities "on
the useful side." The whole treatment takes much less time
than is required for the "classical" psychoanalysis.

Adler's theory and practice have been generally condemned
by psychoanalysts as being hasty and superficial. Yet they are
tending to utilize his methods in certain types of cases. Not all
patients require the same kind of treatment (page 167). Es-
pecially in assisting children to overcome their maladjustments,
Adler's approach has proved its value. His theory, while cer-
tainly not a "depth psychology/' does contain much common-
sense truth that is applicable to daily life, and his conception of
a "style of life" is a valuable contribution to the still embryonic
psychology of character and personality.

198 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

Carl Gustav Jung and the School of "Analytical
Psychology"

Outside of Vienna the chief early center of psychoanalysis
was at Zurich in Switzerland, where Eugen Bleuler (1857-
1939), the eminent psychiatrist who developed the concept of
schizophrenia, became interested in Freud's work. His young
assistant, C. G. Jung (born 1870), began using Freud's meth-
ods along with a method developed at Zurich of employing the
already familiar "free association test" of the psychologists for
the new purpose of detecting hidden "complexes" in psychiatric
patients. Jung and Freud became personally acquainted and
together founded in 1911 an international psychoanalytic so-
ciety with Jung as the first president. But by 1913 it was clear
that Jung's ideas were deviating considerably from Freud's,
and at Freud's insistence Jung ceased to call himself a psycho-
analyst. Instead he began to call himself an analytical psychol-
ogist and proceeded to develop an active school at Zurich and
elsewhere.

Jung's innovations had to do with the neuroses and with
the libido. Freud, by tracing the adult's neurosis back to the
Oedipus complex of the small child, had revealed the "predis-
posing cause" of the neurosis but not the "exciting cause."
Many a person harbors unadjusted complexes left behind from
childhood and still does not fall victim to a neurosis until he is
blocked by some new problem in adult life. Therefore, urged
Jung, the exciting cause of a neurosis is some problem demand-
ing for its solution a greater output of psychic energy than the
individual can muster. ( Here Jung was following Janet, whose
lectures he had attended in Paris.) Failing to solve his present
problem, the individual takes refuge in earlier ways of trying to
handle difficulties. He regresses to the line he took as a child
in meeting the Oedipus situation ; and, his childish adjustment
having been poor, reviving it now does no good. If his childish
reaction was to withdraw from the real situation into fantasy
life, he now tends to do the same an obviously poor adjust-
ment to his present situation. But now let his present problem
"solve itself" without him immediately his infantile behavior

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 199

ceases, his neurosis disappears because its exciting cause is no
longer present. Free association and dream analysis are used
first to discover the patient's present problem.

Take away the obstacle in the path of life and this whole system of
infantile phantasies at once breaks down and becomes again as inactive
and ineffective as before. But do not let us forget that, to a certain
extent, it is at work influencing us always and everywhere. . . . There-
fore I no longer find the cause of the neurosis in the past, but in the
present. I ask, what is the necessary task which the patient will not
accomplish? 2

Jung used the term libido in an even broader sense than
Freud, stripping it of its distinctively sexual character. He
made it include both Freud's libido and Adler's will for power,
and in short the whole range of motives. He made it equivalent
to Schopenhauer's will to live or to Bergson's elan vital. For
Jung, then, libido was the total vital energy of the individual
which finds its outlets in growth, in reproduction, and in all
kinds of activity. Its first outlet in the infant is by way of
nutrition and growth. It is the source of the child's pleasures,
which are not sexual pleasures because the sex drive has not yet
emerged out of the total urge to live. Jung expressed himself
quite forcibly on Freud's conception of infantile sexuality
(1928, pages 339, 340):

A strictly Freudian analysis ... is exclusively a sex-analysis, based
upon the dogma that the relation of mother and child is necessarily
sexual. Of course any Freudian will assure you that he does not mean
coarse sexuality, but "psycho-sexuality" an unscientific and logically
unjustifiable extension. ... A child's regressive tendency can be desig-
nated an "incestuous craving for the mother" only figuratively. . . . The
word "incest" has a definite meaning. ... To apply the same term to
the child's difficulties ... is worse than absurd.

Freud still insisted that the libido was genuinely sexual even
in childhood. Jung's effort to "purify" it seemed to Freud to
betray the cause of psychoanalysis by discarding the great gains
that Freud himself had achieved in sex psychology. A little
later, however, as we have seen (page 184), Freud's study of

a jung, 1920, p. 232. The quotation dates from a paper of 1913.

200 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

narcissism led him to combine libido and the other life instincts
under the name of Eros, which is essentially the same as Jung's
libido, except of course that Freud then postulated a death in-
stinct or destructive tendency as the polar opposite of Eros.

Without accepting the death instinct, Jung was himself fully
convinced of the necessity of postulating opposed forces, not
only to account for conflicts and maladjustments, but still more
to account for synthesis and normal development (Fordham,
1945). Jung's complicated theoretical system demands several
polarities (Jacobi, 1943, 1945). The best known is that be-
tween introversion and extroversion. Jung believed it possible
to distinguish two types of individuals, those whose interest
and attention were centered on what went on in themselves (the
introverts) and those whose interest and attention went out to
the physical and social environment (the extroverts). The ex-
trovert is "set" for dealing with the external world, the intro-
vert for dealing with the inner world of ideas and feelings.
The extrovert finds the values of life in the objects (and per-
sons) he perceives and manages, while the introvert finds his
values in thoughts, feelings, and ideals. The libido, as Jung
would say, has an outward thrust in extroversion, an inward
thrust in introversion. 3

Individuals differ in the direction of their interest and ac-
tivity according as they are introverts or extroverts ; but they
also differ in the kind of mental activity to which they are most
inclined. Jung distinguished four main kinds of mental ac-
tivity: thinking, sense perception, intuition, and feeling. Of
these four, thinking and feeling are polar opposites, for so far
as a man is thinking in logical concepts he is not valuing things
in terms of likes and dislikes, pleasantness and unpleasantness.
The extrovert thinker deals logically with external things, while
the extrovert feeler is engaged in liking and disliking external
things. Sense perception and intuition are regarded as an-
other pair of opposites , sense perception being attentive to de-

8 Following Jung's lead, many psychologists have attempted to work
out the introversion-extroversion dimension of personality in ^detail, but
are coming to the conclusion that more than a single factor is involved
(Guilford, 1936).

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 201

tails, intuition to broad general effects and configurations.
Combining the four kinds of mental activity with the two di-
rections of interest, Jung has eight main types of individuals
besides intermediate types which he also recognizes.

And this is not all, for there is still the great polarity of
conscious and unconscious to be considered. Jung makes even
more use than Freud of the concept of the unconscious. For
Jung there are deeper and deeper layers of the unconscious.
The least (Jeep layer is the personal unconscious, which is com-
posed in part of material repressed by the individual, as Freud
pointed out, but also contains material that has been simply for-
gotten and material that has been learned unconsciously.
Deeper than the personal unconscious lies the racial or collec-
tive unconscious, the common groundwork of humanity out of
which each individual develops his personal conscious and un-
conscious life. The collective unconscious is inherited, coming
down to us from our primitive ancestors. It is inherited in the
structure of the organism, including the native brain structure,
which predisposes the individual to think and act as the human
race has thought and acted through countless generations. The
collective unconscious includes the instincts (the "id" of Freud's
later system) and it also includes what Jung calls archetypes.
The instincts are primitive ways of acting, the archetypes primi-
tive ways of thinking, and the two are not entirely separate,
since thinking and acting go on together, especially at the prim-
itive level. An archetype becomes an idea when it is made con-
scious, but in the collective unconscious it is more like a tacit
assumption, such as the primitive belief in magic and action at
a distance. While almost entirely submerged in the normal
waking life of civilized adults, archetypes crop up in dreams, in
the fantasies of children, in the delusions of the insane, and in
the myths and fairy stories which have come down to us from
distant ages and still make a mystic appeal to our inner nature.

The total psychic individual, in Jung's theory, is composed
of the conscious and the unconscious, the two being comple-
mentary. What the individual is not consciously, that he is
unconsciously. If he is an extrovert consciously, he is an intro-
vert unconsciously; if he is of the thinking type consciously, he

O

202 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

is of the feeling type unconsciously. All the capacities and po-
tential interests which he has not developed and employed in his
conscious life remain as latent tendencies in the unconscious.
Success in practical life calls for specialization and leads to one-
sided development. This is all very well in the first half of life,
but in the second half of life, say from the age of forty on, the
one-sided individual is likely to be oppressed by a sense of the
emptiness and futility of it all and to long in a confused way
for something deeper. Jung's theory and practice were aimed
largely at such persons in the second half of life. Tap the un-
conscious, bring out and develop some of its latent potentiali-
ties, integrate them into the conscious life and so round out the
individual's personality. First get at the personal unconscious,
as was done by the psychoanalysts, and then advance gradually
into the collective unconscious. Help the patient to become
aware of his "shadow" or darker self, which comprises the
tendencies that are rejected from the "ego ideal" no easy task.
Help the man to recognize the "eternal feminine" in himself,
the woman to recognize her "eternal masculine." Recognize
the deeply human religious instinct, which goes beyond Freud's
pleasure-seeking instinct and Adler's will for power; without
dictating the patient's theological beliefs, lead him through
direct acquaintance with his own collective unconscious to a
sense of oneness with mankind and indeed with the universe.
And do not be disturbed as a scientist if your patient comes out
with a rather mystical viewpoint, so long as life for him be-
comes once more meaningful and worth while.

In his treatment Jung encouraged his patients to immerse
themselves in mythology and to give free expression to their
unconscious in some form of artistic activity. He also made
much use of dreams as indicators not only of disturbing com-
plexes left over from the past, but also of constructive stirrings
of the unconscious looking toward the future. He once con-
trasted his own and Freud's line of interpretation in the in-
stance of a dream reported by a young man who had just
finished his university studies but was unable to decide on an
occupation and had become neurotic. The dream was (1920,
page 219) :

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 203

I was going up a flight of stairs with my mother and sister. When
we reached the top I was told that my sister was soon to have a child.

This would be an easy one for a Freudian analyst, climbing
stairs being accepted as a regular symbol for sex behavior, and
mother and sister being the regular objects of infantile sex de-
sires. (Adler could easily see a dependent style of life in this
dream, since the dreamer did not climb the stairs alone. ) Not
satisfied with such a ready-made interpretation, Jung proceeded
to obtain his patient's free associations suggested by the dream.
The mother suggested neglect of duties, since he had long neg-
lected his mother. The sister suggested true love for a woman.
Climbing stairs suggested making a success of life, and the
prospective baby suggested new birth or regeneration for him-
self an archetype. Jung concluded that this dream revealed
unconscious energies beginning to work on the young man's
present problem.

Neo-Freudian Psychology

Since old controversies lose their sharp personal edge in the
course of time with the disappearance of the original protag-
onists from the scene, it is natural that many who now call
themselves Freudian psychoanalysts should feel free to deviate
from the master to some extent. We have already noticed cer-
tain deviations in respect to short therapy (page 167), the
Oedipus complex (page 181), and the death instinct (page
188). Rigid adherence to all of Freud's ideas is no longer con-
sidered necessary by those who use Freud's methods, perhaps
with some freedom, and who certainly deserve the name of
psychoanalysts. Some of them, however, who wish to differen-
tiate their theories and even their techniques quite sharply from
those laid down by Freud, are sometimes spoken of as forming
a neo-Freudian school of psychoanalysis.

The neo-Freudians urge that psychoanalysis should shift its
"orientation" from biology to sociology. It should regard it-
self as one of the social rather than one of the biological sci-
ences. Instead of tracing human motives to the inherited

204 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

instincts of self-preservation and sexual reproduction (with or
without the death instinct), psychoanalysis should seek the
source of human motives in the requirements of the human
situation, which is always a social one. Instead of regarding
the child's emotional development as being closely bound to
his slow bodily growth and delayed sexual maturity, psycho-
analysis should focus on the influences reaching the child from
the family, the school, the culture. And since the family, the
school, and the culture differ in different countries and change
in the course of time, we have to expect corresponding differ-
ences and changes in child development, in human motives, and
in the frustrations and maladjustments of the emotional life.
What Freud so keenly observed in Vienna about 1900 might
not hold good in other times and places. Then, it might be, the
sex desire was most frustrated, but now the aggressive tendency
or the need for security. Times change, and neuroses change
with them.

The cultural point of view is forcefully presented by Abram
Kardiner (1939, 1945) and by Erich Fromm (1941, 1947).
Kardiner has opened up a promising lead for cooperation with
social anthropology in studying the interaction of social insti-
tutions and individual personality. He believes it possible by
use of the psychoanalytic approach to reveal a basic personality
characterizing each culture. Fromm brings out the social psy-
choanalyst's divergence from Freud in such statements as this
one: "We believe that man is primarily a social being, and not,
as Freud assumes, primarily self -sufficient and only secondarily
in need of others to satisfy his instinctual needs." Freud's oral
and anal characters are not primarily due to fixation at these
levels of sexual development but result from the way a child
is treated by his parents. An attitude of dependence (oral) or
of self-sufficiency (anal) is built up by the child in dealing with
his whole social environment, and not simply in relation to
feeding and defecation, though these important infantile prob-
lems certainly play their parts in his development.

Karen Horney in her interesting books has set forth the
theory and practice of a neo-Freudian school, which she is ac-
tively engaged in developing by training young psychoanalysts

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 205

in her methods. After fifteen years of work by Freud's meth-
ods, largely in Europe, she became convinced that they were not
suited to many neurotic patients that she treated, both over
there and in her new location in New York. Her dissatisfac-
tion with Freud's theories was confined at first to his death
instinct and his very unflattering conception of the feminine
personality, but as she reconsidered Freud's whole system of
theory and therapy she found that it hung together but that its
major premises were highly debatable. Her thinking, she says,
was influenced by the work of Fromm. Finally she found it
possible, by abandoning Freud's biological premises and giving
due weight to the social environment in individual development,
to work out a revised psychoanalytic theory which freed the
therapeutic practice from certain hampering restrictions im-
posed by the strict Freudian theory.

These "biological premises" had to do with Freud's "in-
stincts" and with the process of child development. Freud
thought of the instincts as internal sources of energy which,
by the way, is not a very biological conception, since no sources
of energy are known except the general source in metabolism.
We may better say, biologically, that he regarded them as ten-
sions built up by internal processes. Hunger and the sex drive,
at least, would fit this biological conception. Freud went on,
not very biologically, to think of these tensions as dammed up
and directed toward the organism itself until some external out-
let was found, and turning back upon the self when frustrated
externally as if, for example, the organism tended to eat itself
if it could find nothing else to eat, or to fear itself if it could
find nothing else to fear. The safety motive evidently did not
fit very well into this scheme. But when the death instinct
was brought into the picture, that, too, was conceived as an
inner energy or tension seeking something to destroy and turn-
ing back upon the self when blocked externally. These instincts
could fuse and find perverted or sublimated outlets, but that
was about all that the system would allow in the way of derived
human motives. Now hungry behavior, sexual behavior,
safety-seeking behavior, and even hostile behavior are certainly
observed facts at a primitive level, so that the individual must

206 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

have the native capacity to respond in these ways to certain
stimulating conditions. If we substitute native responsiveness
to environmental conditions for instinctive energies seeking
outlet, we are on quite different ground and can allow much
more scope to the environment in the formation of particular
human motives. Something like this is the argument of Fromm
and Horney with regard to the instincts.

With regard to the process of development Freud had a
sound biological basis for emphasizing the importance of the
prolonged human growth period, but he had no biological
reason for dividing childhood into- two periods, a sexually ac-
tive period up to about five years and a latency period from then
to puberty. This and other details in his theory of sexual de-
velopment were based on his psychoanalytic data, No doubt
Freud thought of the emergence of the Oedipus complex and
the superego at about five years of age as a predetermined neces-
sity in the growth process, while Horney would say that this
whole development depends on the way the child is treated. But
it is not good biology to neglect the influence of the environ-
ment, so that the new sociological orientation is not truly
unbiological.

But the point in Freud's theory of development which Hor-
ney finds most objectionable is related to his conception of the
unconscious. He taught that a repressed wish or experience
remains isolated and unchanged in the unconscious to crop up
from time to time in dreams, lapses, or neurotic disturbances
of conscious behavior. The adult's maladjustment is due to the
persistence of such impossible childish goals. What Horney
has to say on this matter is fundamental in her theory and in
her practice as well :

Freud tends to regard later peculiarities as almost direct repetitions
of infantile drives or reactions ; hence he expects later disturbances to
vanish if the underlying infantile complexes are elucidated. . . . We
recognize that the connection between later peculiarities and earlier
experiences is more complicated than Freud assumed : there is no such
thing as an isolated repetition of isolated experiences ; but the entirety
of infantile experiences combines to form a certain character structure,
and it is this structure from which later difficulties emanate [1939, p. 9].

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 207

The character structure, first established by the child's ex-
periences and reactions, is evidently about the same as Adler's
1 'style of life," but the idea is more fully worked out by Horney.
She does not regard it as absolutely fixed and unchangeable by
later experiences and reactions. In opposition to Freud, she
credits the individual with "constructive forces" that "strive
toward growth and development," a forward-moving tendency
that aims at a better self and the realization of one's latent po-
tentialities, though it has to combat inertia and a fear of ven-
turing forward into the unknown (1942, pages 21, 269). In
the psychoanalysis of an adult, then, the great problem is to get
the patient to see his present character structure, how it operates
in his personal relations, and how it could be improved. To dig
in memory for its origins in childhood may help or may prove
to be a blind alley.

It is the neurotic character structure of her patients, rather
than the normal personality, that Horney has been able to work
out with great thoroughness. Whether the child shall develop a
normal or a neurotic character structure depends primarily on
his home environment and the way he is treated by his parents.
With unfavorable treatment he is oppressed by a "basic anx-
iety," from which he seeks to escape by developing "neurotic
trends." These, however, are ineffective and mutually conflict-
ing, so that the child is left with an unintegrated personality
and is incapable of putting his whole heart into any kind of
personal relationship.

Basic anxiety is the child's feeling that the social environ-
ment is hostile and dangerous. It seems to him "unreliable,
mendacious, unappreciative, unfair, unjust, begrudging and
merciless ... a menace to his entire development and to his
most legitimate wishes and strivings" (1939, page 75). He is
openly or subtly intimidated and given to understand that he
does not ''belong," his spontaneous expansiveness is throttled,
and he is made to feel guilty if he dares to rebel or show any
independence. Naturally the child tries to contrive some de-
fense against such conditions, and when one line of defense
fails he tries another, but none of them is really successful. If
a rebellious boy runs away from home, he is forced back by his

208 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

need for a home ; the dilemma between his hostility and his de-
pendence seems insoluble. To repeat, in Horney's words, basic
anxiety is

. . . the feeling a child has of being isolated and helpless in a potentially
hostile world. A wide range of adverse factors in the environment can
produce this insecurity in a child. . . . The child gropes for ways to
keep going, ways to cope with this menacing world. . . . He develops
not only ad hoc strategies but lasting character trends which become
part of his personality. I have called these "neurotic trends." If we ...
take a panoramic view of the main directions in which a child can and
does move under these circumstances . . . three main lines crystallize : a
child can move toward people, against them, or away from them [1945,
pp. 41-42].

The moving-toward, compliant trend expresses the child's
helpless dependence ; the moving-against, hostile trend expresses
his rebellion; the moving-away, withdrawing trend expresses
his sense of isolation and not-belonging. To shift from one of
these attitudes to another according to the circumstances would
be normal (though none of them is the true social feeling), but
if each attitude is compulsive and also ineffective, the outcome
is a neurosis with severe conflict between the trends. Freud
was right in regarding neuroses as the result of conflicts, but
the conflicts are not between the ego on one side and the id, en-
vironment, and superego on the other, as Freud held, but be-
tween the individual's divergent trends in his struggle to cope
somehow with the environment. This conflict of trends is not
directly conscious but manifests itself to the subject in feelings
of anxiety and fatigue, and to the trained observer by a curious
inconsistency and ambiguity of behavior.

The goal of psychoanalytic therapy, then, is not to unearth
and uproot the repressed desires of early childhood, but to en-
able the patient to see the conflicting trends that make up his
shaky character structure and to awaken his constructive de-
sire for a more adequate personality and better personal rela-
tionships. To trace the trends back to childhood may be helpful,
but it is not enough. The patient must come to grips with his
present trends and conflicts and see his present half-hearted and
inconsistent behavior in relation to the trends. Such a thera-

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 209

peutic goal calls for prolonged psychoanalysis, though mild
cases are much helped by brief treatment, and some patients can
be trusted to do a good share of the analytical work for them-
selves, with only occasional guidance from the professional ana-
lyst (1942). The therapist takes a more active, directive part
in the analysis than Freud recommended.

The sex drive and its social frustrations are no longer re-
garded by Horney as the prime factors in neurotic maladjust-
ment. "Sexual difficulties are the effect rather than the cause
of the neurotic character structure." Consequently the analy-
sis and elimination of a sex problem often fails to reach the
fundamental difficulty or to put the patient squarely on his feet
(1939, pages 10, 55). The obstacles to harmonious social life,
which Freud in his earlier theory located in the excessive de-
mands of the sex instinct, and in his later theory in the instinc-
tive hostility of every man toward his neighbor, are attributed
by Horney to the competitive structure of our western civiliza-
tion. Competitiveness is accused of "carrying the germs of
destructive rivalry, disparagement, suspicion, begrudging envy
into every human relationship" (1939, page 173). She seems
not to take account of the elements of good sportsmanship and
fair play that are present in well-organized competition.

With all these rejections and innovations, what is left of
Freud's psychoanalysis that is acceptable to the neo-Freudians ?
Much rather than little, according to Horney, who lists the
following as "fundamentals of psychoanalysis' ' (1939, pages
17-36) :

1. Psychic determinism, without qualification

2. The importance of emotional forces, as contrasted with
"rational motivations, conditioned reflexes and habit forma-
tions"

3. Unconscious motivations, the point being that while a
motive may not be entirely unconscious, its role in the indi-
vidual's personal relationships is hidden by rationalization,
projection, and other such ways of distorting and concealing
the truth

4. Repression and resistance, and the importance of analyzing
the resistances during therapy

210 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

5. Inner conflicts, though the conflicting forces are differently
conceived

6. The persistent influence of childhood experiences, though
this influence is carried by the character structure rather
than by separate unconscious memories

7. The essential techniques of free association, dream interpre-
tation, and the utilization of transference

The "academic psychologist" certainly finds it much easier
to go along with Horney than with Freud. It is interesting to
observe that the elements in Freud's theories which aroused the
greatest "academic" skepticism have been subjected to radical
revision by psychoanalysts themselves. We must not leave the
impression that the neb-Freudians have won the day and that
practical unanimity now prevails in the whole body of psycho-
analysts. Rather, the present seems to be a time of free ex-
perimentation with new ideas and procedures, and of active
dissension, though less rancorous than formerly, within the to-
tal psychoanalytic school. "Psychoanalytic theory today, then,
is far from an accepted body of dogma ; on the contrary, a great
deal of it is fluid, ambiguous, unintegrated and exceedingly
polemic" (Masserman, 1946, page 92).

To what extent have the results and theories of psycho-
analysis been taken up into general psychology? The field of
motivation and personality in which psychoanalysis works is
recognized by all psychologists as a very important though dif-
ficult field. They should welcome any enlightenment offered
by the psychoanalysts; and in a general way much enlighten-
ment has come to psychologists from their study of psycho-
analysis. But the clinical experience and therapeutic success on
which the psychoanalysts rely as evidence for their views seem
to many and probably most psychologists rather a shaky foun-
dation for scientific laws and theories. Simpler explanations
can be offered for the same facts. When an experimental psy-
chologist has undergone psychoanalysis, he may be able to
verify the major phenomena of an analysis the emotional up-
heaval with its anxiety and hostility, the revival of some child-
hood memories and attitudes, the new insights into one's
motives and behavior and still he may "see no need to speak of

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELATED SCHOOLS 211

unconscious motivation or of unconscious dynamics" (Landis,
1940). He may wish that psychoanalysis would employ "op-
erational" concepts, less steeped in Freudian theory. Freud's
quest for the "deep" things of life, along with his flair for sen-
sational ideas that would surely command attention, loaded
psychoanalysis with a host of terms and concepts that do not fit
readily into a sober scientific framework.

Besides his general theory Freud offered a large number of
more particular laws or hypotheses which, it would seem, could
be tested by psychological experiments and direct observation
of children. There have indeed been not a few attempts by
psychologists to do so, as can be seen from the critical survey
of such work by Sears (1943). The net result, so far, is that
Freud's statements regarding child life and development are
overgeneralized, to say the least, while some of his dynamic
laws can be verified or paralleled in relatively simple laboratory
situations. Young children do show some of the sex interest
that Freud assumed (though whether it is genuine libido or a
liking for what is hidden and forbidden is not so clear). Some
children do pass through a phase much like Freud's Oedipus
situation, though it is the exception rather than the rule.
Freud's idea that the memories of early childhood are lost be-
cause of repression occurring at the close of the early sexual
period seems to be pretty well disproved, and the existence of a
clear-cut "latency period" of sex interest in later childhood is
very doubtful. On the other side of the ledger, it has been
found possible to set up laboratory experiments demonstrating
the tendency to repress and forget experiences that were hu-
miliating to the individual, the tendency to project or attribute
to other people those characteristics of the self which one is un-
willing to admit, and the tendency when frustrated to regress
to earlier and perhaps more infantile ways of acting. It is
freely admitted that the laboratory situations are mild affairs in
comparison with the emotional difficulties that sometimes en-
tangle a person in real life. For that reason the experimenters
may never succeed in putting some of Freud's dynamic princi-
ples to the test, but it is reassuring to have some of them veri-
fied in a small way and so brought down out of the clouds and

212 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

made available, along with the experimenter's abundant material
on the processes of learning and perception, for incorporation
into the growing science of dynamic psychology.

The preliminary report (1948) of Kinsey and his associates
on their statistical survey of sex behavior in the human male
population of the United States contains much material that
should have a bearing on the Freudian theories. The mere fact
that sexual behavior is prevalent in the male adult and adoles-
cent population has no particular bearing, unless perhaps as in-
dicating that the restriction of sex behavior is not so marked as
Freud seemed to assume. The great variety of common sex
practices seems inconsistent with the tendency of psychi-
atrists to regard as pathological any but the strictly normal
form of sex behavior. The question of "sublimation" is a slip-
pery one, but if the meaning is that intellectual or artistic
activity necessarily reduces the amount of sex activity, demon-
strative cases of such sublimation were not found in the Kinsey
sample. One definite result is that individuals differ enor-
mously in the amount of their sexual activity a fact to be
borne in mind in any generalizing theory. Some young boys,
even in the first year of age, were found to be capable of or-
gasm, and the reported incidence of such manifestation in-
creased gradually up to adolescence. There was no statistical
indication of Freud's latency period. Actually it is hard to find
in such data any clear-cut proof or disproof of Freud's theories.

CHAPTER 7
HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES

Without forming any compact school, quite a number of
psychologists during the past fifty years have started rebellions
of some importance against what they consider the dominant in-
tellectualistic and analytic trends in psychology. Some of them
have objected mostly to any emphasis on intelligence, percep-
tion, learning, and thinking, to the neglect of emotion, motiva-
tion, and personality. Others have been most critical of the
emphasis on any such separate functions of the organism, to
the neglect of the organism as a whole. Those who insist that
the most important part of psychology has to do with motives,
purposes, and urges have called themselves purposive or hormic
psychologists (hormic from the Greek horme, "an urge").
Those who insist on considering the individual as a whole have
called themselves self -psychologists, personalistic psychologists,
organismic psychologists; because of their emphasis on the
whole person or organism we may label them all holistic. Those
who belong under the one head usually belong secondarily un-
der the other also.

The most militant of these rebels was William McDougall
with his purposivism or hormism, which we shall examine first.

Purposivism or Hormic Psychology

Just as structuralism finds the fundamental fact of psychol-
ogy in sensation, behaviorism in bodily movement, and Gestalt
psychology in the perception of patterns, so there is a school
that starts from the fact of purpose. Human activity has these
various aspects, if not more besides, and any aspect may excite
the interest of a psychologist and lead him to build a psycho-

2*3

2i 4 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

logical system upon the kind of activity that appeals to him as
most significant.

THE FACT OF PURPOSE. In the older "arm-chair" psychol-
ogy, will and purpose came in for a lot of discussion and good
moral advice to the student, but when psychologists started to
be scientific they found it difficult to handle this topic either
from the purely introspective side or behaviorally. What is the
experience of willing and purposing? There is a sensation of
muscular tension, and an "I will" experience, but little more
could be reported. Purpose seemed to belong under the head
of meaning or value, which Titchener ruled out of an existen-
tial psychology. To Watson, purpose belonged decidedly among
the outworn introspective fantasies which he threw overboard.
Yet anyone who got acquainted with either Titchener or Wat-
son soon felt that he was in the hands of a very purposeful in-
dividual. And both of them said as much in their writings.
Titchener wrote freely of his aim to steer psychology into pure
existential channels. "The psychologist seeks, first of all, to
analyze experience into its simplest components. . . . Then he
proceeds to the task of synthesis" (1909-1910, pages 37-38).
And Watson is equally frank (1924-1925, pages 6, 11):
"In 1912 the behaviorists . . . decided either to give up psy-
chology or else make it a natural science. . . . The behaviorist
. . . dropped from his scientific vocabulary all subjective terms
such as sensation, perception, image, desire, purpose. ... He
wants to control man's reactions as physical scientists want to
control and manipulate other natural phenomena." Now you
should not accuse these men of inconsistency. They are lapsing
in these passages into the language of common sense, abandon-
ing for the moment their scientific vocabulary because they are
not really talking psychology but only talking about psychology.
They reveal as anyone else would the prima facie, common-
sense fact of human purpose. Whether this fact is to be ex-
plained away or made fundamental in psychology is another
question.

The purposive school makes purpose fundamental, while the
early behaviorists sought to explain it away. No one has ex-

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 215

pressed this behavioristic attitude more clearly than Z. Y. Kuo
( 1928), an eminent Chinese adherent of the group.

The concept of purpose is a lazy substitute for ... careful and de-
tailed analysis. . . . With better understanding of the ... elementary
stimuli and the stimulus pattern, with more knowledge of physiological
facts, and with clearer insight into the behavior history, the concept of
purpose of whatever form will eventually disappear. . . . The duty of a
behaviorist is to describe behavior in exactly the same way as the
physicist describes the movement of a machine. . . . This human ma-
chine behaves in a certain way because environmental stimulation has
forced him to do so. ...

The rejection of the concept of purpose implies a repudiation of the
current view of trial and error learning in animals. For this view is
based on the notion that . . . the animal has a purpose, or is making
some effort to solve a problem. . . . The purpose is preconceived or
created by the experimenter the animal itself has no aim or goal. . . .
Whether an act is successful or unsuccessful depends on the purpose
of the experimenter. From the objective standpoint, one act is just as
successful or just as unsuccessful as any other one.

Surely these are the words of a purposeful individual ! His
purpose is to eliminate purpose from the behaviorisms scientific
vocabulary and way of thinking. What to common sense is a
purposive act must be analyzed into simpler processes. But
suppose the analysis is successfully accomplished does it prove
the unreality of that which is analyzed? Has the chemist, by
his successful analysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen,
shown that water is unreal or that the property of water to dis-
solve salt, for example, and the immense role of water in the
life of plants and animals, are only illusions? Water, the chem-
ist will reply, functions in the world as a compound and not a
mere mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. Purpose, we may well
believe, is as real as water and plays an immense role in behavior
in human behavior at least a role for psychology to investi-
gate. Purpose is a "molar" fact (page 105), a distinctly psy-
chological fact.

Purposive behavior is the same as goal seeking. In a full-
fledged purposive act, as we know it in ourselves, two factors
are combined : desire and foresight. We foresee the goal and

2i6 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

we desire to reach it. Foresight and desire do not always go
together. The aviator in a certain predicament may clearly
foresee that he is going to strike a tree without desiring that
result. The hungry infant desires a full stomach without
knowing what he desires. In the primitive kind of goal seeking
there is a striving without any clear foresight of the goal.
Purposivism asserts the prime role of striving in all behavior;
it emphasizes striving rather than foresight, though inclined
to place much emphasis on foresight as well, even in animal be-
havior. It is because of its major emphasis on striving that it
has adopted the name of hormic psychology.

McDouGALL CHAMPIONS A HORMIC PSYCHOLOGY. Wil-
liam McDougall (1871-1938), an Englishman by birth and
education and for the larger part of his active career, was a
distinguished student of biology and medicine and an active
anthropological field worker before settling down in 1900 to
the work of a psychologist, first at London and then at Oxford.
During the first world war he was a medical officer in the Brit-
ish Army in charge of cases of war neurosis. After that war
he became professor at Harvard and later at Duke University.

We have already noticed that McDougall was one of the
first to define psychology as the science of behavior (page 73).
A mere science of consciousness seemed to him "sterile and
narrow." The behavior of men and animals under all condi-
tions of health and disease was the proper field for psychologi-
cal study. McDougall himself was trained in physiological
methods. He was fond of animals and from time to time used
animal subjects in his psychological experiments. Accordingly
he stressed the importance of objective methods, but he was by
no means inclined to reject introspection. If we limit ourselves
rigidly to objective observation, we are apt to get a mechanical
view of an animal's behavior and even a human being appears
like a machine, as Kuo said in the quotation given. But we
know our own behavior from inside and know it to be purposive
and not mechanical ; and there is no point in forgetting what
we know by introspection when we turn our attention to animal
behavior. McDougall was not afraid of anthropomorphism.

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 217

What, then, is behavior? As we look around in the world
we find some things that are inert and mechanical, moved by
external forces, and other things that belumc, that "seem to
have an intrinsic power of self-determination, and to pursue
actively . . . their own ends and purposes. . . . The striving
to achieve an end is, then, the mark of behavior ; and behavior is
the characteristic of living things" (1912, page 20). If any-
one objects that we cannot observe the "striving," McDougali
counters by pointing to several objective characteristics of goal-
seeking behavior, as follows (1923, pages 43-46) :

1. It persists. An activity may start in response to a stimulus
but continue after the stimulus has ceased. A rabbit scurry-
ing to its hole after a momentary noise is an example.

2. With all the persistence there is considerable variation of
the activity. An obstacle is by-passed and the same goal is
reached as if there had been no obstacle.

3. The activity terminates when the goal is reached, and some
other activity takes its place. The cat makes a dash for a
tree and up the trunk, but then sits down on a branch and
calmly watches the dog.

4. The activity improves with repetition. Useless movements
are eliminated, and the whole performance becomes
smoother and quicker. In short the animal learns to reach
the goal more efficiently.

These objective criteria of purposive behavior, first formu-
lated by McDougali in 1912 *, are about the same as those later
adopted by Tolman and other recent behaviorists. Although
most of McDougall's work was not well received by the behav-
iorists, we must credit him with considerable influence in this
respect (page 105).

If behavior, both human and animal, is characterized by
goal seeking, a very important problem for psychology is to dis-
cover what goals are sought. The particular goals vary enor-
mously, but they may fall into a few natural classes. The tree
for the cat and the hole in the ground for the rabbit fall into
the class of places of safety; they have the same fundamental

1 In the fifth edition of his Introduction- to social psychology, pages 354-
355.

218 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

appeal. What are the fundamental appeals or motives that lead
to goal-seeking behavior? This is the question raised by Mc-
Dougall in 1908 in his Introduction to social psychology, on the
whole the most important of his many books. It was an effort
to provide a psychological foundation for the social sciences.
Up to that time the psychologists had made no serious attempt
to provide such a foundation but had left each historian or econ-
omist or sociologist to improvise a psychology for his own use.
The experimental psychologists had made good progress in the
study of such intellectual processes as sensation, perception,
learning, memory, and thinking, but what the social sciences
seemed to need was knowledge of human motives, thus far al-
most neglected by the psychologists. Why do men live in
groups, why do they follow leaders and submit to governmental
regulation through mutual fear, mutual helpfulness, or sim-
ply inertia and imitation? Is religion the result of a religious
instinct, and political life the working of a political instinct?
Is all conduct motivated by a desire to obtain pleasure and avoid
pain ? The social thinker who required an answer to these ques-
tions adopted the best answer that suggested itself to him, while
psychology offered no solution.

McDougall's revolt against the existing state of affairs was
twofold. He objected to the tough-and-ready psychology that
he found in the social sciences, and he objected to the one-sided
intellectualism of psychology. This intellectualizing tendency
had led to the assumption that all human conduct was rational
and dependent on foresight of consequences. But why should
some consequences be chosen rather than others unless there
were some basic needs and preferences? Or consider the doc-
trine of "psychological hedonism," that all desire is neces-
sarily a desire for pleasure. This "axiom" puts the cart before
the horse, at least in many cases. For when is eating pleasant ?
Only when you are hungry, i.e., have a desire for food. The
pleasure depends on the desire, and the desire is more funda-
mental than the pleasure ; and so it is with other appetites. To
get down to fundamentals we must find the natural desires and
goals of men, some of which like hunger and sex desire may
be common to men and animals.

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 219

McDougall set to work in earnest in the hope of developing a
systematic psychology of motives for the use of the social sci-
ences. His general assumption was that there must be a num-
ber of fundamental motives which are natural and hereditary
and that all other motives must be derived from these primaries
in the course of the individual's experience. He chose to call
the primaries by the old name of "instincts" a choice which he
later regretted. An instinct for him was not a mechanical affair
like a reflex or chain of reflexes. It was, rather, a motive, a
striving toward some type of goal. There was emotion in it
the emotion of fear, for example, in striving to escape from
danger. And there was a cognitive element in it, a perception
of danger in the case of fear. He regarded an instinct as a
complete mental process at the primitive level, capable of analy-
sis into three parts: (1) On the receptive side, it is a pre-
disposition to notice significant stimuli like food odors when
one is hungry. (2) On the executive side, it is a predisposition
to make certain movements or to approach a certain goal. (3)
In between is the emotional impulse or striving, the core of the
whole instinct. Sometimes a distinction can be made between
the striving and the emotion, but on the whole McDougall later
concluded that the two were scarcely distinguishable.

It was necessary for McDougall to work out a fairly ade-
quate list of human instincts or propensities, as he later pre-
ferred to call them (1932). If any important ones were
omitted, the motivation of human behavior would not be suffi-
ciently explained. But he had to take care not to admit any
secondary, learned motives into his list of primaries, and not
to fall into the absurdity of "explaining" each human activ-
ity by assuming an instinct for it a political instinct to explain
politics, a religious instinct to account for religion, an instinct
of workmanship to account for the high standards of the expert
workman, etc., etc. In 1908 McDougall listed twelve major
human instincts. He reviewed this list from time to time with-
out making any radical changes and by 1932 had a list of seven-
teen besides a number of minor ones such as the breathing
instinct or desire to breathe when out of breath, and similar
desires to sneeze, cough, etc. He included in this later list

220 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

laughing, crying, sleeping, avoiding discomfort, and the some-
what questionable migratory tendency. His main list of in-
stincts or native propensities remained as follows. It is
instinctive :

1. To desire food periodically (hunger)

2. To reject certain substances (disgust)

3. To explore new places and things (curiosity)

4. To try to escape from danger (fear)

5. To fight when frustrated (anger)

6. To have sex desire (mating propensity)

7. To care tenderly for the young (mothering propensity)

8. To seek company (gregarious propensity)

9. To seek to dominate (self-assertive propensity)

10. To accept obvious inferiority (submissive propensity)

11. To make things (constructive propensity)

12. To collect things (acquisitive tendency)

Each of these instincts or propensities is to be regarded as
a natural inclination or motive. The self-assertive and submis-
sive propensities might be called the "pecking order" instincts,
with reference to behavior observed in a henyard. The hens
quickly establish a relatively permanent order of dominance,
each one asserting her claim to any morsel of food as against
certain other hens but yielding without resistance to certain
others. Any particular pecking order is of course learned and
not instinctive, what is instinctive being the tendencies to domi-
nate as far as possible but submit as far as necessary. Me-
Dougall argued that submitting gracefully, following a leader
happily, and being suggestible and imitative toward prestige
persons were sufficient indications of a true native tendency to
submit.

How seriously McDougall regarded his list of instincts or
propensities can be seen from these words from the Introduc-
tion to social psychology ( 1908, page 44) :

Directly or indirectly the instincts are the prime movers of all human
activity . . . determine the ends of all activities and supply the driving
power . . . and all the complex intellectual apparatus of the most highly
developed mind is ... but the instrument by which these impulses seek
their satisfactions.

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 2*1

This quotation, however, tends to create a false impression
of McDougall's system of motives, for he goes on to show how
the instincts become modified by learning and experience. The
fighting instinct, for example, is modified in two principal ways.
On the sensory side it becomes attached to new stimuli ; it be-
comes conditioned, as Pavlov would say. The stimulus arous-
ing angry behavior in an infant consists of physical restraint
and interference with the infant's movements. Later, restraint
or interference of a more subtle sort, exerted by an adult's
verbal commands, will arouse the child's anger. On the motor
or executive side, too, much modification occurs through learn-
ing. The infant's slashing and kicking give place to biting and
scratching, to hair pulling and striking with the fist, to angry
talk and various indirect ways of injuring the adversary. In
spite of all these sensory and motor modifications the instinct
remains the same at its core, the core being the angry impulse to
fight. The infant who reacts to some one holding his elbows
by movements of slashing and kicking, and the adult who reacts
to an offensive letter by devising some scheme that will damage
the offender's reputation, appear on the surface to be perform-
ing entirely different acts, and yet the angry impulse to hurt the
erlemy is there in both cases. When to fight and how to fight
are learned, but the primary motive of fighting back against in-
terference remains the same from infancy to old age.

With only so much modification of the instincts as already
described, the infant would scarcely become a humanized adult.
McDougall recognizes another modification. The instinctive
tendencies become combined into what he calls sentiments.
They become combined by being attached to the same object.
A man's love for a certain woman includes sex desire and also
some of the tender, protective tendency that we called the
mothering propensity. These two natural tendencies and prob-
ably others as well are attached to that one love object and are
thus combined into the sentiment of love, which is a powerful
adult motive. Patriotism is a sentiment. There is no single in-
stinct of patriotism, but a man's native land becomes the object
of several instincts. His country in danger awakens fear in
him; an attack on his country awakens his anger; his country

222 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

in rivalry with another country awakens his self-assertive tend-
ency; and as his home it awakens loving emotions. Thus his
country becomes the object of his complex sentiment of pa-
triotism which can be a powerful motivating force in his be-
havior.

Your sentiment for a person is what the person means to
you emotionally. Your sentiment for any object is what the ob-
ject means to you emotionally. The object may be your family
or another family, your school or another school, your religion
or another religion, your ideology or another ideology. The
self-assertive instinct is likely to be an important factor in any
sentiment. You identify yourself with your school, for in-
stance, feel that it is your school, boast of its triumphs, feel
personally humiliated by its defeats.

McDougall did not say, as he is sometimes supposed to have
said, that adult human behavior is directly motivated by the in-
stincts. What he said was that human behavior is motivated by
sentiments derived from the instincts and still possessing the
emotional striving of the instincts. Behavior, he said, is not
driven by purely rational considerations, but by loves and hates,
interests, zeals, rivalries, enthusiasms, all of which have an
emotional and impulsive character derived ultimately from the
native propensities of mankind. Social behavior, then, while
not based on a single social instinct, is based on loyalties and
interests resulting from the instincts combined into sentiments.
The gregarious propensity, by itself alone, would simply keep
men together in groups ; but group life gives a chance for all the
instincts to become conditioned to social situations and com-
bined into social sentiments.

EARLY AND LATER REACTIONS TO THE HORMIC PSYCHOL-
OGY. Such was the type of psychology which McDougall gave
to the world in 1908. It was received with enthusiasm by psy-
chologists by many though not all of them and quickly led to
books and university courses on social psychology by psycholo-
gists. It created social psychology as a branch of psychology,
where previously it had been treated almost exclusively by so-
ciologists. By the social scientists, too, it was received with

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 223

great interest and accepted for a few years as just what they
needed. How social institutions are based on human instincts
became the theme of a succession of books by sociologists and
economists. Society, it was said, has to meet the instinctive
demands of the individual. An industrialized society may get
so far away from the primitive conditions of life to which the
instincts were adapted that it can no longer satisfy the instinc-
tive cravings of the individual. Mechanized industry may al-
low the workman too little play for his self-assertive impulse,
and the now-common delay of marriage tends to thwart the sex
instinct. Frustrated instincts tend to produce restless, neurotic
behavior. Society may have to be remodeled so as to afford
scope for the instincts. Such was the line of thought of Graham
Wallas, the English economist, in his Human nature and poli-
tics (1908) and Tlie great society (1914), and much the same
line was taken by Ordway Tead in his Instincts in industry
( 1918) and by Carleton Parker in The casual laborer and other
essays (1920).

McDougall's doctrine of instincts, though well received at
first, ran counter to what may be called the professional bias
of the sociologists. With their eyes fixed on the social group
as the important object of study, they were less impressed with
the natural demands of the individual than with another line
of facts suggesting that the individual was molded by society.
The individual derives his language, his manners and customs,
and to a large extent his beliefs from the social environment.
All that the anthropologists call the culture of the group appears
to be imposed upon the individual and not demanded by him.
While to the psychologist it may be self-evident that society is
composed of individuals and must meet their demands, to the
sociologist the main fact is that society is there before any given
individual and imposes on him its demands and standards. We
behave alike and "behave like human beings," not in the main
because of our instincts, but because of the culture we all re-
ceive. Such is the characteristic approach of a sociologist or
social anthropologist.

Among the sociologists, then, a long-smoldering discontent
with the instinct doctrine broke into flame about 1920. The

224 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

greatest single conflagration was a book by L. L. Bernard, in
1924, entitled Instinct, a study of social psychology, which
sought to show up the silliness of much of the current talk
about instinct and to demonstrate the unimportance of instinct
in society. One part of the author's task was easy enough. No
two psychologists gave the same list of instincts. Some al-
lowed over a hundred, while others by pruning and combining
brought the number down to two or even one. Such disagree-
ment argued against the validity of the whole conception.

Bernard's more serious criticism was that what were called
instincts in common speech and even in the psychology books
were far from being purely instinctive. They were complex ac-
tivities, differing from culture to culture and acquired by the
individual from the social environment. Mating behavior with
its forms of courtship and marriage was an obvious example.
The human mother's care of her baby is not instinctive moth-
ering behavior but a complex activity acquired largely from
older women or from the doctors. And so with self-assertion,
acquisitiveness, and constructiveness as we see them among
men they cannot be hereditary units. McDougall's belief in an
emotional "core" of an instinct, present as the driving force in
all its varied activities, seemed to Bernard a touch of mysticism.
No doubt there were many biological instincts, like breathing
and sneezing, but they were small affairs of little social impor-
tance. They could not be allowed the important role that Mc-
Dougall assigned to the instincts ; they did not determine the
goals and provide the motive force for man's social behavior.

What does determine the goals and provide the motive force,
in Bernard's opinion, is the social environment. This supplies
the formative factors in the development of intelligence and
character. Man's environment is very different from the natu-
ral environment in which biological instincts would be appropri-
ate. Mankind, in the course of many generations, has built up
a highly artificial environment of houses, roads, and manifold
material objects, and also of customs and institutions. No
doubt society has to meet the individual's biological needs, but
in the main the individual is plastic and is molded by environ-

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 225

mental pressures. A few sentences from Bernard will illustrate
his point of view (1924, pages 26, 54) :

There are two well-defined viewpoints in the social sciences regard-
ing the importance of a theory of the instincts as a basis for the develop-
ment of social theory. . . . The instinctivists, fairly represented by
McDougall, maintain that the acquired elements in character or control
are formed under the dominance of the instincts. The environmentalists
maintain the opposite and look to the environment, especially to the
psychosocial environment, for the formative factors.

Bernard counts himself decidedly as an environmentalist.
For the most part, he speaks of environmental pressures deter-
mining the individual's behavior. He admits that the individual
is not exactly putty, and that environmental pressures are really
stimuli arousing the individual to respond. He would appar-
ently agree with Kuo, who said (page 215) that the "human
machine behaves in a certain way because environmental stimu-
lation has forced him to do so," except that Bernard stresses the
social environment. He appears to have little more respect than
Kuo for the individual's purposes and motives. But you will
find Bernard lapsing occasionally into a way of speaking that
seems to give away his whole case. Notice what he says of
"environmental dominance" (1926, pages 138-139) :

Civilization is itself in large part a system of sublimations and re-
pressions. We do not give our pugnacious, sexual, gustatory, fear, and
gregarious impulses free rein. . . . The best method of control ... is by
what we call sublimation. This involves the turning of the impulses into
derivative and substitute channels. . . . Our formative institutions . . .
should be able to devise a system which will bend the native impulses
to the service of the best abstract ideals of a cultural civilization.

If this last quotation fairly represents Bernard's views, there
is no fundamental difference between him and McDougall.
Both speak of native impulses which can be redirected or find
new outlets in social life. Besides his theory of the sentiments,
McDougall attempted to show in some detail how the instincts
operate in society. For example (1908, page 279) :

The instinct of pugnacity has played a role second to none in the
evolution of social organization. ... But its modes of expression have

226 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

changed with the growth of civilization ; as the development of law and
custom discourages and renders unnecessary the bodily combat of indi-
viduals, this gives place to the collective combat of communities, and to
the more refined forms of combat within communities.

Bernard could have quoted this passage to illustrate his "con-
trol by sublimation." Both men would seem to agree that there
are native impulses that motivate social behavior, though Ber-
nard would probably not agree that all social behavior can be
traced back to native impulses and their combinations.

We have distorted the historical course of events by consid-
ering the sociological reaction against McDougall before the
psychological. The psychologists had never accepted McDoug-
all's treatment of the instincts with anything like unanimity.
Both Thorndike and Watson soon criticized these broad in-
stincts as poorly established and did not see much promise in
the idea of native driving forces operating throughout life.
But the main question for the psychologists was how far any
complex behavior patterns were inherited rather than built up
by the processes of learning. Doubts began to be raised whether
complex actions were ever provided by heredity; it might be
that only simple movements were so provided, while all complex
behavior patterns, in man at least, had to be learned. At any
rate, the native and the acquired elements in behavior were so
interwoven as to make separation impossible (Dunlap, 1919).
The outcome of this discussion was to make psychologists more
critical of instincts and more inclined to lay all their emphasis
on learning. In very recent years the pendulum has swung back
a little, and the reality of some unlearned complex behavior has
been admitted, at least in animals such as the much-studied
white rat (Lashley, 1938).

This critical revision of the doctrine of instincts, however,
has nothing to do with the essential doctrine of purposivism.
Two different problems were mixed together in this debate on
instinct. How far are behavior patterns native rather than
learned? That is the question which has most interested the
psychologists, and their answer has been the critical attitude of
demanding proof before they will admit that a behavior pattern
is native. The other problem has to do with native impulses or

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 227

primary motives. It would not seriously damage McDougall's
theory if he were forced to admit that almost all the behavior
patterns of fear, anger, love, curiosity, self-assertion, and the
other instincts are acquired by learning. What his theory de-
mands of the fighting instinct is not a skillful fighting perform-
ance but an innate tendency to combat any interference by ah
angry reaction. If that tendency exists in human nature, oper-
ating in different patterns at different levels of behavior, we are
justified in accepting a primary pugnacious motive.

This distinction between motive and behavior pattern had
been recognized by McDougall from the start. The emotional-
impulsive "core" of the instinct, which was native and remained
unchanged by experience and learning, was evidently the mo-
tive. The sensory and motor parts of the instinct, which were
modified by learning, made up the behavior pattern. In speak-
ing of instincts as being combined into sentiments he was evi-
dently referring to their "cores" and not to their behavior
patterns. Thus he used the word instinct in two senses : to refer
to a native behavior pattern with its emotional-impulsive core,
and to refer to the core alone. In his latest statement of the
theory (1932, page 78) he recognized this source of confusion
and needless controversy and dropped the use of instinct in re-
ferring to human motives and behavior. A typical instinct,
such as the nest-building of a wasp, includes a native ability
"geared to" a native propensity. The native ability is shown by
the fact that the wasp builds the characteristic nest of her species
without ever having a chance to learn the use or form of the
nest. The native propensity is shown by the fact that when she
has matured to the egg-laying stage she devotes all her energy
to building and stocking the nest. The human being has many
native abilities (or capacities) and quite a number of native
propensities, but the abilities are not innately geared to the
propensities. So the human being has no full-fledged instincts
(except the "minor" ones like breathing and sneezing). If his
self-assertive propensity is aroused, he draws upon any ability
that is convenient ("See what I can do!") not upon one par-
ticular preordained ability; or if it is the sex propensity that is
aroused, he may utilize any ability that seems likely to "make a

228 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

hit." The abilities (in McDougall's view) do not have any
driving force in themselves, but must be driven by the propen-
sities, either by the native propensities or by sentiments derived
from the propensities. We may indeed acquire "tastes" for cer-
tain activities, like music or bridge, i.e., we learn to like to exer-
cise certain abilities for their own sake, but such likes (and
dislikes) have no strong motivating force. "Broadly speaking
... we may say that, while our sentiments determine the ma-
jor goals toward which we strive, our tastes determine our
choice of means, the kinds of activities and instruments we use"
( 1932, page 239) . Another recent qualification of the theory is
that an immediate goal has a strong pull, no matter what the
ultimate motive may be. "If from any motive you set yourself
to attain the goal" the exit, for example, in a ma2e puzzle
"from that moment the exit becomes your goal, you foresee
and desire the passing out through the exit. ... It is the same
whenever we solve a problem. . . . The solution is the goal
towards which we look forward" (1932, page 348). In thus
recognizing the motivating power of tastes, of which there are
many, and of immediate goals, of which there are an indefinite
number, McDougall seems to some of us to have modified his
theory quite seriously (and desirably).

PRESENT STANDING OF THE HORMIC THEORY. Though
McDougall laid great stress on native propensities and also on
native capacities and individual differences, this emphasis on
the native and hereditary was after all not the mainspring of his
system. He wished above all things to win general acceptance
of the fundamental importance of goal-seeking, of purposive
striving. The older structuralists and behaviorists, as we saw,
were averse to any such principle in scientific psychology, and
many other psychologists regarded his idea of "driving forces"
or "sources of energy" as a sort of mythology. By 1930, how-
ever, it seemed to him that his crusade had made noticeable
progress. He wrote (1930, pages 3-4) :

Fifteen years ago American psychologists displayed almost without
exception a complete blindness to the most peculiar, characteristic, and
important feature of human and animal activity, namely, its goal-seek-

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 229

ing. All bodily actions and all phases of experience were mechanical
reactions to stimuli. . . . Now, happily, all is changed ; the animal psy-
chologists . . . are busy with the study of 'drives/ 'sets/ and 'incen-
tives/ . . . Much the same state of affairs prevails in current American
writings on human psychology. . . . American psychology has become
purposive ... in the vague sense. . . . My task is the more difficult one
of justifying the far more radical purposive psychology denoted by the
adjective 'hormic/ a psychology . . . which asserts that active striving
towards a goal . . . cannot be mechanistically explained or resolved into
mechanistic sequences.

What he objected to was the tendency of psychologists, while
finally admitting the fact of goal-seeking, to reduce it to some
form of "mechanistic" process. Hunger, drowsiness, and per-
haps sex craving were regarded by the mechanists as "tissue
needs/' chemical conditions of the organism predisposing to ac-
tivity or inactivity. A "set" toward a certain goal could be con-
ceived as a response to suitable stimuli and as operating like the
setting of an adjustable machine which determines what the ma-
chine shall do. Thus purposes would arise as effects in the
stream of natural processes and would produce effects in the
same stream. Some psychologists, indeed, after going to great
pains to show how purposes could be natural behavior events,
were still afraid to allow them any causal efficacy which was
rather absurd, for if a purpose occurs as a natural effect, it
must also be a natural cause of further effects. McDougall was
deeply dissatisfied with all such schemes. If purposive striving
toward a goal has any real influence on the course of events, it
must operate by "teleological causation/* he held, and not by
"mechanical causation/' He was not a complete teleologist, it
would seem, for he did not go so far as to say that the future
event exerts a pull on the present event. It is not, he admitted,
the future goal-reaching, but the present goal-seeking that in-
fluences the present course of events. But it appeared to him
that the goal-seeking must operate in some entirely different
way from other causes, for it is energy directed toward a result.
But is not all energy directed toward a change of state, just as
all motion is motion toward as well as motion away from?

230 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

Most of us psychologists feel out of our depth in such specula-
tions.

While McDougall exerted considerable influence on psychol-
ogy in directing attention to the reality and importance of goal-
seeking, he did not convert many to his hormic philosophy or
even to the doctrine of "mental energies" corresponding to the
native propensities. In this doctrine of energies he evidently
stood rather close to Freud. His original 1908 book was writ-
ten without knowledge of Freud's work, and his list of instincts
is very different from Freud's polarity of two great instincts
and, we must say, much closer to the facts of behavior. As he
got to know Freud's work he was much impressed by its rich,
deep appreciation "of the range of subconscious activities, of
the wide and subtle influences of conflict, of repression, of sub-
limation, of symbolism, of the genesis of symptoms, errors,
myths and dreams*' (1936, page 103). And here is his general
characterization of Freud's work (1936, pages 17-18) :

In my opinion Freud has, quite Unquestionably, done more for the
advancement of our understanding of human nature than any other man
since Aristotle. . . . This judgment implies, of course, that there is
much that is of value and relatively true in Freud's teaching. And yet
I hold that every bit of such truth is mixed almost inextricably with
error ; or embedded in masses of obscure implications and highly ques-
tionable and misleading propositions.

McDougall expressed his opinions of the other schools with
similar candor and picturesqueness. For example :

As to Wundt's Outline of psychology: "A quagmire of ped-
antry, a mass of confusion and error, lacking even the modest
merit of internal consistency. . . . Experimental psychology
of the strict Wundtian type may be said to have died of perni-
cious anemia under the too drastic purgative treatment of Dr.
Titchener" (1932-1933, pages 197-198).

As to Gestalt : "The name is a novelty; but the principle has
long been recognized" (1932, page 46).

As to Watson : "By repudiating one half of the methods of
psychology and resolutely shutting his eyes to three quarters of
its problems, he laid down the program of Behaviorism and

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 231

rallied to its standard all those who have a natural distaste for
difficult problems and a preference for short, easy, and fictitious
solutions" (1926, pages 277-278).

Or again : "I regard Dr. Watson as a good man gone wrong
... a bold pioneer whose enthusiasm, in the cause of reform
in psychology, has carried him too far . . . and landed him in
a ditch. . . . And, so long as his followers continue to jump
into the ditch after him, shouting loud songs of triumph as they
go, he does need great moral courage in order to climb back
and^brush off the mud" (1924, page 14).

As to the "middle of the road*' : "A deplorable influence in
almost all parts of the world . . . largely responsible for the
disappointing state of psychology . . . sterilizing for research
and paralyzing for the teacher" (1936, page 11).

Such blandishments failed to win votes. Yet McDougall in
his autobiography (1930a) reveals himself as a man desirous
of approval from his colleagues as well as from the general pub-
lic, and despondent over what he regarded as his small measure
of success. His influence was probably greater than he thought,
but it was limited by his insistence that psychologists should
follow him beyond the proper bounds of psychology into re-
gions that seem to us the province of philosophy.

Holistic Psychologies

The individual is a unit, a whole. Every psychologist would
be willing to assent to this statement, and it would seem to offer
no basis for any rebellion or controversy or for the formation
of any school. Did not Titchener say that psychology was con-
cerned with experience considered as dependent on the indi-
vidual ? And did not Watson say that behavior, as contrasted
with the action of muscles, glands, and other separate organs,
was the activity of the organism as a whole in relation to its
environment? But perhaps these statements have not been
taken seriously enough in the actual work of these psycholo-
gists or of psychologists in general. Such has been the com-
plaint of quite a number of critics. We cannot speak of a
holistic school, however, for these rebels have not spread out

232 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

from a single center nor shown any tendency to come together
and agree on a program. They would agree, and others with
them, that the individual is a unitary organism, and that the
human individual is a whole person. But with that as a starting
point the question is where to go next, how to proceed on some
distinctive line of investigation. What new holistic knowledge
shall be sought, or how shall our existing knowledge be organ-
ized into an organismic or personalistic system ? The answers
given to these questions are rather divergent but still interest-
ing and valuable.

Of all the holistic psychologists only a few of the most out-
spoken will be cited here, and these will be classified under the
heads of organismic and personalistic psychology. The organ-
ismic group take a more biological, the personalistic a more
social point of view.

ORGANISMIC PSYCHOLOGY. Let us notice first two main
lines of attack against tradition that are suggested by the
concept of the organism as a whole. The great enemy is some-
times the old mind-body dualism, and sometimes the still-preva-
lent tendency of psychologists to speak of separate functions
and motives of the organism.

Adolf Meyer (born 1866, long professor at Johns Hopkins),
who later became the acknowledged leader of American psy-
chiatry, rebelled as a young man against the mind-body distinc-
tion current in nineteenth century psychiatry. The cleavage
between the somatic and psychic theories (page 8) seemed to
him wholly unrealistic and unprofitable. As he pointed out in
1897, the organism in its development from the one-celled egg
begins and continues as a unit. "In this unit the development
of the mind goes hand in hand with the anatomical and physio-
logical development, not merely as a parallelism, but as a one-
ness with several aspects." And in 1908 he wrote: "It is
unfortunate that science still adheres to an effete and impossible
contrast between mental and physical. . . . Mind ... is a
sufficiently organized living being in action ; and not a peculiar
form of mind-stuff." He found this "psychobiological" con-
cept a better working hypothesis for psychiatric work than the

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 233

materialistic and mental istic approaches that were customary.
If somatic disorders are found, well and good diagnose and
treat the patient accordingly but if none are demonstrable, it
is futile to imagine some brain disorder underlying the symp-
toms; it is better to utilize the available facts of the patient's
behavior and life history. He should be seen as a person con-
fronted with a situation that is too much for him, rather than
merely as a "case" to be classified under some one of the recog-
nize.d psychoses. His trouble can sometimes be traced in the
Freudian manner to an unsolved problem of childhood, but
often it has a more gradual development and amounts to a
faulty habitual attitude toward social situations a growing
tendency, for example, to retreat from the real situation into the
realm of fantasy. While not a prolific writer, Adolf Meyer was
a great teacher and therapist and he built up in the Henry
Phipps Psychiatric Clinic in Baltimore an outstanding and influ-
ential institution. His psychobiology has been found a very
useful basis for psychiatric work. His point of view has re-
cently found expression in "psychosomatic medicine," which
looks for mental or emotional factors operating in such organic
conditions as stomach ulcer and also for organic factors pos-
sibly present in cases of behavior disorder. (For Meyer's
teachings, see Rennie, 1943; Richards, 1941.)

George Ellett Coghill (1872-1941) was led by a primary in-
terest in psychology to a study of the nervous system and finally
to a combined study of the early development of the nervous
system and of behavior in the same animals. This he was able
to accomplish by working with salamander tadpoles. The eggs
of the salamander Amblystoma develop in fresh water, first into
little motionless tadpoles, then into swimmers and finally into
land walkers. Swimming occurs by a wavelike wriggling of the
trunk and tail, before the legs make their appearance. When
the legs do appear, their first movements are not separate and
independent but occur only with the trunk movement as integral
parts of the swimming action. As development proceeds, the
leg movements become "individuated," in Coghill's terminology,
so that the legs can move separately as in walking. Total organ-
ismic movement precedes partial movement. The total move-
Q

234 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

ment is not built up by the combination of originally separate
movements, but the development proceeds from the whole to the
parts. When this significant work first came to the attention of
psychologists, they were inclined to suppose that the animal
learned to isolate part movements out of the total movement
just as the beginner in piano playing learns to move his fingers
separately instead of together as is more natural. But Coghill's
anatomical studies showed that the individuation of leg and
other movements was due to maturation and not primarily to
learning. It is due to the growth of new nerve fibers into the
legs, etc., and this neural growth precedes the emergence of the
separate movements.

At any rate Coghill's view that the more general movements
of the organism are primary and not built up by combination of
smaller, local reflexes as seemed to be the view of some older
theorists had much influence on later thinking in regard to
child development. It led to work on the earliest movements
of young organisms, including those of the human child before
the normal time of birth, with a persistent effort to make sure
whether general body movements always appeared before smaller
movements of the arms, legs, fingers, mouth, eyes. The results
are not quite the same in all species of animals. Not all local
movements are individuated out of total bodily movements, even
though Coghill's proposed law holds good to a considerable ex-
tent. The human infant at birth (i.e., after several months of
motor development) certainly possesses many specific move-
ments sucking, vocalizing, grasping, eye movements, etc. but
also a large fund of movements that are relatively diffuse and
non-specific, at least so far as any definite environmental effects
are concerned; and it is mostly out of this fund that specific
learned movements are formed (Carmichael and Pratt, in Car-
michael, 1946).

In this line of active investigation we have an instance of an
organismic theory leading somewhere. And yet, in a broad
sense, it seems unimportant to a general organismic psychology
whether motor development proceeds from the general to the
specific or vice versa. For suppose that local movements did
appear first and were later combined into the larger movements

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 235

it would still remain true that the organism was a unit com-
posed of interacting parts. How otherwise could the part activ-
ities combine? Sherrington, whose classic analytical work on
reflex action has made him appear to the orgahismic biologists
and psychologists as the archenemy, was actually the one who
said, "The nervous system functions as a whole. Physiological
and histological analysis finds it connected throughout its whole
extent. . . . Are there in the body no reflexes absolutely neutral
and indifferent one to another ? . . . Two reflexes may be neutral
to each other when both are weak, but may interfere when either
or both are strong. . . . Correlation of the reflexes ... is the
crowning contribution of the brain towards the nervous integra-
tion of the individual" (Sherrington, 1906, pages 114, 146-
147). Such statements can certainly be regarded as "organ-
ismic."

Kurt Goldstein (born 1878, now in New York), one of the
strongest defenders of the organismic point of view, believes
that the study of reflexes makes a poor and misleading approach
to any true understanding of the organism's behavior. The re-
flex is supposed to be a constant, uniform response to a constant
stimulus, but such constancy of the single reflex cannot be
obtained except under constant conditions in the rest of the
organism. Even the knee jerk, that typical local reflex, cannot
be obtained in regular, uniform strength unless the leg is in a
certain position and "isolated" from the rest of the organism by
instructions to the subject to think of something else. And the
knee jerk can be made exceptionally strong if the subject
clenches his fists or is exposed at the proper instant to a sudden
noise. Therefore "the reflex cannot be properly understood in
terms of the isolated mechanism alone" (1939, page 69). A
reflex is really an act of the whole organism and can be under-
stood only as a particular manifestation of the nature of the
whole organism. How absurd, then, to expect to understand
the organism's behavior as a combination of reflexes ! "There
do not exist discrete, individual reactions of parts, as combina-
tions of which the behavior of the organism can be understood.
On the contrary, only knowledge of the whole organism leads
us to understand the various reactions we observe in isolated

236 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

parts" (1940, page 123). We must start with a true impres-
sion of the organism's unitary action ; then we can see the reflex
playing its part in this organismic action and so make our view
of the whole organism more detailed and more diversified. We
must proceed from the whole to the parts, not from the parts to
the whole.

Isolation of pieces of the organism's behavior is character-
istic not only of the physiologist's investigation of reflexes but
also of the psychologist's study of habits, thoughts, motives,
feelings, sensations, and perceptions. Every experiment de-
mands constant conditions so as to isolate the particular phe-
nomenon to be observed. Only by this isolating, analytic pro-
cedure can any scientific data be obtained. The organismic
approach finds itself in a dilemma, since it wishes to see the
organism in its behavioral wholeness and yet must resort to
isolating observation in order to secure any dependable facts.
It rejects the analytic-synthetic method of first examining the
parts and then trying to piece them together. Instead it adopts
the holistic-analytic method. First must come a holistic view of
the behaving organism; then follows isolating observation
which yields data for correcting and amplifying the first impres-
sion. The holistic or global impression plays the role of a
working hypothesis which almost certainly can be improved in
face of the particular facts as they are discovered. Or, the
global view provides a framework for holding the facts, a
framework that is not too rigid to accommodate itself to the
growing mass of data. Or again, in Goldstein's words : "We do
not try to construct the architecture of the organism by a mere
addition of brick to brick ; rather we try to discover the actual
Gestalt . . . through which some phenomena may become intelli-
gible. . . . We sketch a picture of the whole organism, which in
turn, so long as we encounter discrepancies between this picture
and factual experience, stimulates further questions and investi-
gations" (1940, pages 23, 26).

The global picture or Gestalt shows an organism endowed
with certain capacities and needs, continually challenged by the
environment and seeking always to "come to terms with the
environment" so as to achieve optimal performance. If the

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 237

challenge is too severe, the organism is thrown into a "catas-
trophic" state of anxiety, a feeling of inability to perform its
chosen tasks. Brain-injured men, closely studied by Goldstein
in his medical capacity in Germany during and after the first
world war, are especially subject to this feeling of "catas-
trophe," and their reaction is to get rid of the tensions so
produced. But the normal tendency is not, as Freud and others
have theorized, to get rid of tension, but rather to maintain an
optimum of tension such as is necessary for accomplishment
and progress. "Freud fails to do justice to the positive aspects
of life. He fails to recognize that the basic phenomenon of life
is an incessant process of coming to terms with the environ-
ment; he only sees escape and craving for release. He only
knows the lust of release, not the pleasure of tension" (1939,
page 333).

The behavior of neurotic and of brain-injured people mani-
fests certain traits very strikingly, but we have to be on our
guard here against the isolation error. A sick person's behavior
is dominated by isolated needs, such as the need for self-preser-
vation. Seen in isolation these needs appear unduly strong and
rigid; in the normal person under normal conditions, such
needs are not isolated from the general tendency to come to
terms with the environment. The same error of isolation is
likely to vitiate the experimental study of animal drives and
even the much overvalued study of children, for the young child
is still uncentered or unintegrated. Only the normal adult re-
sponding normally to a favorable environment gives the holistic
picture, and he is animated by a single comprehensive motive,
which Goldstein calls the urge toward self -actualization or self-
realization, "the tendency to achieve the optimal performance of
the total organism" (1947, page 228). Nevertheless, though
the organism has this one holistic motive, it engages in various
activities and seems to be seeking various goals. This is be-
cause it has various capacities and tends to actualize its poten-
tialities. "The traditional view assumes various drives. . . . We
assume only one drive, the drive of self-actualization, but are
compelled to concede that under certain conditions the tendency
to actualize one potentiality is so strong that the organism is

238 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

governed by it. ... The organism has definite potentialities, and
because it has them it has the need to actualize or realize them.
The fulfillment of these needs represents the self -actualization
of the organism" (1940, pages 144, 146). Taken literally,
these statements could apply only to an extremely self-conscious
organism whose interests were wholly centered in the self and
not in the environment.

We have spoken of "isolation 1 ' as a necessary though risky
procedure of the scientific investigator, and we should also
notice that isolation is an inevitable characteristic of the be-
havior of an organism, at least of a higher organism possessing
various capacities. Though, in a sense, the organism always
acts as a whole, it cannot actualize all its potentialities at the same
time. Its behavior is governed by one need or capacity at a
time. Here there are two extreme possibilities. The organism
may yield itself passively to the configuration of the present
environment, this being the "concrete attitude" ; or, being self-
conscious and aware of its own many capacities, the organism
may analyze the situation and choose for itself which capacity
to actualize, this being the "abstract attitude." The concrete
attitude is rigid and cannot shift from one capacity to another
so long as the concrete situation remains unchanged ; but as soon
as the situation changes, the response passively follows suit.
The abstract attitude, on the contrary, can shift from one line
of attack to another upon an unchanging situation, and it can
maintain a persistent line of attack upon a changing situation.
The normal human adult can adopt either attitude ; in planning,
choosing goals, and selecting ways and means, he takes the
abstract attitude, while in carrying out a specific manipulation
of the environment he necessarily acts concretely. Goldstein's
study of brain-injury cases convinced him that their essential
defect was the loss of the abstract attitude. They were unable
"to break up a given whole into parts, to isolate and to synthe-
size them ... to abstract common properties reflectively ... to
plan ahead ideationally" (Goldstein and Scheerer, 1941, page
4). With his several collaborators he has designed and adapted
a number of tests for the abstract attitude and has found that
schizophrenics and the feeble-minded, as well as young children,

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 239

are more or less deficient in this ability. Here, then, we find
organismic psychology of a productive sort, though it is not
quite clear how the productive research depends upon the organ-
ismic viewpoint. Goldstein would claim, however, that his
discovery of the abstract and concrete attitudes was due to his
firm determination to view the patient's symptoms and test
results from the standpoint of the personality as a whole.

Is Goldstein to be counted as a member of the Gestalt school ?
The leading Gestalt psychologists have claimed him, but he him-
self is inclined to make a distinction. He thinks primarily as a
biologist rather than a psychologist. "Our basic view agrees
in many respects with Gestalt psychology. . . . Yet my guiding
principle has been a different one, inasmuch as the 'whole, the
'Gestalt/ has always meant to me the whole organism and not
the phenomena in one field, or merely the 'introspective expe-
riences/ . . . Certain differences arise between the views ad-
vanced by Gestalt psychologists and by myself" (1939, page
369). For him a "good gestalt" is not merely an organization
of the perceptual field ; rather, it is a performance of the organ-
ism, a way of coming to terms with the environment as well and
economically as possible. Gestalt psychology has undervalued
the central factors, the "field forces" supplied by the organism
itself and not by the stimulus configuration. And the existing
Gestalt theory does not allow sufficiently for the "abstract atti-
tude." Indeed, Goldstein's emphasis on the abstract attitude as
a prime necessity in science and in normal adult behavior seems
exactly opposed to Wertheimer's abhorrence of any "piecemeal
attitude."

Jacob Robert Kant or (born 1888, professor at Indiana) has
been advocating an "organismic psychology" since 1924 or ear-
lier, having in view both of the reforms already mentioned
(page 232 ) . He wishes to rid psychology of the old mind-body
dualism, and he insists that the organism always acts as a whole
and never part by part. "It is always the whole person who
reacts. ... It is a biological and psychological impossibility for
the organism to act unless it acts as a whole" (1924, pages 56,
133). The real whole, however, is not the organism but the
organism in its effective environment, the organism in active

2 4 o CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

relations with certain objects at a given time. Psychological
observation, whether objective or introspective, always reveals
an organism interacting with objects present or thought of, and
nothing less than this complete statement can give us genuine
psychological data. "The data of psychology can only be the
concrete interactions of organisms and the things to which they
respond" (1924, page xiv). Or again, "Psychology has its
own subject-matter specific interactions between organisms
and stimulating objects" (1933, page vii). This "organismic"
psychology, then, is primarily concerned not with what goes on
in the organism but rather with what goes on in the field in-
cluding the organism and its objects. Accordingly Kantor re-
gards it as inaccurate to speak of perceiving, learning, and
thinking as functions of the organism; they are functions of
the organism-object field, just as the function of batting a ball
involves the ball and the bat as well as the batter. All psycho-
logical functions depend on the organism-object situation and
not on the organism alone.

If psychological functions cannot be localized in the organ-
ism, still less can they be localized in the brain. The brain
undoubtedly has its functions, but they are physiological func-
tions on a par with the contraction of a muscle or the conduction
of a nerve. The muscles, nerves, sense organs, and brain all
perform their physiological functions and so play their parts in
a psychological act such as batting a ball, but the psychological
act is the total event, which does not occur in any of these
organs. Psychological events, being interactions between the
organism and the relevant objects, must not "in any manner be
regarded as functions of particular structures or of the total
organism. . . . Obviously no psychological event is lacking in
muscular action. . . . But surely the most elaborate description
of such participating biological factors cannot cover the essen-
tial features of the psychological event" (1947, pages 307,
337). Kantor is especially concerned to combat the proneness
of psychologists to attribute functions like learning and per-
ceiving to the brain. He will not even allow that the brain is
modified in learning (1947, page 103), though he does not
indicate where else in the total organism-environment field the

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 241

modification can possibly occur. Again, though he insists on
the importance of preparatory set (1924, page 58), he rejects
the idea that this set occurs in the brain, an idea which he says
"certainly stems from a mind-body source" (1947, page 195).
It is somewhat surprising, then, to find Kantor devoting a
whole book to problems of physiological psychology (1947).
The tone of the book, however, is severely critical and even
negativistic. Its aim is to discredit false conceptions of physio-
logical psychology and so clear the decks for an "authentic
physiological psychology/' But the critical part occupies all but
the last three of the 345 pages in his text. He keenly ferrets
out any lingering trace of the old mind-body dualism and any
heedless localization of psychological functions in the brain.
No psychologist, not even the most organismic, is found to be
free of these defects. Adolf Meyer's psychobiology had indeed
"the great merit of dealing with the activities of the whole
organism . . . operating in a distinctive human environment. . . .
Nevertheless, the psychobiology of Meyer and his followers
. . . leaves us with the old dualism" (1947, pages 316-317).
Goldstein's organismic psychology provides "a fine orientation
toward an objective physiological psychology. . . . This writer
does not, however, give up symptoms as ... correlated with
particular areas. In a definite sense, then, the holistic idea is
not consistently maintained. . . . Goldstein persistently posits an
association between higher mental functions and the frontal
lobes. . . . Goldstein [stresses] the organism as the central fea-
ture in a psychological situation, with a deplorable disregard of
the essential place of the other items in any ps>chological field"
( 1947, pages 318-319) . Kantor's other books are less negative
than this one, though they all contain a large element of criti-
cism of the errors of psychologists. The positive and construc-
tive discussions are less stimulating and give an outsider the
impression that this approach to psychology may be relatively
sterile. It is reported, however, that Kantor's students find
him an inspiring teacher and guide in research.

PERSONALISTIC PSYCHOLOGY. The reality of the self is as
obvious to the introspectionist as the reality of the organism is

242 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

to the behaviorist. We should have to go far back in the history
of psychology to find the beginnings of the personalistic view.
With the coming of empirical and experimental study of psy-
chology the person tended to drop out of the picture because
attention was focused on analytic data, separate sensations,
images, and feelings. This way of approaching psychology was
criticized by William James in his famous chapter on "The
stream of thought'' (1890, I, 224-225). On the contrary, he
said,

The first fact for us ... as psychologists, is that thinking of some
sort goes on. I use the word thinking . . . for every form of conscious-
ness. . . . How does it go on? We notice immediately five important
characters in the process . . . :

1 ) Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness.

2) Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing.

3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly con-
tinuous.

4) It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself.

5) It is interested in some . . . objects to the exclusion of others.

Mary Whiton Calkins ( 1863-1930), a pupil of James begin-
ning in 1890, was for a decade the active head of the psycho-
logical laboratory at Wellesley, though she later switched mostly
to philosophy. She invented the important "method of paired
associates" for the study of memory. During the 1890's she
became more and more dissatisfied with the Wundt-Titchener
psychology and more and more impressed with the importance
of the self as the integrating factor in conscious experience.
In 1900 she came out strongly for "psychology as a science of
selves," and in 1901 she embodied this view in her first book,
An introduction to psychology. In this book she endeavored
to do justice to both the atomistic and the personalistic views of
psychology. She came to believe, however, that the atomistic
data were significant only in relation to the self, and in 1909 her
revised textbook, called A first book in psychology, made a radi-
cal innovation "by its abandonment of the duplex conception
of psychology, as science alike of succeeding mental events and
of the conscious self, in favor of a single-track self -psychology"
(1930, page 40). She argued that the self, far from being

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 243

merely a metaphysical concept, was an ever-present fact of
immediate experience and fully worthy to be made the central
fact in a system of scientific psychology.

The conscious self of each one of us ... is immediately experienced
as possessed of at least four fundamental characters. I immediately ex-
perience myself as (1) relatively persistent in other words, I am in
some sense the same as my childhood self ; as (2) complex I am a per-
ceiving, remembering, feeling, willing self; as (3) a unique, an irre-
placeable self I am closely like father, brother, or friend, but I am,
after all, only myself: there is only one of me. I experience myself
(4) as related to (or conscious of) objects either personal or imper-
sonal [1914, p. 3].

The self is consciously related to its objects in various ways.
It takes a receptive attitude toward an object in observing it,
but a dominating attitude in managing it ; it has the attitude of
liking certain objects but of disliking others. To speak of
pleasantness and unpleasantness as impersonal conscious states
is as absurd as to speak of them as unrelated to objects, for the
real datum is the self being pleased or displeased by an object.
Among the "objects" of the self the most important are other
selves. The self is consciously a social being. Only a self-
psychology can provide the basis for a genuine social psy-
chology. Behaviorism cannot make a start on social psychology
without sneaking in assumptions contrary to its major principle
of regarding individuals as not having conscious experience;
for, no matter what the behaviorist may say, the individuals he
is considering certainly treat each other as conscious beings.
Aside from this fanatical negative doctrine of behaviorism, its
positive research findings can be welcomed and assimilated by
self -psychology.

Calkins was distinctly an introspectionist and approached the
self from this point of view. In her textbook she constantly
appealed to the student to introspect for himself and to see the
personal significance of the different topics in psychology. But
she was eager also to bring the schools together and hoped to
accomplish this by securing general acceptance of the funda-
mental importance of the self or person in all the psychologies.
Though she herself much preferred "the strictly psychological

244 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

conception of the self-which-has-a-body" to that of the con-
scious organism, she became convinced that the "biological form
of personalistic psychology provides a middle ground in which
most schools of contemporary psychology may meet" (1930,
page 50). She noted that the "psychosomatic personalists,"
such as Stern whom we have soon to consider, attributed to the
"person" the same fundamental characteristics as she attributed
to the "self," and that "nothing forbids the self -psychologists
from enriching their doctrine by distinctions stressed by these
biological personalists." And nothing prevents the self-psy-
chologist from utilizing the "atomistic" data of the structural
or existential school. "Only the great negation of existential
psychology, its outlawry of the self, its insistence on contents or
ideas or experiences as the one concern of scientific psychology,
is inconsistent with personalistic theory." She found herself in
substantial agreement with Gestalt psychology except in its
neglect of the "supreme illustration of the Gestalt" that "inte-
grated complex whole inclusive of parts" which is the self.
And in psychoanalysis, which she regarded with a critical eye,
she found the self appearing again and again in different guises
as the censor, for example, of Freud's earlier period and as
the superego of his later theory (1930, pages 52-53). In fact
it would be almost impossible to write psychology without laps-
ing, even against one's theoretical preconceptions, into the
language of self -psychology. Why, then, should not all the
schools unite in a personalistic psychology r* Her plea seemed to
fall on deaf ears, probably because most psychologists felt there
was little to be gained by continually reiterating the truism of
the reality and unity of the self or organism. Yet, looking back
over the past fifty years, one can see that psychology has been
moving in the direction she desired.

William Stern (1871-1938) offered his personalistic psy-
chology to the world in 1906, just a few years after the self-
psychology of Calkins made its appearance. Stern was appar-
ently unacquainted with the work of Calkins; the Germans of
1900 or even of 1920 paid little attention to the American
output in psychology. The two authors were alike in having a
predominant interest in philosophy, as well as in making sub-

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 245

stantial contributions to experimental psychology. Stern was
an exceptionally enterprising and inventive psychologist, a pio-
neer in the psychology of testimony and an active contributor to
applied, differential, child, and clinical psychology. It was he
who invented the IQ for use in connection with the Binet tests.
His most important position was at Hamburg (1916-1933)
where he was -professor of psychology and director of the
many-sided Hamburg Psychological Institute, devoted largely
to clinical and guidance work in connection with the public
schools.

Stern's great ambition throughout his career was to develop
a philosophy that should reconcile the atomistic tendency of
science with the human demand for real values in the world
that should integrate mechanism and teleology ; and, like Calkins
again, he believed that the concept of person made this recon-
ciliation and integration possible. The person has unity, value,
and purpose. The person is a whole of many parts, unitas
multiplex. Taken part by part he (the person) can and should
be studied mechanistically, i.e., in terms of cause and effect and
the interaction of different factors ; but taken as a whole he can
be understood only in terms of purposes, goals, and values.
The typical person is an adult human being; but a child is a
person; an animal or any living organism is a person under
Stern's definition ; and there are superindividual "persons," or-
ganized social groups having their own goals and composed of
individuals as the individual is composed of cells.

Each person has an environment selected by himself to some
extent, and it is characteristic of a person to be in active rela-
tions with his environment. There are three levels of relations
between the individual and his environment : the biological level
of nutrition, etc. ; the psychological level of conscious experi-
ence; and the valuational level which Stern regards as the
province of philosophy. Psychology is concerned with con-
scious experience. Its data are the "phenomena" which the
individual reports. But psychology goes behind the phenomena
and recognizes "acts' ' of the person which are revealed by the
phenomena, such as the acts of seeing, remembering, desiring.
Psychology goes behind the momentary acts and recognizes en-

246 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

during "dispositions" such as abilities and propensities, which
are potentialities of the organism needing only to be awakened
by stimulation from the environment. And finally psychology
attempts to go behind the manifold dispositions and envisage
the unitary person; but psychology cannot by itself reach this
goal, because the unitary person is not purely mental but bio-
logical as well and also related to the world in a system of values
which have to be approached from the philosophical angle
(Stern, 1938, pages 70-84).

The true conception of the person dawned on Stern during
his intensive studies of his own children in the home.

Here I became aware of the fundamental personal istic fact of unitas
multiplex; the wealth of phenomena concomitantly or successively ob-
servable arrayed themselves in a unified life-line of the developing indi-
vidual. . . . Here I discovered the fundamental form of personal causal-
ity: the convergence of the stirring character-traits in the developing
child, with the totality of environmental influences [1930, pp. 350-351].

This concept of convergence is important in Stern's system.
The child's development is not due to heredity alone, nor to
environment alone, nor to a mere sum of heredity and environ-
ment, but to the convergence (or synergy) of the two, con-
vergence being possible because of the unity of the person. In
the same way the person has a multiplicity of traits, but these
converge in his unitary personality. He has a multiplicity of
drives, but these converge in his unitary purposive behavior.
Freud grossly underestimated the multiplicity of the individual's
drives and motives, and he also failed to take due account of the
unity of the person (1938, page 37).

Yet Freud's idea of a "depth psychology" is important, for
there are depths in the person beneath the level of conscious
experience. These depths are biological rather than psychologi-
cal, but they have their influence on behavior. The unconscious
cannot be rightly conceived in the categories of conscious activi-
ties such as ideas, memories, and definite desires. There is a
gradation in depth extending from wholly unconscious bio-
logical activity of the organism, up through the various degrees
of vaguely conscious feelings and activities, to the most sharply
conscious and attentive perceptions and voluntary acts.

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 247

Whatever is sharply conscious is said by Stern to be salient;
and whatever is salient is at the same time embedded in the
deeper layers of the person. When you are closely observing a
certain object, that observation is salient; but at the same time
there is a background of feeling in which the specific observa-
tion is embedded; and the feeling itself is embedded in the un-
conscious life of the organism. "Everything that 'stands forth*
from the whole nevertheless remains 'embedded' in it, despite its
isolation, and receives from this relationship its sense and or-
der" ( 1930, page 380) . Stern suggests the analogy of a moun-
tain range.

The peaks (cognition and acts of will) appear to stand out from the
earth as sharply denned separate structures ; but they are not separate
from it, being held up by the mountainous mass (feeling) which, while
visible itself, displays no shape of its own nor any sharp edge above and
below ; it is very near to the earth and is rooted, along with the peaks,
in the invisible ground common to them all (sphere of the so-called
"unconscious") [1938, p. 531].

Feeling, regarded not in isolation but as personal background
experience, is not limited to pleasantness and unpleasantness but
has a great variety of shades and tones It can be mapped in
many dimensions, including excitement-tranquillity, activity-
passivity, attraction-avoidance. It is "shapeless" but still has
much influence on behavior.

Gestalt psychology, in its emphasis on shape or configuration,
has neglected the important role of the non-Gestalt, the shape-
less. It has said much of figure and ground but devoted all its
attention to the figure and regarded the ground as a minor mat-
ter. But the ground is not simply the spatial background of a
visual figure ; it is, rather, the personal feeling in which the act
of perceiving the figure is embedded. Visual figures, so much
used by the Gestalt psychologists, are not suited to bring out
the whole range of psychological dynamics. They are too much
like the old isolated elements. A whiff of odor, a sunset, a
breeze blowing on the skin, have a degree of salience though
they are shapeless non-Gestalts rather than Gestalts. Such

248 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

sensory experiences, along with the feelings, must have their
place in our psychology. Salience and embedding are a more
comprehensive and useful pair of concepts than figure and
ground. Such is Stern's contention (1938, page 112).

Stern made practical application of his personalistic psychol-
ogy in the clinical and guidance work of his Hamburg institute.
The "total procedure" used there has been described by a col-
league (Bogen, 1931). The mere accumulation of tests in the
hope of sampling the individual on all sides is not entitled to be
called a "total procedure," because limitations of time would
not allow for a complete survey, and also because the totality
principle would be neglected. The real requirement is to see
the individual as a unity in his multiplicity. The focal question
must be, "What goal is this person seeking what situation is
he trying to make real ?" Each person is regarded as having
two goals : ( 1 ) an intrinsic goal bound up with his individual
nature, and (2) an adopted goal representing his adjustment to
his social environment. The adopted goal is the resultant of
the converging influences of the intrinsic goal and the environ-
ment. The psychologist's task is to discover the intrinsic as
well as the adopted goal of the individual. Achievement and
aptitude tests are given, also the Rorschach with some freedom
of interpretation, and a typological questionnaire based partly
on Kretschmer. But the main thing is to get the subject to tell
the story of his life beginning as far back as he can remember.
Freud's rule, to keep back nothing, is followed, but nothing like
a full psychoanalysis is attempted, nor are the Freudian con-
cepts used. The psychologist is on the watch for resistances,
conflicts, and the subject's childhood feelings toward his envi-
ronment. Special attention is given to what the subject can
tell of his childhood play. Did he have his own favorite kinds
of play, or did he follow the season and the crowd? Sometimes
it is desirable to obtain from the subject an account of his rela-
tives, especially of those whom he "takes after" to his own
knowledge. From all these indications an opinion and recom-
mendation are offered and discussed with the subject before
being regarded as final.

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 249

THE "UNDERSTANDING" PSYCHOLOGY A PSYCHOLOGY
THAT SEEKS TO UNDERSTAND RATHER THAN TO EXPLAIN.
This is one of the oldest of still-contemporary schools. No
sooner had the infant experimental psychology begun to show
its hand than philosophers who were impressed with the rich-
ness of mental life and with the need for a broad, deep psychol-
ogy as a basis for the social sciences began to utter wails of
disappointment. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) if not the first
was about the most outspoken and influential. In 1894 he
urged that there should be developed a "descriptive and analytic
psychology" very different from the "explanatory psychology"
that was imitating the natural sciences and attempting to dis-
cover the elements of conscious experience and the laws of their
combination. This explanatory psychology seemed doomed to
depend on un verifiable hypotheses, while a direct appeal to
consciousness would reveal a living unity calling for no such
artificial constructions. The explanatory psychology had no
means of approaching the motives of men or the achievements
of great minds, and its natural-science techniques broke down
altogether before the problems of social institutions and cul-
tural history. The method of descriptive psychology, as applied
to the individual, would start with the integrated totality of men-
tal life and then examine parts of this totality in their intimate
relation to the whole. "Understanding" cannot be purely intel-
lectual but must be appreciative, sympathetic, feelingful. Val-
ues as well as facts are directly given in the inner life. The
component parts discovered by true psychological analysis are
seen in their relations to the whole. But the full scope of
mental life cannot be gained from this introspective study; it is
revealed in the achievements of great men and in human history
and culture, envisaged as living processes. Dilthey's unremit-
ting emphasis on the integrated whole (Zusammenhang) and
on its articulated structure sounded a note that is common to
many of his successors in Germany, such as Stern, Goldstein,
and the Gestalt school. We should include here the Gansheit
("wholeness") psychology of Felix Krueger, Wundt's succes-
sor at Leipzig. (Fuller accounts of this general movement are
given by Hartmann, 1935, and by Kliiver, 1929.) What
R

250 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

Dilthey had to offer was a project and not a descriptive psychol-
ogy worked out to any extent, but he did offer the suggestion
(1895-1896) that types of men, men with distinctive aims in
life, would well repay psychological study.

This lead has been followed by Edouard Spranger (born
1882, professor of philosophy at Berlin). Spranger's interest
in the problems and aspirations of young people, along with his
interest in philosophy and the history of culture, led him to
take up Dilthey 's demand for an "understanding" psychology
(1928). While the "explanatory" psychology was occupied
with elements and physiological processes, understanding psy-
chology must proceed at the higher level of meaningful acts
and attitudes. A meaningful act has some goal, some value.
What are the goals and values of really meaningful human
activity? They are not limited to the biological goals of self-
preservation and reproduction, for we find mankind seeking
other values. Mankind finds value in knowledge, and one of its
goals is the advancement of knowledge. Another is seeri in the
love for beauty and the age-long devotion to artistic production
and enjoyment. By keeping in view both the living individual
and the history of mankind we can develop a psychology of
values and understand the individual's attitude toward life.
After prolonged attention to the problem Spranger believed he
could identify six typical human goals six dimensions of
human value, we might say aside from the biological goals
mentioned. Here is his list of goals, values or attitudes:

The theoretical, knowledge-seeking

The esthetic m

The economic or practical

The religious

The social or sympathetic

The political or managerial

Spranger speaks of "types of men": the practical man, the
religious man, and so on. He does not mean that people can be
cleanly grouped under these heads, for every individual will
appreciate more than a single value. As a type, the "practical
man" is idealized; and the same thing is true of the other

HORMIC AND HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIES 251

types. Yet actual individuals differ in their interests, some
inclining more toward the practical, others more toward the
theoretical, others more toward the political. This is not only
common observation, but it has also been demonstrated by the
use of questionnaires based on Spranger's types, so that his
system has found use in studies of personality.

Interest in "types" is not confined to the personalists. Jung,
we remember, introduced the famous distinction between in-
troverts and extroverts (page 200). Freud and his direct
followers distinguished several types which they believed to
originate in the fixation of early stages of psychosexual develop-
ment: the oral-erotic, dependent type; the sadistic or "biting"
type; the anal-erotic, characterized by parsimony, obstinacy,
and orderliness; and the more mature genital type (page 178).
Adler distinguished several "styles of life" (page 195). Hor-
ney's character trends are much like Freud's: the moving-
toward-people, compliant character ; the moving-against, hostile
character; and the moving-away, withdrawing character (page
208). Fromm has now worked over the psychoanalytic types,
which he calls orientations toward the world and life, and added
a new one. He speaks of the receptive-dependent type; the
exploiting-sadistic type; the hoarding-remote type; the self-
marketing type, always seeking to adjust to the current fashion
and demand ; and finally the only truly productive, creative, and
maturely loving type (Fromm, 1947, page 111). These types,
like Spranger's, are not separate classes of actual individuals so
much as "ideal types" combined and blended in any individual's
orientation.

Gordon W. Allport (born 1897, professor at Harvard) may
be cited as an outstanding representative of a large group of
contemporary psychologists who are endeavoring to build up a
science of personality. They do not attach themselves to any
of the schools we have mentioned, preferring a fresh approach
though with free use of their predecessors' methods. They do
not despise the "explanatory" psychology of the experimental-
ists and factor analysts, and make use of it to some extent, but
their feeling is that the individual as a living whole is being
neglected in all this attention to perception, learning, and abili-

252 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

ties. The individual as a unique organized whole, Allport says
(1937), does not come into focus when serving as a subject in
an experiment on perception or memory. The experimenter is
seeking for general laws, using the individual only as a specimen.
Even the student of individual differences is not really con-
cerned with the individual except as he occupies a certain
position in the distribution curve of one or another ability.
Psychoanalysis neglects the unique individual in its preoccu-
pation with universal causes. "The properties of the uncon-
scious, it holds, are . . . the same for all people. The desires of
the infant . . . and the stages of development through which he
passes are prescribed; the three- fold division of the self: the
super-ego, the ego, and the id permit no variation" ( 1937, page
12). Gestalt psychology and the "understanding*' psychology
have opened up lines of attack on the problem of personality, but
much remains to be done. Stern introduces unnecessary meta-
physics on one side and on the other overlooks the possible uses
of general experimental psychology. A psychology of person-
ality does not need to discard the laws of general psychology but
it demands laws "that tell how uniqueness comes about" (1937,
page 558). Presumably these will be laws of organization.
For another serious attempt to discover such laws see Murphy,
1947.

CHAPTER 8

THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD

In view of all the divergent movements that we have sur-
veyed, all these "warring schools" of contemporary psychology,
the reader may easily carry away the impression that we psy-
chologists are anything but a harmonious body of scientific
workers. Looked at from outside, our fraternity has seemed to
be a house divided against itself. Other scientists and philoso-
phers have sometimes said that "until psychologists can put
their own house in order, they have no claim on the attention
and respect of other groups," and that "a meeting of psycholo-
gists must be a perfect bear den." You would get a very
different impression from attending one of the International
Congresses of Psychology or a meeting of one of the national
societies such as the American Psychological Association. You
would hear papers read on various psychological topics, with
very little mention of any of the schools and with discussions of
the usual scientific type, free from acrimony though not of
course from the give and take of doubt and criticism. Outside
of the meeting rooms you would see friendly groups engaged in
animated conversation and you would find that a single group
often contained members of different schools. If you attended
the business meeting or looked into the business enterprises of
the society, you would find members of different schools serving
together on committees and editorial boards and evidently able
to cooperate in advancing the general interests of psychology.
You might query how they could conscientiously cooperate
when their views are so different as to what psychology ought
to be doing, and perhaps you would conclude that these psychol-
ogists liked and respected each other personally and left really
serious questions out of their public affairs. But then you
would probably reflect that after all there is something common

253

254 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

to all the schools. All psychologists are interested in psychol-
ogy* and though their definitions of the subject appear to differ,
there is something common to all underlying the definitions.
Whether they speak of behavior or of conscious experience or
of activity in general, they all have before them the individual
in his relation to the environment.

The total field of psychology is very wide and diversified,
and the possible applications of the science to human welfare are
numerous. Some psychologists are drawn into one part of the
field and some into another. Their diverse lines of work do not
usually result in the formation of "schools," as was said in the
introductory chapter, but to quite an extent the schools do repre-
sent different lines of work. The behaviorists are more inter-
ested in problems of learning, the Gestalt group more in prob-
lems of perception, the psychoanalysts more in motivation. The
human individual, enmeshed in all the problems, is what holds
the specializing groups of psychologists together, and we may
hope that the interrelations of the problems will become increas-
ingly evident with the general advance of the science. Already
rapprochements are becoming visible (Dashiell, 1939) .

Another reason for the continued unity of psychology is
found in the fact that only a minority of psychologists have
become active adherents of any of the schools. Some may lean
toward one school and some toward another, but on the whole
the psychologists of the present time are proceeding on their
way in the middle of the road. After all there was a great deal
in the psychology of 1900 against which there has been no
revolt. Many of the results of the earlier research still hold
good, and fresh research during the past half century has added
many new results that have no direct connection with any of
the schools. The psychologists of 1900 were on their way, and
their way is our way, but we seem to be farther ahead.

No worldwide census of psychologists has been attempted
for fifteen years and more, and we do not know how numerous
we are. Probably 10,000 would be a conservative estimate, a
very large number in comparison with 1900, though very small
in comparison with some contemporary scientific groups, as for
example the chemists. If we could assemble all these psycholo-

THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD 255

gists in a convention hall and ask the members of each school to
stand and show themselves, a very large proportion of the
entire group would remain seated. If, instead of mentioning
the schools, we should ask the experimental psychologists to
rise, the clinical psychologists, the social psychologists, the child
psychologists, the educational psychologists, the industrial psy-
chologists, and a few more such groups, we should soon have
the entire convention on its feet. Anything like a cleavage into
separate "psychologies" seems much more likely along such
lines than along "school" lines. But for the present there seems
to be a determination among psychologists to stick together in
one inclusive group.

Finally we may raise a question which has been hinted at
more than once, especially in the early discussion of functional
psychology. A broadly defined functional psychology starts
with the question "What man docs" and proceeds to the ques-
tions "How?" and "Why?" This we thought to be the under-
lying conception of psychology, coming down from the old days
and persisting underneath even when the formal definitions
were quite different. So broadly defined, we have said more
than once, functional psychology scarcely deserves the name of
a school because it would include so many psychologists who
have not professed themselves. Now the question is whether
our middle-of-the-roaders are not after all members of this
broadly conceived functional school. If we had our convention
assembled we could put the question to a vote. But if the
middle-of-the-roaders are really functionalists, the question is
then whether the same would not be true of all the schools.
Are they not all functionalists at heart? Without calling them
up one by one and pressing the question home, we can at least
say that they have all made contributions to the solution of
functional problems. Every school is good, though no one is
good enough. No one of them has the full vision of the psy-
chology of the future. One points to one alluring prospect,
another to another. Every one has elements of vitality and is
probably here to stay for a long time. Their negative pro-
nouncements we can discount while we accept their positive
contributions to psychology as a whole.

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262 CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

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AUTHOR INDEX

Adler, A. 193-197, 257

clinical methods of 196

divergence of, from Freud 181,
192, 193, 195, 197

on dream interpretation 197

on neuroses 196

on social spirit 194

on style of life 195, 207

on superiority motive 193, 195
Alexander, F. 257

clinical methods of 168

on hostility motive 187

on Oedipus complex 187
Allport, G. W. 257

on personality 251-252
Anderson, O. D., on conditioned

response 263
Angell, J. R. 257

on animal psychology 31

on functional psychology 30-32
Aristotle

on faculties 12

on laws of association 38

Bain, A., on association 45, 257
Bekhterev, V. M., on conditioned

response 82, 257
Bentley, M., as pupil of Titchener

30, 257
Berkeley, G.. on association 41.

257

Bernard, L. L. 257
on environmentalist!! 225
on instincts in society 224
on sublimation 225
Binet, A. 257 m
on introspective method 22
on thinking 23

Bleuler, E., on schizophrenia 198
Bogen, H. f on Stern's methods 248,

257

Boring, E. G. 257-258
history of psychology by 5, 38,

126

on operationism 119
as pupil of Titchener 30
on tonal senation 30

Breuer, J., talking-out method of

160, 258
Bridgman, P. W., on operational

definitions 116, 258
Brown, T. 43-44, 258
on association 43
on mental chemistry 43
on relations perceived 44, 125

Calkins, M. W. 258

on introspection 243

self psychology of 120, 242-244
Cannon, W. B., on emotion 86, 258
Carmichael, L., on child develop-
ment 234, 258
Carpenter, W. B., on unconscious

cerebration 170, 258
Carr, H. 258

on animal psychology 68

on functional psychology 32
Cattell, J. McK. 258

definition of psychology by 72

pupils of 51, 99
Charcot, J. M. 258

on hypnosis and hysteria 157

pupils of 157, 159
Claparede, E. 258

on functional psychology 33

on the schools 33
Coghill, G. E. 258

on development from .vhole to
parts 233

on organismic psychology 233-
235

Darwin, C , influence of, on psychol-
ogy 8, 48, 158

Dashiell, J. F., on rapprochements
of the schools 254, 258

Descartes, R., reflex theory of be-
havior of 6

Dewey, J., on functional psychology
30, 32

Dilthey, W., on "understanding"
psychology 249, 258-259

DuBois, C., on psychoanalysis 262

269

270

AUTHOR INDEX

Duncker, K., on problem solving

142, 259
Dunlap, K., on instincts 226, 259

Ebbinghaus, H. 47-48, 259
on associations 47
memory experiment of 16, 47

Edwards, J., on free will 17, 259

Ehrenfels, C. v., on Gestalt qual-
ities 125, 126, 259

Einstein, A., as thinker 147, 150

Ellis, W. L)., on Gestalt psychology
120, 259

Elmgren, J., on Gestalt psychology
120, 259

Estes, W. K., definition of anxiety
by 116,259

Faraday, M. f on field in physics 131
Fenichel, O , on psychoanalysis 188,

259

Fordham, M., on Jung 200, 259
Franz, S. I., on brain functions

99, 259
French, T., clinical methods of 168,

257

Freud, S. 158-193, 259-260
followers of 120, 167, 181, 186,

187, 188, 192, 203
interests of 158, 169
life of 158, 186
methods of 159-168
as pupil of Charcot and Breuer

158, 160

theories of 168-192
See Subject Index, Psychoanal-
ysis

Frornm, E. 260
on human types 251
on Oedipus complex 181
on psychoanalysis 204

Galileo, influence of, on psychology

6
Galton, F., pioneer in psychology

8 72

Goldstein, K. 235-239, 260
on abstract attitude 238
on brain injuries 237
on drives 237
on Freud 237
on Gestalt psychology 239
holistic-analytic method of 236
on organismic psychology 235
Guilford, J. O. and R. S., on intro-
version 199, 260

Guthrie, E. R., on conditioned re-
sponse 88, 266

Harrell, W., and Harrison, R., on

behaviorism 260

Hartley, D., on association 43, 260
Hartmann, G. W., on Gestalt psy-
chology 120, 249, 260
Heidbreder, E., history of psychol-
ogy by 5, 38, 260
Herbart, J. F. 46-47, 260
on apperceptive mass 46
on attraction and repulsion of

ideas 46

Hilgard, E. R., on conditioned re-
sponse and learning 62, 67, 261
Hobbes, T. 38-40, 261
on association 38
on desire 40

physical theory of mind of 6, 39
Hobhouse, L. T., animal experi-
ments of 143, 261
Horney, K. 204-210, 261
Sec Subject Index, Neo-Freudian

psychology

Hull, C. L. 108-112, 261
on associationism 110
on conditioned response 111
hypothetico-deductive system of

110, 115

and Pavlov 110
on robots 111
Hume, D. 261
on association 42
on cause and effect 42, 122, 151
Hunter, W. S., on behaviorism 97-
98, 261

Jacobi, J., on Jung 200, 261
Jacobson, E., on muscle action in

thinking 90, 261
James, W. 24, 37, 261

against atomism 128

definition of psychology by 24

on emotion 85, 86

on fusion 128

on inner experience 25

on instincts 91

on personal consciousness 242

as precursor of functional psy-
chology 31, 68

pupils of 31, 51

James, W. T., on conditioned re-
sponse 263
Janet, P. 157-158, 261-262

and Freud 160

on hypnosis 157, 160

AUTHOR INDEX

271

Janet, P. (Continued)

on low mental tension 158, 173,
198

on neuroses 157
Jung, C. G. 198-203, 262

divergence of, from Freud 182,
198

on dream interpretation 202

on human types 200, 251

on introversion 200

on libido 162, 199

on treatment 202

on unconscious 201

Kantor, J. R. 239-241, 262
on brain functions 240
on organismic psychology 239
Kardiner, A., on psychoanalysis

204, 262
Katona, G., on problem solving 142,

148, 262

Katz, D. 33-34, 262
on color constancy 34
phenomenological method of 34
Kellogg, W. N. f on conditioned re-
sponse 62, 266
Kinsey, A. C., on sex behavior 212,

262
Kline, L. W., animal experiments of

51
Kliiver, H., on the "understanding"

psychology 249, 262
Koffka, K. 262

on behavioral environment 139
on ego 138

on figure and ground 127, 128
on Gestalt theory 121, 137
on isomorphism 135
on Lewin 152
on psychophysical field 137
Kohler, W. 262
animal experiments of 142
on audition 121
on direct experience 140
field theory of 130, 132
on figural after-effects 133
on insight vs. trial and error 142-

147

on isomorphism 135
on Lewin 152

on response to patterns 134, 137
on Wertheimer 151
Krueger, F. E., "wholeness" psy-
chology of 249, 262
Kiilpe, O., thought psychology of
23

Kuo, Z. Y., on purpose 215, 225*
263

Landis, C 263

on emotion 86

on psychoanalysis 211
Lange, C., on emotion 85
Laromiguiere, P., on perceived re-
lations 44, 263
Lashley, K. S. 98-103, 263

on behaviorism 98

on brain functions 99

on conditioned response 100

critique of Hull by 112

on Gestalt psychology 103, 145

on instinct 226

on introspection 98

on mass action and equipotential-
ity 100

on neuropsychology 98, 102

transposition experiment of 145
Leeper, R. W., on Lewin 155, 263
Lewin, K. 151-155, 263

on association 151, 153

on concepts 153

experiments of 155

field theory of 152

and Gestalt psychology 151, 152

on motivation 152, 155

on topology and vector analysis

154

Liddell, H. S., on conditioned re-
sponse 62, 263

Linton, R., on psychoanalysis 262
Locke, J. 40-41, 263

on association 40

on conditioned fears 41

MacLeod, R. B., phenomenological

method of 35, 263
Marquis, D. G., on conditioned re-
sponse 62, 261
on reinforcement 66, 268
Martin, C. E., on sex behavior 262
Masserman, J. H., on psychoanal-
ysis 210, 263
Max, L. W., on muscle action in

thinking 90, 264
Maxwell, C, on field in physics

131, 150

McDougall, W., 216-231, 264
on abnormal psychology 173
on behavior 217
critique of Freud by 230
definition of psychology by 73,

216
influence of 230

2 7 2

AUTHOR INDEX

McDougall, W. (Continued)
social psychology of 218, 222, 225
on teleology 229
See Subject Index, Hormic psy-
chology
McGeoch, J. A., on learning 67,

264

Menninger, K. A. 264
on hostility motive 187
psychoanalytic methods of 168
Mesmer, F., on hypnotism 156
Meyer, A., on organismic psychology
or psychobiology 120, 232-233,
241, 264
Meyer, M. F., on behaviorism 94-

95, 264

Michotte, A., on thinking 23, 264
Mill, J., on association 44, 264
Mill, J. S., on association 45, 264
Morgan, C. L., on animal psychology

49, 265

Midler. G. E. 265
on association 48, 66
introspective method of 22
laboratory of 22, 34
on memory 22
Murchtoon, C, as editor 257, 258,

261, 263, 264, 266, 268
Murphy, G. 265
history of psychology by 5, 38
on personality 252

Parker, C., on instincts in industry

223, 265
Pascal, G. R., on psychoanalysis

167, 265

Pavlov, I. P. 56-61, 112, 265
on conditioned response 56, 63, 65
on psychiatry 60
on psychology 60
on reinforcement 58, 66
on theory of conditioning 61
and Thorndike 50, 61, 64, 66
Petermann, B., on Gestalt psychol-
ogy 120, 265

Pillsbury, W. B., 73-74, 265
definition of psychology by 73
as functionalist 73, 95
as pupil of Titchener 30
Pomeroy, W. B., on sex behavior

262
Pratt, K. C, on child development

234

Prince, M., on double personality
157, 265

Reik, T., on Freud 187, 265

Rennie, T. A. C, on Adolf Meyer

233,265
Richards, E. L., on psychobiology

233, 265
Richie, B. F., critique of Hull by

265
Robinson, E. S., on associationism

today 67, 265
Rogers, C. R., nondirective therapy

of 168, 265

Rubin, E. 34-35, 265-266
on figure and ground 34
on functional psychology 35
on schools 35

Sachs, H., on Freud 187
Scheerer, M., on abstract attitude

238, 260

Schumann, F., on memory 265
Sears, R. R., on psychoanalysis 211,

266

Sherrington, C. S , on reflex inte-
gration 235, 266
Skinner, B. F. 112-116, 266
animal experiment of 64, 113
on behaviorism 112, 115
on conditioned response 65
hypotheses of 115
on intervening variables 116
on ope rants 114
on operationism 116
Small, W. S., animal experiment of

51
Smith, S., on conditioned response

88, 266
Spearman, C. E., on associationism

66, 266
Spooner, A., on conditioned response

62, 266

Spranger, E. 250-251, 266
on "understanding" psychology

250

on value types 250
Stern, W. 244-248, 266
clinical methods of 248
on convergence 246
on Gestalt psychology 247
personalistic psychology of 245
on salience and embedding 247
Stevens, S. S. 266
on operationism 119
on tonal sensation 30
Sully, J., definition of psychology by
24, 266

Tappan, H. P., on free will 18, 266

AUTHOR INDEX

273

Tead, 0., on instincts in industry

223, 266
Thorndike, E. L. 50-56, 120, 266-

267
animal experiments of 51, 65, 142,

146

on behaviorism 68
on confirming reaction 55, 66
on connectionism 56
human experiments of 54
on instincts 91, 226
on law of effect 52, 54, 66
Tilquin, A., on Tolman 107, 267
Titchener, E. B. 26-30, 267
on behaviorism 29
experimental psychology of 30
pupils of 30
on purpose 214
structural psychology of 26-28,

30

Tolman, E. C. 103-108, 267
on associationism 108
on consciousness 106
on intervening variables 107
on molar vs. molecular behavior

105
on purposive behaviorism 103,

105

Volkmann von Volkman, W., Her-
bartian psychology 267

Wade, M, critique of Hull by 263
Wallach, H., on figural after-effects

133, 262
Wallas, G., on instincts in society

223, 267

Warren, H. C, history of associa-
tionism by 38, 267
Washburn, M. F. 267-268

on animal psychology 69

on introspection 89

as pupil of Titchener 30
Watson, J. B. 68-94, 268

on animal psychology 68, 77

behaviorism founded by 69, 120

on child psychology 86

on conditioned response 82, 88, 91

definition of psychology by 71, 77

on environmentalism 90

on feeling and emotion 84, 104,
105

on implicit behavior 75, 88, 136

Watson, J. B. (Continued)

on instincts 91, 101, 226

on introspection 70, 74, 76, 82,
121

on learning 87

on memory images 84

popular appeal of 92

on purpose 214

on sensation and perception 81

on stimulus and response 80, 136

on thinking 88

Tolman's critique of 104

verbal report method of 82

Sec Subject Index, Behaviorism
Weiss, A. P. 95-97, 268

on behaviorism 95

on biosocial development 96
Wertheimer, M. 121, 268

on apparent visual motion 122,
127

association test of 121

experiments in teaching of 148

on field forces 128, 150

founds Gestalt school 121

on law of organization 130, 131

on motion pictures 122

on thinking 142, 147-151

on truth attainable 151

on whole and parts 122, 124, 147
West, J., on psychoanalysis 262
Wexberg, E., on Adler 197, 268
Wheatstone, C., on stereoscopic vi-
sion 16
Woodworth, R. S. 268

on learning 67

on reinforcement 66
Wundt, W. 24-26, 268

on animal psychology 49

on creative synthesis 26

definition of psychology by 24

on elements of consciousness 25

laboratory of 7, 22

pupils of 26, 72

on structural psychology 25, 121

Watson's rejection of 69, 80

Yerkes, R. M., on animal psychology
68

Youmans, E. L., on functional psy-
chology 14

Zener, K., on conditioned response
63, 268

SUBJECT INDEX

Abnormal psychology 173, 237

See Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis
Abstract attitude (Goldstein) 238
Academic psychology 156, 210
Aggressiveness 184, 187, 188, 192,

225

Ambivalence 165, 185
Analytical psychology 198

See Author Index, Jung, C. G.
Anger 221, 227
Animal learning 49, 51
Apperception mass 46
Archetypes 201, 203
Association
animal 48
free and controlled 40, 121, 162,

165

laws and sublaws J8, 44, 50, 87
learning 47
sign and meaning 41
simultaneous and sucessive 40
Associationism 6, 37-67, 127
critiques 66, 151, 153
history 38
earlier 38

See Author Index, Bain, A.,
Berkeley, G., Brown, T., Hart-
ley, D., Herbart, J. R, Hobbes,
T., Hume, D., Locke, J., Mill, J.,
Mill, J. S.
newer 47, 110

See Author Index, Ebbinghaus,
H., Muller, G. E., Pavlov, I. P.,
Thorndike, E. L.
present-day 66, 108
Atomism 54, 80, 128, 242, 245

Barrier (Lewin) 154

Basic anxiety (Homey) 207

Behavior

cognitive 105, 108

implicit 75, 86, 88, 136

molar vs. molecular 80, 105, 112,
134, 138

operant vs. respondent 114

purposive 105, 108, 217

reflex conception of 6, 112

Behavior (Continued)
as subject matter of psychology

9, 29, 216

Behaviorism 68-119
See Author Index, Hull, C. L.,

Hunter, W. S., Lashley, K. S.,

Meyer, M. F., Skinner, B. F. f

Tolman, E. C, Watson, J. B.,

Weiss, A. P.
antecedents 72
biosocial 96

concepts 71, 76, 78, 79-91
critiques 76, 78, 83, 104, 135, 243
early 68,94
later 103
metaphysical 75
methodological 71, 74, 76, 84
purposive 103
Biology, influence on psychology 7,

48
Brain, functions 55, 57, 84, 99-103,

124, 127, 130, 132, 135, 240
indicators 15, 57, 135, 136
injuries 237, 238

Catharsis, emotional 160
Cause and effect 42, 122, 229
Character 178, 204, 207, 210

See Types
Chemistry, influence on psychology

7,41
Child development 234, 246

biosocial 96, 204

emotional 86

perceptual 128

sexual 178, 186, 206, 211, 212
Closure, a Gestalt principle 129,

150

Competition 209
Complex 162

inferiority 194

Oedipus 179
Concept formation 109
Conditioned reflex or response (CR)

delayed 59
differentiation 59, 82

275

2 7 6

SUBJECT INDEX

Conditioned reflex (Continued)

extinction 58, 65

instrumental 63, 114

ope rant 64

theories 61, 88, 100, 110

varieties 62
Confirming reaction (Thorndike)

55, 66

Connectionism 56, 102
Consciousness as field for study
24, 97, 106, 112, 136, 242

See Direct experience
Constraints in dynamics 132, 151,

154
Convergence, of factors 246

of nerve fibers 134

Death instinct 184, 186
Defense mechanisms 174
Definition, operational 117, 155
of psychology 24, 29, 71-74, 77,

216, 245, 249
Depth psychology 156, 197, 230,

246, 249

Determinism 17, 172
Direct experience 124, 134, 136,

138, 243

Discrimination 45, 60, 82, 114
Dream, interpretation by Adler 197
by Freud 162
by Jung 202
manifest vs. latent 162
symbolism 165
wish-fulfilling 162
Dualism, mind-body 71, 232, 239

Ego, in Gestalt psychology 138

in psychoanalysis 178, 188, 191
Emotion 85

in children 86
Environment 232, 245

behavioral vs. geographic 139,
141, 146, 153

social 224

Environmentalism 98, 225
Equipotentiality (Lashley) 100
Eros 184
Evolution 48

Existential psychology, See Struc-
tural psychology
Exploration 147, 150

Faculty psychology 12
opposed by associationist 38

by Herbart 46
Fantasy 163, 198

Fear 191,207

conditioned 41, 87, 221
Feelings 25, 84
Figural after-effects 133
Figure and ground 34, 127, 248
Form quality 124
Free will 17, 172
Frustration 154
Function, three meanings 28, 107,

113, 115

Functional psychology 11-23, 30-36,
98, 137

beginnings 10

Chicago school 30

defined 13, 14, 36

European 33

experimental 14

inclusive 35, 106-107, 254

primary and secondary 35

Generalization, stimulus 59
Gestalt psychology 120-155
See Author Index, Koffka, K.,
Kohler, W., Lewin, K., Wer-
theimer, M.

animal experiments 142
antecedents 124

Austrian and Berlin schools 126
critique of behaviorism 135
of structural psychology 121
of Thorndike 142
field forces 128, 131, 150, 153
founding 121
insight 143
introspection 121
nonvitalistic 134
organization 126, 128, 131, 137,

141

problem solving 142
productive thinking 147
seen motion 122
self and environment 135
Goal seeking 105, 217, 228, 248
Good figure, a Gestalt principle 130,

150
Guilt, feeling of 190

Hedonism 12, 218
Heredity 8, 45, 91, 194, 226
Historical background, ancient 12

early modern 5

nineteenth century 7, 14
Holistic psychology 213, 231-252

organismic 232-241

personalistic 241-248

personality 251-252

"understanding" 249-25 1

SUBJECT INDEX

277

Hormic psychology 213-231

See Author Index, McDougall, W.

behavior concept 217

criticized 223, 226

instincts 219, 227

motives 219

propensities 219, 227

purpose 214

sentiments 221

striving 216
Hostility motive 165, 184-188, 190,

225
Hypnotism 156

discontinued by Freud 161
Hypothetico-deductive system

(Hull) 110, 115
Hysteria 157, 159

Id 189

Ideas, innate 40, 45
simple vs. compound 40, 43, 45

Identification 180, 222

Imageless thought 23, 74

Individual psychology, See Author
Index, Adler, A.

Individuality 252

Individuation (Coghill) 233

Infantile sexuality 176, 186, 193,
199, 206, 211, 212

Inhibition 46, 48, 58, 59

Insight 142, 145
evidences of 144

Instinct 45, 49, 80, 91, 101, 179,
183, 184, 189, 201, 202, 204, 205,
219, 227

Intelligence 117, 142

Intervening variables 107, 110, 116

Introspection, See Method, intro-
spective

Introversion 200

Isolation (Goldstein) 235

Isomorphism 135, 152

Lapses 163,171

Latency period in sexual develop-
ment 180,206, 211, 212
Law of effect 50, 52, 66

criticized 53, 87

revised 54

Law of exercise 52, 87
Learning, animal 49

and instinct 226

laws of 52, 87

recent interest 37
Libido 162, 178, 182, 199
Life space (Lewin) 153
Logic 147

Low mental tension (Janet) 158,
198

Machine vs. dynamic field 132
Mass action of cortex 100
Maturation 234
Memory 16, 22, 47, 117, 242

of childhood 164, 166, 180

images 84

Mental chemistry 43, 125
Methods, clinical 79, 159-169, 196
202, 208, 248

experimental 15-24

holistic-analytic 236

of impression 18, 82, 118

introspective 17, 21, 28, 33, 70-7&,
94, 98, 216 243

objective 15, 20, 76

phenomenological 34

verbal report 20, 82, 118
Motion pictures 122
Motives 152, 155, 192, 219, 237

fusion of 185

polarity of 178, 183, 184, 188,

194, 200
Muscle currents in thinking 90

Nancy school 157, 159
Narcissism 182, 200

primary 183

Necessary connection 42, 122
Neo-Freudian psychology 203-210

See Author Index, Fromm, E.,
Horney, K., Kardiner, A.

basic anxiety 207

character structure 207, 209

Freudian fundamentals 209

neurotic trends 207

sexual problems 209

sociological orientation 203

treatment 208
Neuropsychology 98, 103
Neuroses 157, 159, 167, 196, 198,

208

Neurotic trends (Horney) 207
Noegenesis (Spearman) 66
Nondirective therapy 168

Oedipus 179, 190, 198
Operant (Skinner) 114
Operationism 116-119
Organismic psychology 232-241
See Author Index, Coghill, G. E.,

Goldstein, K., Kantor, J. R.,

Meyer, A.
Organization 126, 128, 131, 137,

141, 252

SUBJECT INDEX

Pecking order 220

Perception, neglected by behaviorism

stressed by Gestalt psychology 5,

124, 137

Personalistic psychology 241-252
See Author Index, Calkins, M. W.,

Stern, W.
Personality 251

uniqueness 252
Physics, influence on psychology

6, 18, 39

Physiology, influence on psychology

7, 15, 18

Pleasure principle 179
Preconscious 188

Pregnance, a Gestalt principle 130
Propensities 219, 227
Psychasthenia 157
Psychiatry, psychic and somatic 8,
156, 232

psychobiological 232
Psychoanalysis 156-212

See Author Index, Freud, S.

antecedents 156

clinical method 159-169
catharsis 160

childhood memories 163, 180
classical vs. modified 166-168
development 166
dream analysis 162
free association 162
fundamental rule 162, 248
relaxation 161
resistances 165, 209
revival of emotion 164
symbols 165
talking out 160
transference 161, 164, 210

earlier theories 169-181
ego and libido 178
infantile sexuality 176,211,212
Oedipus complex 179, 190, 198
pefsistent wishes 175, 206
psychic determinism 172, 209
resistance and repression 174,

2C9, 211

the unconscious 170, 188, 209
unconscious motives 170

later theories 181-192
ego, id, superego 188, 191
life and death instincts 184
narcissism 182
primary narcissism 183

neo-Freudian 203-210

tests of 210-212
Psychobiology 120, 232, 241

Punishment 55, 190
Purposivism 213
See Hormic psychology

Quasi-needs (Lewin) 152
Questions of science 12

Reality principle 179
Reinforcement 50, 58, 64, 66, 110,

131, 141

Relations, in association 66
in behavior 143
perception or education of 44, 45,

66, 133, 145

Resistance 165, 175, 189
Robot 111

Sadism 185

Salience vs. embeddedness (Stern)

247
Schools, defined 3

disapproved 33, 35

listed with dates 4

persistent 5

reconciled 244, 254

tested 10, 90, 91, 101
Self as conscious experience 243
Self -actualization 237
Self psychology 242
Sensations 18
Sentiments 221
Set 22, 23, 130. 150, 229, 241
Social psychology 185, 194, 204,

209, 218, 222, 225, 243
Sociology 92. 203, 223
Stereoscope 16

Stimulus and response, in behavior-
ism 80

in Gestalt psychology 136
Structural psychology" 24-30, 76

See Author Index, Titchener, E.
B., Wundt, W.

and behaviorism 69, 106

existential 28

program 25, 28

study of conscious experience 24,

97

Style of life (Adler) 195, 207
Sublimation 178, 205, 225
Superego 190

Talking-out method 160

Tastes 228

Teaching. Gestalt advice 147

Herbartian advice 46
Teleology 229, 245
Tests 8, 16, 118

SUBJECT INDEX

279

Thinking 22, 23, 33, 147-151

implicit speech 88
Topology (Lewin) 155
Transfer 144
Transference 161, 164, 176
Transposition 125, 145
Trial and error 5l r 53, 105, 142,

145, 147, 149, 154
Types 251, 252

"Understanding" psychology 249-
251 <

Sec Author Index, Dilthey, W. t

Spranger, E.
Unitas multiplex 245

Valence 15JJ
Vectors 155
Values 250

Unconscious 138, 170, 188, 195, 201, War neuroses 167

209, 246 Whole and parts 124, 147, 236, 249