Our Minds, Our Selves

A Brief History of Psychology

Keith Oatley

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781400890040
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

An original history of psychology told through the stories of its most important breakthroughs and the people who made them Advances in psychology have revolutionized our understanding of the human mind. Imaging technology allows researchers to monitor brain activity, letting us see what happens when we perceive, think, and feel. But technology is only part of how ideas about the mind and brain have developed over the past century and a half. In Our Minds, Our Selves, distinguished psychologist and writer Keith Oatley provides an engaging, original, and authoritative history of modern psychology told through the stories of its most important breakthroughs and the men and women who made them. Our Minds, Our Selves traverses a fascinating terrain: forms of conscious and unconscious knowledge; brain physiology; emotion; stages of mental development from infancy to adulthood; language acquisition and use; the nature of memory; mental illness; morality; free will; creativity; the mind at work in art and literature; and, most important, our ability to cooperate with one another. Controversial experiments--such as Stanley Milgram's investigation of our willingness to obey authority and inflict pain and Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues' study of behavior in a simulated prison—are covered in detail. Biographical sketches illuminate the thinkers behind key insights and turning points: historical figures such as Hermann Helmholtz, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, B. F. Skinner, and Alan Turing; leading contemporaries such as Geoffrey Hinton, Michael Tomasello, and Tania Singer; and influential people from other fields, including Margaret Mead, Noam Chomsky, Jane Goodall, and Gabrielle Starr. Enhancing our understanding of ourselves and others, psychology holds the potential to create a better world. Our Minds, Our Selves tells the story of this most important of sciences in a new and appealing way.

PART ONE

Significant Ideas

1

Conscious and Unconscious

A shadow on a wall, of the kind Plato described in his parable of people in a cave who see such shadows rather than reality.

Though the mind is usually thought of as conscious, there are three kinds of unconscious knowledge. One, proposed by Plato, is that in this world, we are unconscious of eternal truths. Another, proposed by Sigmund Freud, is that aspects of ourselves that are unacceptable have become unconscious but can still affect our perceptions of others and our actions toward them. A third, proposed by Hermann Helmholtz, is probably the most important. It is the principle of unconscious inference: we project inner understandings, implicit theories, to infer what goes on in the physical world, and in the social world of our interactions with others.

Plato’s Cave

It is tempting to think that what we see is real. But what if the mind doesn’t work by taking in reality? What if our minds depend in part on movements of which we are not conscious? What if some of these movements are not entirely about what’s out there, but come from inner processes, in a way that affects what we see and know?

To invite us to think about this, Plato asked us to imagine that we are prisoners chained to a bench in a cave where we have been since childhood. Our necks are fastened so that we can look only straight ahead. In front of us, on a wall, we see people passing back and forth. This, said Plato, is the human condition. We can’t turn around to see that behind us is a large fire that is casting shadows of people onto the wall. We think the shadows are reality.

Now suppose that we are freed. We turn around and look at the fire. Now we see actual people as they walk past, and see other prisoners still shackled. Imagine being taken up a steep ascent, out of the cave and into the light. At first we are dazzled, unable to distinguish much, but then we start to see the world as it is.

The Republic, published nearly 2,400 years ago, in which Plato wrote about the cave, was a significant moment in the history of psychology. Are shadows in a cave what we experience of the world?

With his metaphor of the cave, Plato reached a turning point.¹ He suggested that although, in the world, we seem to experience truth in what we see, and seem to know what we are doing, other processes are at work. Plato was suggesting that we don’t know some of the most profound things about the world. They can’t be seen in the ordinary way.

Plato thought that before we were born we lived on another plane, as souls in the realm of ideals. Although—as Plato thought—in our souls we once knew unchanging truths, in our embodied lives we have forgotten them. Now we see only appearances, shadows onto which we project our beliefs, which are sometimes false. Ideals can, however, be drawn out from us by insightful teachers: the word “education” means to “bring out” or “lead forth.” In the history of education, the path out of the cave has come to include philosophy and mathematics, and the acquisition of skills of constructing theories and drawing inferences.

Other questions are not about the physical world but, because we humans are social beings, about our understanding of the social world. How do we know what other people are thinking and feeling? We can wonder to what extent other people are similar to us, to what extent they are different. What if we ask them what they think and feel? Might our impression of them derive in part from what they say, and in part from passing shadows on their faces as they make emotional expressions and speak in certain tones of voice? And what about ourselves? We think we know our own thoughts and memories. But do we really know ourselves?

Plato thought the question of how one can know one’s own self was even more difficult than ascending from the cave into the light of the physical world. In his time, an injunction was written at the shrine of the Oracle in Delphi: “Know yourself.”² Plato offers a thought about this in a story of how Socrates was one day walking by a river with his friend, Protagoras, discussing the myths that had been told about the beautiful place where they were. Socrates said it would take a lot of work to understand myths, and that he didn’t have time for it, because, he said: “I’ve not yet succeeded in obeying the Delphic injunction to ‘know myself.’”

Alfred Whitehead wrote that Western philosophy is “a series of footnotes to Plato.”³ But not everyone agrees. The innovative philosopher Karl Popper rejected some of Plato’s main arguments, saying Plato was an enemy of open society. In The Republic, Plato’s account of the ideal society, he has organized people into three classes: guardians (rulers), auxiliaries (warriors), and artisans (producers). Only the guardians are free.

Although the form in which Plato wrote his philosophy was the dialogue—a fictional mode in which he imagines the long-dead Socrates discussing issues with acquaintances—he wants to ban writers of fiction from society entirely. Is it an oversight that he didn’t point out that his idea of shadows in a cave is neither philosophy nor mathematics? It’s a story based on a metaphor, the kind of story a fiction writer might offer. In chapter 17 we come to modern findings of how fiction can enable us to deepen our understandings.

How can we know other people? How can we know ourselves? The modern approach to understanding the mind is cognitive science: understanding mind as the making of meaning. “Cognitive” means having to do with knowledge. The mind makes meaning by organizing and working with knowledge, by making inferences, conscious and unconscious, to see, to remember, to converse, to know others and ourselves. In this quest, cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience come together with linguistics, cultural anthropology, philosophy, and other areas of research (see Ulric Neisser’s Cognition and Reality, Howard Gardner’s The Mind’s New Science, Michael Eysenck’s Dictionary of Cognitive Psychology, Robert Wilson and Frank Keil’s Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, and Morton Hunt’s The Story of Psychology).

Not all our knowledge can be accessed consciously; some of it is unconscious. It’s of three kinds, and three methods are involved in reaching it. For Plato, the methods were philosophy and education. In the next section, the means are those of psychotherapy. In the sections following that, they are of psychological research and theory.

The Freudian Unconscious

The most famous kind of unconscious is psychoanalytic, as proposed by Sigmund Freud. The method he chose now seems obvious, but before his time it was not. Then, most often, doctors would observe people who were mentally ill, see that they would often seem strange, and infer that this signified their insanity. The way Freud worked was different. He listened to what people said as they talked about themselves. He called this listening with “evenly suspended attention.”

Freud was not the only one in his time to be thinking about the unconscious in relation to mental illness, but he was a detective of the mind who asked: Who are we? At the center of his ideas is the suggestion that we humans are not always conscious of our reasons for doing what we do. His research affected the very texture of thinking about the self. It became, as W. H. Auden said in a poem to commemorate Freud, “a whole climate of opinion.” Concepts such as the unconscious, neurosis, inner conflicts, anxiety states, and psychotherapy acquired the meanings they now have largely through his influence.⁴

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in a small town called Příbor, which is now in the Czech Republic.⁵ A few years later his family moved to Vienna, where Freud spent most of his life. He attended the University of Vienna and qualified as a doctor in 1881. Soon after this he met Martha Bernays, with whom he fell deeply in love. The frustration of the couple’s four-year engagement may have contributed to Freud’s emphasis on sexuality as a central aspect of mental life. Sigmund and Martha had six children, the youngest of whom, Anna, also became a famous psychoanalyst. In May 1938, Freud, with his family, fled from the Nazis to London, where he lived until his death in September 1939.

Dora’s Case

Freud made the case study central to our understanding of human emotional disorders. In his hands it took the form of a detective story; the culprit being sought was a set of intentions that had gone missing from the patients’ conscious experience.⁶ The most important of Freud’s cases was that of Dora. Her real name was Ida Bauer.⁷

It’s 1899. Dora is aged eighteen. She is depressed, and has other nervous complaints. Her parents have found a suicide note in her writing desk. Freud describes her as: “in the first bloom of youth, a girl of intelligent and engaging looks.” Freud is aged forty-four, hoping at last to make a name for himself. He sees Dora for an hour every weekday.

Freud says that he began treatment by asking Dora “to give [him] the whole story of [her] life and illness.” Then he writes, “As a matter of fact the patients are incapable of giving such reports about themselves … their communications run dry, leaving gaps unfilled, riddles unanswered.” What is left out—the very matters that the psychological detective is seeking—are the patients’ desires and intentions. Some of them are unknown to the patients. They are unconscious. It would be their discovery, to fill gaps in their stories, which would free the patients from disabling disorders.

Freud points out that although Dora is vague about herself, she gives a detailed account of an affair her father was having with a family friend, Frau K. At the same time Dora said that her father had encouraged Herr K to take an interest in herself, when she was only fourteen. This enabled Dora’s father to pursue his affair with Frau K. Without denying anything she says, Freud asks Dora whether she may also be reproaching herself in the same way that she is reproaching her father. What is her involvement?

This is a psychoanalytic interpretation, a tentative filling-in of a gap left by the patient. For Dora, Freud’s interpretation introduces a new development. She admits that Herr K had sent her flowers every day for a year, spent much of his spare time in her company, and that she felt enlivened by the relationship. She had looked after the Ks’ children so that her father and Frau K could carry on their affair. She says Herr K even made her a proposal of marriage. Dora utters a crescendo of reproaches against her father. She has ended things with Herr K, and she tells Freud that she had demanded that her father end his affair with Frau K. Nothing enrages her more than her father’s insistence that Herr K’s proposal was just her imagination.

Then, one day, after three months of therapy, Dora tells Freud that this would be the last time she would see him. Freud asks her how long ago she had decided this. She tells him that it was two weeks. “That sounds just like a maidservant or governess—a fortnight’s notice,” says Freud.⁸ In this leap of intuition, Freud the mind-detective had found the right clue. This interpretation—for that is what it is—would clear up the case.

In response to this interpretation, Dora tells Freud that, on a holiday with the K family, the Ks had a governess who gave a fortnight’s notice of leaving. She had confided in Dora that Herr K had made advances and had sex with her. He’d said to the governess that he got nothing out of his wife. Freud says: “These are the very words he used afterwards when he made his proposal to you.” He suggests to Dora that the reason she was so incensed was that Herr K was treating her as he had treated the governess, as someone with whom he could have casual sex.

Freud explains to Dora that she had been hoping that Herr K would divorce his wife and marry her. At the same time, her father would be able to marry Frau K. That is why Dora had been outraged at her father thinking the proposal from Herr K had been just her imagination. She had been caught up in her idea of marriage to Herr K. But when the proposal came it was horribly transformed by what the governess had told her.

Freud added that, as he explained this, Dora had “listened to [him] without her usual contradictions.⁹ She seemed to be moved.” We might reflect that for Dora what had been at issue was not just her sexual desire, but her whole life. Dora felt moved, perhaps because for the first time she felt understood by another person.

With the two weeks’ notice that Dora gave to Freud, he inferred that she was both treating him like a governess or maidservant and dumping him in the way she had dumped Herr K. He called this process, of patients feeling and acting toward him in ways they had felt and acted toward people in their day-to-day lives, “transference,” attention to which is another distinctive feature of psychoanalytic therapy.

Controversy and Advance

When Freud’s theories were mentioned at a congress on neurology and psychiatry in 1910, one professor who was attending it banged “his fist on the table” and said: “This is not a topic for discussion at a scientific meeting; it is a matter for the police.”¹⁰ A minor industry has grown up to show how wrong Freud was. Although Freud said that Dora’s problems arose from driving her sexuality underground because it was unacceptable to her, Adolf Grünbaum has argued that Freud was never able to show that patients became psychologically ill because they had buried painful events in their unconscious. Some painful events may be lost to us, said Grünbaum, but others stay for decades sharply in our memories, and Freud was never able to say which would be which.

Why is there such antipathy toward Freud? Is it because Freud was merely wrong about certain things?¹¹ Or is it because he became famous, and even popular? Or is it because his proposals about our inner selves are unacceptable?

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Part One. Significant Ideas
• Part Two. Learning, Language, Thinking
• Part Three. Mind and Brain
• Part Four. Community
• Part Five. Common Humanity
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Image Credits