Recently I was sent for review a book by a woman who had been in analysis for twenty years, with four or five sessions a week, in all about four thousand. Four thousand hours of talking about oneself! Full marks for endurance, if not for choice of subject matter. Whether it did her any good is, of course, a question that cannot be answered definitively. What she would have been like without it must be a matter of fruitless speculation. The author, Barbara Taylor, is a historian who suffered no serious traumas in her life except that of her own personality and the consequences thereof. In the book she recorded some of the interchanges she had with her analyst, who seems to have been a lot more communicative if not necessarily more profound in his utterances than most orthodox analysts. I presume she must have written them down immediately after they took place:
SHE: Why [do I keep coming to the analyst]? Is it just to torture myself?
HE: Sometimes.
SHE: Why else? Why else would I keep coming here? I’m just making myself suffer more! Why else would I keep coming here?
HE: You have different reasons at different times.
SHE: What reasons?
HE: Well . . . to get revenge on your parents. To get revenge on me, their current representative.
SHE: Ah. Yes. [I have heard this so many times, it doesn’t mean anything.]
HE: And because you’re waiting for a miracle.
SHE: A miracle? [This is more interesting. Is he offering? Maybe there’s something he can do for me that he hasn’t done yet.]
HE: Yes, the miracle that will make you the baby your mother really wanted, the sort of baby she could really love, so that she would look after you properly.
SHE: Oh. That miracle. [Why is there never anything new?]
HE: And sometimes it’s because you want to know the truth.
SHE: The truth? What truth?
HE: About what happened to you.
SHE: I know what happened to me.
HE Do you?
SHE: [Do I?]
This, I presume, must have been one of the highlights of twenty years of analysis, or it would not have been selected for inclusion in the book. Behind the self-obsession of the analysand and the portentous banality of the analyst’s interjections lies the idea, self-exculpatory, that we are victims of our past, about which we can do nothing (unless, that is, we pay an analyst for four thousand sessions). Indeed, a British psychoanalyst called Adam Phillips wrote in a recent book, Becoming Freud, that childhood is inherently catastrophic and the past is, in his typically inelegant phrase, “unrecoverable from.” (Psychoanalysis, it seems, does wonders for a man’s prose style: it renders it labyrinthine without subtlety.) There is no place, then, for human agency, except the kind that leads you to talk about yourself in the presence of another for twenty years. Shallowness can go no deeper.
Though for several decades Freudianism ruled the psychological roost, and won the allegiance of those – always a large number – who seek to escape from the terrible burden, though also the glory, of being human (that is to say, of having to choose at all times how to act and respond to circumstances, and therefore of being at least partially responsible for their fate), it was never quite without opponents, enemies, or resistance. (I do not here mean resistance in the psychoanalytic sense, the refusal by an analysand to accept an interpretation by his analyst, a refusal taken by the latter as confirmation of its truth: not a manner of proceeding conducive to self-criticism among analysts, to put it mildly.)
No, resistance to psychoanalysis as a doctrine and a method arose because of its intellectual inadequacies, which were, or should have been, evident from the first. It provided no criterion of truth to distinguish between a true and a false interpretation, or even between a plausible and an implausible one, itself a deficiency so serious that it vitiated the repeated claims of psychoanalysis to be a science. Interpretations were based upon the theory and the theory (allegedly) upon interpretations, a circularity from which there was no escape: for despite Malinowski’s expedition to the Trobriand Islands to find the Oedipus complex among their Stone Age inhabitants, there never was and never could be any independent evidence of the intellectual constructs of psychoanalysis. It was a closed system in which one had a priori to believe as a kind of act of faith.
In reaction to the intellectual indiscipline and clinical impotence of psychoanalysis, a mindless psychology – a psychology that excluded mind – became quite popular, eventually developing into an orthodoxy, at least among psychologists, with a little church of its own. The data of consciousness, pronounced the popes of behaviorism, were not susceptible to scientific verification; therefore they should be excluded from scientific enquiry. Instead, psychology should study only verifiable and measurable inputs and outputs, stimuli and responses, for whatever happened between input and output, stimuli and responses, was inaccessible to verification and measurement. It was worse than the black box of Flight MH370: it was not merely unfound, it was inherently unfindable.
What started as methodology became ontology. It is an old adage of medical diagnosis that absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence, but the behaviorists ignored this sage call to modesty. Instead, they began to believe that stimulus and response were all there was to human life, that everything human could be explained by it. Again, this should have been laughable, but it was taken by many with the utmost seriousness. An intellectual could almost be defined as a person who follows an argument to an absurd conclusion, and believes the conclusion.
Behaviorism was not without its successes, however, and not just the institutional ones that psychoanalysis undoubtedly enjoyed. Its theory was used, for example, to teach pigeons to play table tennis. Who would have thought you could teach pigeons to play table tennis? Actually, I am not sure that you can teach it: for a game of table tennis involves more than merely batting a ball back and forth over a little net stretched across a green table, astonishing though the ability to do even this is in the case of pigeons. Among other things, a real game of table tennis entails the desire to win something as abstruse as a game, a desire which it is difficult to believe that pigeons can have; and also to know the rules. A pigeon is unlikely to keep score or celebrate victory when it is the first to reach twenty-one points. In other words, it will show no behavioral sign of having understood the meaning of what it is doing. Behaviorism entails the systematic denial of meaning, a denial which does violence to both the evidence and the everyday experience of humanity.
It is perhaps hard now to believe, but behaviorists claimed, and induced many people to believe, that the whole of human behavior could be explained by the scheme of stimulus and response, leading to aversion or reinforcement. Their assumptions and generalizations now appear to us naïve to the point of being ludicrous. In what might be called the Behaviorist Manifesto, written in 1913 by the founder of behaviorism, John B. Watson, we read:
The position is taken here that the behavior of man and the behavior of animals must be considered on the same plane; as being equally essential to a general understanding of behavior. It can dispense with consciousness in a psychological sense.
And while he admitted that:
Psychology as behavior will, after all, have to neglect but few of the really essential problems with which psychology as an introspective science now concerns itself
he went on optimistically (or was it pessimistically?) to state that:
In all probability even this residue of problems may be phrased in such a way that refined methods in behavior (which certainly must come) will lead to their solution.
Watson