B.F. Skinner - Critique of Psychoanalytic Concepts and Theories (From 'Minnesota Studies in The Philosophy of Science.') Vol.1 1956 (1954)
B.F. Skinner - Critique of Psychoanalytic Concepts and Theories (From 'Minnesota Studies in The Philosophy of Science.') Vol.1 1956 (1954)
B.F. Skinner - Critique of Psychoanalytic Concepts and Theories (From 'Minnesota Studies in The Philosophy of Science.') Vol.1 1956 (1954)
SKINNER-
and Theories
FREUD'S great contribution to Western thought has been described as the application of the principle of cause and effect to human behavior.
Freud demonstrated that many features of behavior hitherto unexplained and often dismissed as hopelessly complex or obscure could be shown to be the product of circumstances in the history of the individual. Many of the causal relationships he so convincingly demonstrated had been wholly unsuspected unsuspected, in particular, by the very individuals whose behavior they controlled. Freud greatly reduced the sphere of accident and caprice in our considerations of human conduct. His achievement in this respect appears all the more impressive when we recall that he was never able to appeal to the quantitative proofs characteristic of other sciences. He carried the day with sheer persuasion with the massing of instances and the delineation of sur-
and analogies among seemingly diverse materials. This was not, however, Freud's own view of the matter. At the age of seventy he summed up his achievement in this way: "My life has been aimed at one goal only: to infer or guess how the mental apparatus
prising parallels
is is
constructed and what forces interplay and counteract in it." (2) It difficult to describe the mental apparatus he refers to in noncontro-
because Freud's conception changed from time to its very nature encouraged misinterpretation
it is
perhaps not too wide of the mark to Freud conceived of some realm
of the mind, not necessarily having physical extent, but nevertheless into regions of capable of topographic description and of subdivision the conscious, co-conscious, and unconscious. Within this space, various
mental events
ideas, wishes,
NOTE: This paper appeared, in somewliat different form, in The Scientific Monthly, November 1954, and is by permission of the editor and the author.
reprinted
77
B. F. Skinner
cies,
and
so
Sys-
and were given proper names: the id, the ego, and the superego. These systems divided among themselves a limited store of psychic energy. There were, of course, many other details.
sidiary personalities
No
may
eventually
make
ratus, there
as a scientific
it
define the goal of one's life as the exploration of an explanatory fiction. Freud did not use his "mental apparatus" as a postulate system from
which he deduced theorems to be submitted to empirical check. If there was any interaction between the mental apparatus and empirical observasuch interaction took the form of modifying the apparatus to account for newly discovered facts. To many followers of Freud the
tions,
mental apparatus appears to be equally as real as the newly discovered facts, and the exploration of such an apparatus is similarly accepted as
the goal of a science of behavior. There is an alternative view, howwhich holds that Freud did not discover the mental apparatus but
it,
ever,
rather invented
borrowing part of
its
philosophy of
own
There
concede that Freud's mental apparatus was an observable empirical system but
justify it in
the light of
scientific
method.
take the line that metaphorical devices are inevitable in the early stages of any science and that although we may look with amuse-
One may
"essences," "forces/' "phlogistons," and "ethers," of the science of yesterday, these nevertheless were essential to the his-
to prove or disprove this. However, learned anything about the nature of scientific thinking, if mathematical and logical researches have improved our capacity to repdifficult
would be
we have
resent
data, it
is
possible that
we can
avoid
some
is
past demonstrating, but whether we need similar constructs in the future prosecution of a science of behavior is a question worth considering.
Constructs are convenient and perhaps even necessary in dealing with As Frenkel-Brunswik shows (1),
78
scientific
of the metaphorical nature of some of his own constructs. When this case, he justified the constructs as necessary or at least highly convenient. But awareness of the nature of the metaphor is no defense
it,
and
if
modern
science
is still
occasionally metaphorical,
still
we must
remember
that
point is not or construct but that is metaphor objectionable particular metaand constructs have caused trouble and are continuing to do so. phors Freud recognized the damage worked by his own metaphorical thinkthat, theorywise,
it is
also
in trouble.
The
ing,
but he
felt that it
could not be avoided and that the damage must is reason to disagree with him on this point.
Freud's explanatory scheme followed a traditional pattern of looking human behavior inside the organism. His medical train-
ing supplied him with powerful supporting analogies. The parallel between the excision of a tumor, for example, and the release of a repressed wish from the unconscious is quite compelling and must have
affected Freud's thinking.
behavior
Now, the pattern of an inner explanation of best exemplified by doctrines of animism, which are primarily concerned with explaining the spontaneity and evident capriciousness of behavior. The living organism is an extremely complicated
is
system behaving in an extremely complicated way. Much of its behavior appears at first blush to be absolutely unpredictable. The traditional
procedure has been to invent an inner determiner, a "demon,"
"spirit,"
"homunculus," or "personality" capable of spontaneous change of course or of origination of action. Such an inner determiner offers only a
momentary explanation
it
must, of course, be accounted for also, but it is commonly used to put the matter beyond further inquiry and to bring the study of a causal series of events to a dead end.
Freud, himself, however, did not appeal to the inner apparatus to account for spontaneity or caprice because he was a thoroughgoing deaccepted the responsibility of explaining, in turn, the behavior of the inner determiner. He did this by pointing to hitherto unnoticed external causes in the environmental and genetic history of
terminist.
He
the individual.
He
did not, therefore, need the traditional explanatory but he was unable to eliminate the
each of the causal pattern from his thinking. It led him to represent as a series of three events. Some environhad discovered he relationships
79
B. F. Skinner
an
mental condition, very often in the early life of the individual, leaves effect upon the inner mental apparatus, and this in turn produces
symptom. Environmental
event, mental
symptom
appeal to the middle link to explain sponhe used it to bridge the gap in space and or Instead taneity caprice. time between the events he had proved to be causally related.
causal chain.
He made no
possible alternative,
estab-
lished science,
may be
of the individual, perhaps at a much later date. In one sense, too little is known at the moment of these physiological processes to make them
way for this purpose. On the other hand, too much of them, at least in a negative way. Enough is known of the nervous system to place certain dimensional limits upon speculation
useful in a legitimate
is
known
and to
clip the wings of explanatory fiction. Freud accepted, therefore, the traditional fiction of a mental life, avoiding an out-and-out dualism
by arguing that eventually physiological counterparts would be discovered. Quite apart from the question of the existence of mental events,
let us
We
may touch
only briefly upon two classical problems that arise life has been adopted. The first of
is
to
introspection is only a special science rests and that man's experience necessarily stands between him and the physical world with which science purports to deal. But it was
Freud himself
ratus
who
all
of one's mental
life
was
many
were necessarily inferred. Great as this discovery was, it would have been still greater if Freud had taken the next step, advocated a
little later
called Behaviorism,
and
insisted
arguing that the individual organism simply reacts to its environment, rather than to some inner experience of that environment,
By
spection,
was Freud himself who taught us to doubt the face value of introAlthough he appears to have heen responsible for the view that another sort of direct
80
second
classical
problem
is
how
the mental
life
first
it
commonly assumed that the mental apparatus is being directly manipulated. Sometimes it is argued that processes are initiated within
the individual himself, such as those of free association and transference,
apparatus.
But
how
by physical means? The clarification of such a causal connection places a heavy and often unwelcome
are these mental processes initiated
dualist.
The important
cerns
The
first
of these con-
pointed.
the environmental variables to which Freud so convincingly The cogency of these variables was frequently missed because
the variables were transformed and obscured in the course of being represented in mental life. The physical world of the organism was
converted into conscious and unconscious experience, and these experiences were further transmuted as they combined and changed in mental
processes.
For example,
change
is
early
punishment
of sexual behavior
is
an ob-
But
when
this
unconscious
anxiety or guilt, specific details of the punishment are lost. When, in turn, some unusual characteristic of the sexual behavior of the adult
individual
is related to the supposed guilt, many specific features of the relationship may be missed that would have been obvious if the same features of behavior had been related to the punishing episode.
is
it
and
inadequate and
misleading. Freud's theory of the mental apparatus had an equally damaging effect upon his study of behavior as a dependent variable. Inevitably,
it stole the show. Little attention was left to behavior per se. Behavior was relegated to the position of a mere mode of expression of the
is required if certain activities in the mental apparatus are to be comprehended. Such a requirement is implied in the modem assertion that only those who have been psychoanalyzed can fully understand the meaning of transference or the
experience
81
B. F. Skinner
activities of
disturbance.
the mental apparatus or the symptoms of an underlying Among the problems not specifically treated in the manner
we may note
five.
clari-
fied.
simple occurrence of behavior was never well represented. "Thoughts" could "occur" to an individual; he could "have" ideas
The The
according to the traditional model; but he could "have" behavior only are much more likely in giving expression to these inner events.
We
thought occurred to rne to ask him his name" than that "the act of asking him his name occurred to me." It is in the
to say that "the
nature of thoughts and ideas that they occur to people, but we have never come to be at home in describing the emission of behavior in
a
is
of
art,
he rejected the
possibility of
an analysis of verbal
behavior in
its own right rather than as the expression of ideas, feelother or inner events, and therefore missed the importance of ings,
their occurrence.
The
To
see an
object as
an object
is
it is
an
act,
and some-
thing very
an object although no object is present. Fantasy and dreams were for Freud not the perceptual behavior of the individual but pictures painted by an inner artist in
like
it
much
when we
see
some
atelier of
the
component of the
-of
act of seeing
emphasized.
behavior, particularly its dynamic properties, were never adequately represented. are all familiar with the fact that some of our acts are more likely to occur upon a given occasion
The dimensions
We
The dynamic
is hard to represent and harder to changes in behavior that are the first concern
of the psychoanalyst are primarily changes in probability of action. But Freud chose to deal with this aspect of behavior in other termsas a
The
delicate question of
how
probability of action
is
to
be quanti-
be
applied.
3. In his emphasis upon the genesis of behavior, Freud made extensive use of processes of learning. These were never treated operationally
in terms of changes in behavior but rather as the acquisition of ideas, feelings, and emotions later to be expressed by, or manifested in, behavior.
rivalry in his
suggestion that sibling early history played an important part in his theoretical considerations as well as in his personal relationships as an adult.
Freud's
own
own
An
a half
years old,
and
as a
young
than himself and presumably more powerful, yet who was, strangely enough, in the nominally subordinate position of being his nephew. To classify such a set of circumstances as sibling rivalry obscures, as we
regarded as independent variables in a science of behavior. To argue that what was learned was the effect of these circumstances upon unconscious or conscious aggressive tendencies or feelings of guilt works
a similar misrepresentation of the dependent variable. An emphasis upon behavior would lead us to inquire into the specific acts plausibly assumed
how was
to be engendered by these childhood episodes. In very specific terms, the behavior of the young Freud shaped by the special re-
inforcing contingencies arising from the presence of a younger child in the family, by the death of that child, and by later association with
an older playmate who nevertheless occupied a subordinate family position? What did the young Freud learn to do to achieve parental attention under these difficult circumstances?
How did
he avoid
aversive con-
sequences? Did he exaggerate any illness? Did he feign illness? Did he make a conspicuous display of behavior that brought commendation?
field of physical prowess or into he learn Did endeavor? tellectual engage in behavior that would in turn increase the repertoires avaikble to him to achieve commendation?
Was
Did he strike or otherwise injure young children? Did he learn to injure them verbally by teasing? Was he punished for this, and if so, did he
discover other forms of behavior that had the same damaging effect but
We cannot,
83
B. F. Skinner
of behavioral repertoires under oy a concern for the explicit shaping childhood circumstances. What has survived through the years is not
be manifested In behavior, but rather pataggression and guilt, later to terns of behavior themselves. It is not enough to say that this is "all
that
is
ratus.
meant" by sibling rivalry or by its effects upon the mental appaSuch an expression obscures, rather than illuminates, the nature
could be
A similar analysis
and emotion.
4.
made
An
explicit
re-
the principal quantifiable property of behavior, and of learning sponse and other processes in terms of changes of probability is usually enough
as
to avoid
another
temporaries, fell. suggest the activity of an organism yet are not descriptive of behavior in the narrower sense. Freud used many of these freely; for example,
which Freud, in common with his conThere are many words in the layman's vocabulary that
pitfall into
the individual
is
said to discriminate,
remember,
We say
that a
man
he when with two ~~ objects ____. _ behaves differently _,. ._ ___ __ ___iL__ to them; but discriminating is not itself behavior. We say that respect he represses^ behavior which has been~~punSied~w^en he engages in
-
it
but
re-
not action.
upon
a course of conduct
either when he enters upon one course to the exclusion of another, or when he alters some of the variables affecting his own behavior in order
to bring this about;
but there
is
culty
it
is
that
when one
uses terms
no other "act of deciding." The diffiwhich suggest an activity, one feels and the subordinate personalities in the
Freudian mental apparatus do, indeed, participate in just these activities rather than in the more specific behavior of the observable organism.
Among
of self-control
the so-called "Freudian mechanisms." These need not the individual or any subdivision thereof what happens when a skillful wish evades
be regarded
a censor
as activities of
but simply as ways of representing relationships among reand sponses controlling variables. I have elsewhere tried to demonstrate this by restating the Freudian mechanisms without reference to Freudian theory (3).
84
of the organism and never approached many of the scientific problems peculiar to that subject matter, it is not surprising that he misinter-
own
behavior. This
is
admittedly a delicate subject, which presents problems that perhaps, has adequately solved.
Butjhejici^^
no one, be
of
idSO^ranother states
^
consciousness which
many
experiences of theirjife.
people regar^asjimong the most immediate Freud himself prepared^us for~lhis change.
is, perhaps, no experience more powerful than that which the mystic reports of his awareness of the presence of God. The psychoanalyst explains this in other ways. He himself, however, may insist
There
upon the reality of certain experiences that others wish to question. There are other ways of describing what is actually seen or felt under
such circumstances.
Each
stances,
of us
is
own
skin.
Under
we may come
ways. But it does not follow that that particular part has any special physical or nonphysical properties or that our observations of it differ
in
world.
any fundamental respect from our observations of the rest of the I have tried to show elsewhere (3) how self-knowledge of this
and why it is likely to be subject to limitations that are troublesome from the point of view of physical science. Freud's represort arises
sentation of these events was a particular personal contribution influenced by his own cultural history. It is possible that science can now
to a different description of them. If it is impossible to be wholly nonmetaphorical, at least we may improve upon our metaphors. The crucial issue here is the Freudian distinction between the con-
move on
and unconscious mind. Freud's contribution has been widely misunderstood. The important point was not that the individual was often
scious
unable to describe important aspects of his own behavior or identify important causal relationships, but that his ability to describe them was irrelevant to the occurrence of the behavior or to the effectiveness
of the causes. begin by attributing the behavior of the individual to events in his genetic and environmental history. then note that because of certain cultural practices, the individual may come to describe
We
We
85
B. F. SJcinner
some of that behavior and some of those causal relationships. We may say that he is conscious of the parts he can describe and unconscious of the rest. But the act of self-description, as of self-observation, plays no part in the determination of action. It is superimposed upon behavior. Freud's argument that we need not be aware of important causes
of conduct leads naturally to the broader conclusion that awareness of cause has nothing to do with causal effectiveness.
ratus in
In addition to these specific consequences of Freud's mental appaobscuring important details among the variables of which
human
behavior is a function and in leading to the neglect of important problems in the analysis of behavior as a primary datum, we have to note the most unfortunate effect of all. Freud's methodological
of psychoanalysis into the body of science proper. It was inherent in the nature of such an explanatory system that its key entities would be unquantifiable in the
sense in which entities in science are generally quantifiable, but the spatial and temporal dimensions of these entities have caused other
kinds of trouble.
One
among
psychoanalytic writers
with respect to the primary entities of the mental apparatus. There is a predilection for terms that avoid the embarrassing question of the
spatial dimensions, physical or otherwise, of
level.
Although
qualities
it is
and
their
and to
in
some haste
to less
the analyst usually moves on committal terms such as forces, processes, organiza-
a lower level.
The
and mechanisms. But all these imply terms at notion of a conscious or unconscious "force" may
be a useful metaphor, but if this is analogous to force in physics, what is the analogous mass that is analogously accelerated? Human behavior
and undergoing changes that we call "processes," changing in what direction when we speak of, for example, an affective process? Psychological "organizations," "mental systems,"
is
in a state of flux
is
but what
these all imply arrangements or relationbut what are the things so related or arranged? ships among things, Until this question has been answered the problem of the dimensions of the mental apparatus can scarcely be approached. It is not likely that
"motivational interaction"
the problem can be solved by working out independent units appropriate to the mental apparatus, although it has been proposed that such
86
footing.
Before one attempts to work out units of transference, or scales of anxiety, or systems of mensuration appropriate to the regions of consciousness,
for a
it is
is
gram rapprochement with physical science that would make such a task unnecessary. Freud could hope for an eventual union with physics
or physiology only through the discovery of neurological mechanisms that would be the analogues of, or possibly only other aspects of, the features of his mental apparatus. Since this depended upon the prose-
its
Freud appears never to have conedge, sidered the possibility of bringing the concepts and theories of a psychological science into contact with the rest of physical and biological
attractive future.
was not an
science by the simple expedient of an operational definition of terms. This would have placed the mental apparatus in jeopardy as a life goal,
but
it
would have brought him back to the observable, manipulable, variables with which, in the last analysis, he
REFERENCES
Frenkel-Bninswik, Else. "Meaning of Psychoanalytic Concepts and Confirmation of Psychoanalytic Theories," Scientific Monthly, 79:293-300 (1954). 2. Jones, E. Life and Work of Sigmund Freed, Vol. 1. New York: Basic Bks., 1953 3. Skinner, B. F. Science and Human Behavior. New York: Macmillan, 1953.
1.
87