Freud and Psychoanalysis

Dr. George C. Boeree

Precursors of Psychoanalysis

It often surprises students that psychiatry - meaning the doctoring of the mind - was not invented by Sigmund Freud.  Psychoanalysis - a particular (and very significant) brand of psychiatry - was his baby.  Psychiatrists existed before Freud, and most psychiatrists today are not Freudian.

The term psychiatry was coined by the German physician Johann Reil in 1808, and would slowly replace the older term "alienist."  The new respect signalled by the new name was based on some significant improvements in the care of the mentally ill in the second half of the 1700's.

There are three people I would like to pay my respects to as important precursors to psychoanalysis:  Franz Anton Mesmer, who discovered hypnotism; Philippe Pinel, who changed the way we thought of and treated the mentally ill; and Jean-Martin Charcot, who is often considered the father of neurology.

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Franz Anton Mesmer

Franz Anton Mesmer was born May 23, 1734 in Iznang, Germany, near Lake Constance.  He received his MD from the University of Vienna in 1766.  His dissertation concerned the idea that the planets influenced the health of those of us on earth.  He suggested that their gravitational forces could change the distribution of our animal spirits.  Later, he changed his theory to emphasize magnetism rather than gravity -- hence the term “animal magnetism.”  It would soon, however, come to be known as mesmerism.

He was, in fact, able to put people into trance states, even convulsions, by waving magnetized bars over them.  His dramatic performances were quite popular for a while, although he believed that anyone could achieve the same results.  In point of fact, some of his patients did in fact get relief from their symptoms -- a point that would later be investigated by others.

When accused of fraud by other physicians in Vienna, he went to Paris.  In 1784, the King of France, Louis XVI, appointed a commission including Benjamin Franklin to look into Mesmer and his practices.  They concluded that his results were due to nothing more than suggestion.

Despite condemnation by many of the educated elite, mesmerism  became a popular fad in the salons of Europe.  In order to serve the many poor people who came to him for help, he designed a sort of bathtub in which they could sit while holding the magnetic rods themselves.  He eventually created an organization to train other mesmerists.

Mesmer died March 5, 1815 in Meersburg, also near Lake Constance, Germany.

An English physician, James Braid (1795-1860), a much more careful researcher of Mesmer’s phenomenon, termed it hypnotism.  Disassociated from Mesmer, hypnotism would go on to have a long, if controversial, life into the twentieth century.

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Philippe Pinel

Philippe Pinel was born on April 20, 1745, in the small town of Saint André. His father was both a barber and a surgeon, a common combination in those days, as both vocations required a steady hand with the razor.  His mother was also from a long line of physicians.

Philippe began his studies more interested in literature -- especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- than in medicine.  But, after a few years studying theology, he began the study of medicine, and he recieved his MD from the University at Toulouse in 1773.

Pinel moved to Montpellier in 1774 where he tutored wealthy students in anatomy and mathematics.  He was admited into the Montpellier Société Royale des Sciences after presenting two papers on the use of mathematics in anatomical studies.  He moved to Paris in 1778, where he came into contact with a number of the renowned scientists and philosophers of the day (including Ben Franklin), as well as becoming familiar with the radical new ideas of John Locke and the French sensationalists.  Although he could not practice in Paris, he became a well respected medical writer, particularly known for his careful and exhaustive case studies.

A turning point in Pinel's life came in 1785, when a friend of his developed a mental illness ending in his death.  He became devoted to the study of mental illness, and became the head of the Paris asylum for insane men at Bicêtre in 1792.  In that year, he also married Jeanne Vincent, with whom he had three sons.

It was at Bicêtre that he made his place in history:  Prior to his coming to Bicêtre, the men were kept in chains, treated abominably, and put on daily display to the public as curiosities.  In 1793, Pinel instituted a new program of human care, which he referred to as moral therapy.  The men were given clean, comfortable accommodations, and were instructed in simple but productive work.

In 1795, he was appointed the head physician at the world famous hospital at Salpêtrière.  Here, too, he provided his enlightened treatment conditions to the mentally ill.  In that same year, he was made professor of medical pathology at Paris.  In 1801, Phillipe Pinel introduced the first textbook on moral therapy to the world.

Pinel is also remembered for dismissing the demonic possession theory of mental illness for once and for all, and for eliminating treatments such as bleeding from his hospital.  He also introduced other novelties to his hospital, such as vaccinations and the use of the stethoscope.  He was a physician to Napoleon and was made a knight of the Legion d'Honneur in 1804.  He died in Paris on October 25, 1826.

Pinel's innovations were soon imitated in other countries, by such notables as William Tuke in England, Vincenzo Chiarugi in Florence, and Dorothea Dix in the U.S.

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Jean-Martin Charcot

Jean-Martin Charcot was born in Paris on November 29, 1825.  He received his MD at the University of Paris in 1853. In 1860 he became a professor at his alma mater.  Two years later, he began to work at Salpêtrière Hospital as well. In 1882, he opened a neurological clinic at Salpêtrière Hospital.  It, and he, became known throughout Europe, and students came from everywhere to study the new field.  Among them were Alfred Binet and a young Sigmund Freud.

Charcot is well known in medical circles for his studies of the neurology of motor disorders, resulting diseases, aneurysms, and localization of brain functions.  He is considered the father of modern neurology as well as the person who first diagnosed Multiple Sclerosis.

In psychology, he is best known for his use of hypnosis to successfully treat women suffering from the psychological disorder then known as hysteria.  Now called conversion disorder, hysteria involved a loss of some physiological function such as vision, speech, tactile sensations, movement, etc., that was nonetheless not based in actual neurological damage.

Charcot believed that hysteria was due to a congenitally weak nervous system, combined with the effects of some traumatic experience.  Hypnotizing these patients brought on a state similar to hysteria itself.  He found that, in some cases, the symptoms would actually lessen after hypnosis -- although he was only interested in studying hysteria, not in curing it!  Others would later use hypnosis as a part of curing the problem.

Charcot died in Morvan, France, on August 16, 1893..

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The Unconscious

Before we turn to the really big names, let's take a peek at the concept of the unconscious, so strongly associated with psychoanalysis.  Most historians agree that the first mention of such a concept was Leibniz's discussion of "petites perceptions" or little perceptions.  By this he meant certain very low-level stimuli that could enter the mind without the person's awareness - what today we would call subliminal messages.  The reality of such things is very much in doubt.

Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) was the author of a textbook on psychology, published in 1816.  But, following Kant, he did not believe psychology could ever be a science.  He took the concepts of the associationists and blended them with the dynamics of Leibniz's monads.  Ideas had an energy of their own, he said, and could actually force themselves on the person's conscious mind by exceeding a certain threshold.  When ideas were incompatible, one or the other would be repressed, he said - meaning forced below the threshold into the unconscious.  This should remind you of Freud's ideas - except that Herbart had them nearly a century earlier!

Schopenhauer is often seen as the originator of the unconscious, and he spoke at great lengths about instincts and the irrational nature of man, and freely made use of words like repression, resistance, and sublimation! Nietzsche also spoke of the unconscious:  One of his most famous statements is "My memory says I did it.  My pride says I could not have done that.  In the end, my memory yields."

One more pre-Freudian should be mentioned:  Karl Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906).  He blended the ideas of Schopenhauer with Jewish mysticism (the kaballah) and wrote Philosophy of the Unconscious in 1869, just in time to influence a young neurologist named Sigmund Freud.

The reader should understand that there are many theorists with little or no use for the concept of the unconscious.  Brentano, forefather of phenomenology and existentialism, did not believe in it.  Neither did William James.  Neither did the Gestalt psychologists.  Memories, for example, can be understood as stored in some physical state, perhaps as traces in the brain.  When activated, we remember.  But they aren't in the mind - conscious or unconscious - until so activated.

In addition to the concept of the unconscious, another early landmark of psychiatry was the introduction of careful diagnosis of mental illness, beginning with Emil Kraepelin's work (1856-1926).  The first differentiated classification was of what he labelled dementia praecox, which meant the insanity of adolescence.  Kraepelin also invented the terms neurosis and psychosis, and named Alzheimer's disease after Alois Alzheimer, who first described it.  I should also mention Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term schizophrenia to replace dementia praecox in 1911.

Now, on to Freud....

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Sigmund Freud

Freud's story, like most people's stories, begins with others. In his case those others were his mentor and friend, Dr. Joseph Breuer, and Breuer's patient, called Anna O.

Anna O. was Joseph Breuer's patient from 1880 through 1882. Twenty one years old, Anna spent most of her time nursing her ailing father. She developed a bad cough that proved to have no physical basis. She developed some speech difficulties, then became mute, and then began speaking only in English, rather than her usual German.

When her father died she began to refuse food, and developed an unusual set of problems. She lost the feeling in her hands and feet, developed some paralysis, and began to have involuntary spasms. She also had visual hallucinations and tunnel vision. But when specialists were consulted, no physical causes for these problems could be found.

If all this weren't enough, she had fairy-tale fantasies, dramatic mood swings, and made several suicide attempts. Breuer's diagnosis was that she was suffering from what was then called hysteria (now called conversion disorder), which meant she had symptoms that appeared to be physical, but were not.

In the evenings, Anna would sink into states of what Breuer called "spontaneous hypnosis," or what Anna herself called "clouds." Breuer found that, during these trance-like states, she could explain her day-time fantasies and other experiences, and she felt better afterwards. Anna called these episodes "chimney sweeping" and "the talking cure."

Sometimes during "chimney sweeping," some emotional event was recalled that gave meaning to some particular symptom. The first example came soon after she had refused to drink for a while: She recalled seeing a woman drink from a glass that a dog had just drunk from. While recalling this, she experienced strong feelings of disgust...and then had a drink of water! In other words, her symptom -- an avoidance of water -- disappeared as soon as she remembered its root event, and experienced the strong emotion that would be appropriate to that event. Breuer called this catharsis, from the Greek word for cleansing.

It was eleven years later that Breuer and his assistant, Sigmund Freud, wrote a book on hysteria. In it they explained their theory: Every hysteria is the result of a traumatic experience, one that cannot be integrated into the person's understanding of the world. The emotions appropriate to the trauma are not expressed in any direct fashion, but do not simply evaporate: They express themselves in behaviors that in a weak, vague way offer a response to the trauma. These symptoms are, in other words, meaningful. When the client can be made aware of the meanings of his or her symptoms (through hypnosis, for example) then the unexpressed emotions are released and so no longer need to express themselves as symptoms. It is analogous to lancing a boil or draining an infection.

In this way, Anna got rid of symptom after symptom. But it must be noted that she needed Breuer to do this: Whenever she was in one of her hypnotic states, she had to feel his hands to make sure it was him before talking! And sadly, new problems continued to arise.

According to Freud, Breuer recognized that she had fallen in love with him, and that he was falling in love with her.  Plus, she was telling everyone she was pregnant with his child. You might say she wanted it so badly that her mind told her body it was true, and she developed an hysterical pregnancy. Breuer, a married man in a Victorian era, abruptly ended their sessions together, and lost all interest in hysteria.  Please understand that recent research suggests that many of these events, including the hysterical pregnancy and Breuer's quick retreat, were probably Freud's "elaborations" on reality!

It was Freud who would later add what Breuer did not acknowledge publicly - that secret sexual desires lay at the bottom of all these hysterical neuroses.

To finish her story, Anna spent time in a sanatorium. Later, she became a well-respected and active figure - the first social worker in Germany - under her true name, Bertha Pappenheim. She died in 1936. She will be remembered, not only for her own accomplishments, but as the inspiration for the most influential personality theory we have ever had.

Biography

Sigmund Freud was born May 6, 1856, in a small town - Freiberg - in Moravia. His father was a wool merchant with a keen mind and a good sense of humor. His mother was a lively woman, her husband's second wife and 20 years younger. She was 21 years old when she gave birth to her first son, her darling, Sigmund. Sigmund had two older half-brothers and six younger siblings. When he was four or five - he wasn't sure - the family moved to Vienna, where he lived most of his life.

A brilliant child, always at the head of his class, he went to medical school, one of the few viable options for a bright Jewish boy in Vienna those days. There, he became involved in research under the direction of a physiology professor named Ernst Brücke. Brücke believed in what was then a popular, if radical, notion, which we now call reductionism: "No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism." Freud would spend many years trying to "reduce" personality to neurology, a cause he later gave up on.

Freud was very good at his research, concentrating on neurophysiology, even inventing a special cell-staining technique. But only a limited number of positions were available, and there were others ahead of him. Brücke helped him to get a grant to study, first with the great psychiatrist Charcot in Paris, then with his rival Bernheim in Nancy. Both these gentlemen were investigating the use of hypnosis with hysterics.

After spending a short time as a resident in neurology and director of a children's ward in Berlin, he came back to Vienna, married his patient fiancée Martha Bernays, and set up a practice in neuropsychiatry, with the help of Joseph Breuer.

It is true that Freud experimented with cocaine, encouraged his fiancée and friends to try it, and wrote about its great restorative powers. He later came to regret his enthusiasm for the drug and withdrew his endorsement.

Freud's books and lectures brought him both fame and ostracism from the mainstream of the medical community. He drew around him a number of very bright sympathizers who became the core of the psychoanalytic movement. Unfortunately, Freud had a penchant for rejecting people who did not totally agree with him. Some separated from him on friendly terms; others did not, and went on to found competing schools of thought.

Freud emigrated to England just before World War II when Vienna became an increasing dangerous place for Jews, especially ones as famous as Freud. Not long afterward, he died of the cancer of the mouth and jaw that he had suffered from for the last 20 years of his life.

Theory

Freud didn't exactly invent the idea of the conscious versus unconscious mind, but he certainly was responsible for making it popular. The conscious mind is what you are aware of at any particular moment, your present perceptions, memories, thoughts, fantasies, feelings, what have you. Working closely with the conscious mind is what Freud called the preconscious, what we might today call "available memory:" anything that can easily be made conscious, the memories you are not at the moment thinking about but can readily bring to mind. Now no-one has a problem with these two layers of mind. But Freud suggested that these are the smallest parts!

The largest part by far is the unconscious. It includes all the things that are not easily available to awareness, including many things that have their origins there, such as our drives or instincts, and things that are put there because we can't bear to look at them, such as the memories and emotions associated with trauma.

According to Freud, the unconscious is the source of our motivations, whether they be simple desires for food or sex, neurotic compulsions, or the motives of an artist or scientist. And yet, we are often driven to deny or resist becoming conscious of these motives, and they are often available to us only in disguised form. We will come back to this.

The id, the ego, and the superego

Freudian psychological reality begins with the world, full of objects. Among them is a very special object, the organism. The organism is special in that it acts to survive and reproduce, and it is guided toward those ends by its needs -- hunger, thirst, the avoidance of pain, and sex.

A part - a very important part - of the organism is the nervous system, which has as one of its characteristics a sensitivity to the organism's needs. At birth, that nervous system is little more than that of any other animal, an "it" or id. The nervous system, as id, translates the organism's needs into motivational forces called, in German, Trieben, which has been translated as instincts or drives. Freud also called them wishes. This translation from need to wish is called the primary process.

The id works in keeping with the pleasure principle, which can be understood as a demand to take care of needs immediately. Just picture the hungry infant, screaming itself blue. It doesn't "know" what it wants in any adult sense; it just knows that it wants it and it wants it now. The infant, in the Freudian view, is pure, or nearly pure id. And the id is nothing if not the psychic representative of biology.

Unfortunately, although a wish for food, such as the image of a juicy steak, might be enough to satisfy the id, it isn't enough to satisfy the organism. The need only gets stronger, and the wishes just keep coming. You may have noticed that, when you haven't satisfied some need, such as the need for food, it begins to demand more and more of your attention, until there comes a point where you can't think of anything else. This is the wish or drive breaking into consciousness.

Luckily for the organism, there is that small portion of the mind we discussed before, the conscious, that is hooked up to the world through the senses. Around this little bit of consciousness, during the first year of a child's life, some of the "it" becomes "I," some of the id becomes ego. The ego relates the organism to reality by means of its consciousness, and it searches for objects to satisfy the wishes that id creates to represent the organisms needs. This problem-solving activity is called the secondary process.

The ego, unlike the id, functions according to the reality principle, which says "take care of a need as soon as an appropriate object is found." It represents reality and, to a considerable extent, reason.

However, as the ego struggles to keep the id (and, ultimately, the organism) happy, it meets with obstacles in the world. It occasionally meets with objects that actually assist it in attaining its goals. And it keeps a record of these obstacles and aides. In particular, it keeps track of the rewards and punishments meted out by two of the most influential objects in the world of the child - mom and dad. This record of things to avoid and strategies to take becomes the superego. It is not completed until about seven years of age. In some people, it never is completed.

There are two aspects to the superego: One is the conscience, which is an internalization of punishments and warnings. The other is called the ego ideal. It derives from rewards and positive models presented to the child. The conscience and ego ideal communicate their requirements to the ego with feelings like pride, shame, and guilt.

It is as if we acquired, in childhood, a new set of needs and accompanying wishes, this time of social rather than biological origins. Unfortunately, these new wishes can easily conflict with the ones from the id. You see, the superego represents society, and society often wants nothing better than to have you never satisfy your needs at all!

The stages

Freud noted that, at different times in our lives, different parts of our skin give us greatest pleasure. Later theorists would call these areas erogenous zones. It appeared to Freud that the infant found its greatest pleasure in sucking, especially at the breast. In fact, babies have a penchant for bringing nearly everything in their environment into contact with their mouths. A bit later in life, the child focuses on the anal pleasures of holding it in and letting go. By three or four, the child may have discovered the pleasure of touching or rubbing against his or her genitalia. Only later, in our sexual maturity, do we find our greatest pleasure in sexual intercourse. In these observations, Freud had the makings of a psychosexual stage theory.

The oral stage lasts from birth to about 18 months. The focus of pleasure is, of course, the mouth. Sucking and biting are favorite activities.

The anal stage lasts from about 18 months to three or four years old. The focus of pleasure is the anus. Holding it in and letting it go are greatly enjoyed.

The phallic stage lasts from three or four to five, six, or seven years old. The focus of pleasure is the genitalia. Masturbation is common.

The latent stage lasts from five, six, or seven to puberty, that is, somewhere around 12 years old. During this stage, Freud believed that the sexual impulse was suppressed in the service of learning. I must note that, while most children seem to be fairly calm, sexually, during their grammar school years, perhaps up to a quarter of them are quite busy masturbating and playing "doctor." In Freud's repressive era, these children were, at least, quieter than their modern counterparts.

The genital stage begins at puberty, and represents the resurgence of the sex drive in adolescence, and the more specific focusing of pleasure in sexual intercourse. Freud felt that masturbation, oral sex, homosexuality, and many other things we find acceptable in adulthood today, were immature.

This is a true stage theory, meaning that Freudians believe that we all go through these stages, in this order, and pretty close to these ages.

The Oedipal crisis

Each stage has certain difficult tasks associated with it where problems are more likely to arise. For the oral stage, this is weaning. For the anal stage, it's potty training. For the phallic stage, it is the Oedipal crisis, named after the ancient Greek story of king Oedipus, who inadvertently killed his father and married his mother. 

Here's how the Oedipal crisis works: The first love-object for all of us is our mother. We want her attention, we want her affection, we want her caresses, we want her, in a broadly sexual way. The young boy, however, has a rival for his mother's charms: his father! His father is bigger, stronger, smarter, and he gets to sleep with mother, while junior pines away in his lonely little bed. Dad is the enemy.

About the time the little boy recognizes this archetypal situation, he has become aware of some of the more subtle differences between boys and girls, the ones other than hair length and clothing styles. From his naive perspective, the difference is that he has a penis, and girls do not. At this point in life, it seems to the child that having something is infinitely better than not having something, and so he is pleased with this state of affairs.

But the question arises: where is the girl's penis? Perhaps she has lost it somehow. Perhaps it was cut off. Perhaps this could happen to him! This is the beginning of castration anxiety, a slight misnomer for the fear of losing one's penis.

To return to the story, the boy, recognizing his father's superiority and fearing for his penis, engages some of his ego defenses: He displaces his sexual impulses from his mother to girls and, later, women; And he identifies with the aggressor, dad, and attempts to become more and more like him, that is to say, a man. After a few years of latency, he enters adolescence and the world of mature heterosexuality.

The girl also begins her life in love with her mother, so we have the problem of getting her to switch her affections to her father before the Oedipal process can take place. Freud accomplishes this with the idea of penis envy: The young girl, too, has noticed the difference between boys and girls and feels that she, somehow, doesn't measure up. She would like to have one, too, and all the power associated with it. At very least, she would like a penis substitute, such as a baby. As every child knows, you need a father as well as a mother to have a baby, so the young girl sets her sights on dad.

Dad, of course, is already taken. The young girl displaces from him to boys and men, and identifies with mom, the woman who got the man she really wanted. Note that one thing is missing here: The girl does not suffer from the powerful motivation of castration anxiety, since she cannot lose what she doesn't have. Freud felt that the lack of this great fear accounts for fact (as he saw it) that women were both less firmly heterosexual than men and somewhat less morally-inclined.

Before you get too upset by this less-than-flattering account of women's sexuality, rest assured that many people have responded to it. I will discuss it in the discussion section.

Therapy

Freud's therapy has been more influential than any other, and more influential than any other part of his theory. Here are some of the major points:

Relaxed atmosphere. The client must feel free to express anything. The therapy situation is in fact a unique social situation, one where you do not have to be afraid of social judgment or ostracism. In fact, in Freudian therapy, the therapist practically disappears. Add to that the physically relaxing couch, dim lights, sound-proof walls, and the stage is set.

Free association. The client may talk about anything at all. The theory is that, with relaxation, the unconscious conflicts will inevitably drift to the fore. It isn't far off to see a similarity between Freudian therapy and dreaming! However, in therapy, there is the therapist, who is trained to recognize certain clues to problems and their solutions that the client would overlook.

Resistance. One of these clues is resistance. When a client tries to change the topic, draws a complete blank, falls asleep, comes in late, or skips an appointment altogether, the therapist says "aha!" These resistances suggest that the client is nearing something in his free associations that he - unconsciously, of course - finds threatening.

Dream analysis. In sleep, we are somewhat less resistant to our unconscious and we will allow a few things, in symbolic form, of course, to come to awareness. These wishes from the id provide the therapist and client with more clues. Many forms of therapy make use of the client's dreams, but Freudian interpretation is distinct in the tendency to find sexual meanings.

Parapraxes. A parapraxis is a slip of the tongue, often called a Freudian slip. Freud felt that they were also clues to unconscious conflicts. Freud was also interested in the jokes his clients told. In fact, Freud felt that almost everything meant something almost all the time - dialing a wrong number, making a wrong turn, misspelling a word, were serious objects of study for Freud. However, he himself noted, in response to a student who asked what his cigar might be a symbol for, that "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." Or is it?

Other Freudians became interested in projective tests, such as the famous Rorschach or inkblot tests. The theory behind these tests is that, when the stimulus is vague, the client fills it with his or her own unconscious themes. Again, these could provide the therapist with clues.

Transference, catharsis, and insight

Transference occurs when a client projects feelings toward the therapist that more legitimately belong with certain important others. Freud felt that transference was necessary in therapy in order to bring the repressed emotions that have been plaguing the client for so long, to the surface. You can't feel really angry, for example, without a real person to be angry at. The relationship between the client and the therapist, contrary to popular images, is very close in Freudian therapy, although it is understood that it can't get out of hand.

Catharsis is the sudden and dramatic outpouring of emotion that occurs when the trauma is resurrected. The box of tissues on the end table is not there for decoration.

Insight is being aware of the source of the emotion, of the original traumatic event. The major portion of the therapy is completed when catharsis and insight are experienced. What should have happened many years ago - because you were too little to deal with it, or under too many conflicting pressures - has now happened, and you are on your way to becoming a happier person.

Freud said that the goal of therapy is simply "to make the unconscious conscious."

Discussion

The only thing more common than a blind admiration for Freud seems to be an equally blind hatred for him. Certainly, the proper attitude lies somewhere in between. Let's start by exploring some of the apparent flaws in his theory.

The least popular part of Freud's theory is the Oedipal complex and the associated ideas of castration anxiety and penis envy. What is the reality behind these concepts? It is true that some children are very attached to their opposite-sex parent, and very competitive with their same-sex parent. It is true that some boys worry about the differences between boys and girls, and fear that someone may cut their penis off. It is true that some girls likewise are concerned, and wish they had a penis. And it is true that some of these children retain these affections, fears, and aspirations into adulthood.

Most personality theorists, however, consider these examples aberrations rather than universals, exceptions rather than rules. They occur in families that aren't working as well as they should, where parents are unhappy with each other, use their children against each other. They occur in families where parents literally denigrate girls for their supposed lack, and talk about cutting off the penises of unruly boys. They occur especially in neighborhoods where correct information on even the simplest sexual facts is not forthcoming, and children learn mistaken ideas from other children.

If we view the Oedipal crisis, castration anxiety, and penis envy in a more metaphoric and less literal fashion, they are useful concepts: We do love our mothers and fathers as well as compete with them. Children probably do learn the standard heterosexual behavior patterns by imitating the same-sex parent and practicing on the opposite-sex parent. In a male-dominated society, having a penis - being male - is better than not, and losing one's status as a male is scary. And wanting the privileges of the male, rather than the male organ, is a reasonable thing to expect in a girl with aspirations. But Freud did not mean for us to take these concepts metaphorically. Some of his followers, however, did.

Sexuality

A more general criticism of Freud's theory is its emphasis on sexuality. Everything, both good and bad, seems to stem from the expression or repression of the sex drive. Many people question that, and wonder if there are any other forces at work. Freud himself later added the death instinct, but that proved to be another one of his less popular ideas.

First let me point out that, in fact, a great deal of our activities are in some fashion motivated by sex. If you take a good hard look at our modern society, you will find that most advertising uses sexual images, that movies and television programs often don't sell well if they don't include some titillation, that the fashion industry is based on a continual game of sexual hide-and-seek, and that we all spend a considerable portion of every day playing "the mating game." Yet we still don't feel that all life is sexual.

But Freud's emphasis on sexuality was not based on the great amount of obvious sexuality in his society -- it was based on the intense avoidance of sexuality, especially among the middle and upper classes, and most especially among women. What we too easily forget is that the world has changed rather dramatically over the last hundred years. We forget that doctors and ministers recommended strong punishment for masturbation, that "leg" was a dirty word, that a woman who felt sexual desire was automatically considered a potential prostitute, that a bride was often taken completely by surprise by the events of the wedding night, and could well faint at the thought.

It is to Freud's credit that he managed to rise above his culture's sexual attitudes. Even his mentor Breuer and the brilliant Charcot couldn't fully acknowledge the sexual nature of their clients' problems. Freud's mistake was more a matter of generalizing too far, and not taking cultural change into account. It is ironic that much of the cultural change in sexual attitudes was in fact due to Freud's work!

The unconscious

One last concept that is often criticized is the unconscious. It is not disputed that something like the unconscious accounts for some of our behavior, but rather how much and the exact nature of the beast.

Behaviorists, humanists, and existentialists all believe that (a) the motivations and problems that can be attributed to the unconscious are much fewer than Freud thought, and (b) the unconscious is not the great churning cauldron of activity he made it out to be. Most psychologists today see the unconscious as whatever we don't need or don't want to see. Some theorists don't use the concept at all.

On the other hand, at least one theorist, Carl Jung, proposed an unconscious that makes Freud's look puny! But we will leave all these views for the appropriate chapters.

Positive aspects

People have the unfortunate tendency to "throw the baby out with the bath water." If they don't agree with ideas a, b, and c, they figure x, y, and z must be wrong as well. But Freud had quite a few good ideas, so good that they have been incorporated into many other theories, to the point where we forget to give him credit.

First, Freud made us aware of two powerful forces and their demands on us. Back when everyone believed people were basically rational, he showed how much of our behavior was based on biology. When everyone conceived of people as individually responsible for their actions, he showed the impact of society. When everyone thought of male and female as roles determined by nature or God, he showed how much they depended on family dynamics. The id and the superego - the psychic manifestations of biology and society - will always be with us in some form or another.

Second is the basic theory, going back to Breuer, of certain neurotic symptoms as caused by psychological traumas. Although most theorists no longer believe that all neurosis can be so explained, or that it is necessary to relive the trauma to get better, it has become a common understanding that a childhood full of neglect, abuse, and tragedy tends to lead to an unhappy adult.

Third is the idea of ego defenses. Even if you are uncomfortable with Freud's idea of the unconscious, it is clear that we engage in little manipulations of reality and our memories of that reality to suit our own needs, especially when those needs are strong. I would recommend that you learn to recognize these defenses: You will find that having names for them will help you to notice them in yourself and others!

Finally, the basic form of therapy has been largely set by Freud. Except for some behaviorist therapies, most therapy is still "the talking cure," and still involves a physically and socially relaxed atmosphere. And, even if other theorists do not care for the idea of transference, the highly personal nature of the therapeutic relationship is generally accepted as important to success.

Some of Freud's ideas are clearly tied to his culture and era. Other ideas are not easily testable. Some may even be a matter of Freud's own personality and experiences. But Freud was an excellent observer of the human condition, and enough of what he said has relevance today that he will be a part of personality textbooks for years to come. Even when theorists come up with dramatically different ideas about how we work, they compare their ideas with Freud's.

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Carl Jung

Freud said that the goal of therapy was to make the unconscious conscious. He certainly made that the goal of his work as a theorist. And yet he makes the unconscious sound very unpleasant, to say the least: It is a cauldron of seething desires, a bottomless pit of perverse and incestuous cravings, a burial ground for frightening experiences which nevertheless come back to haunt us. Frankly, it doesn't sound like anything I'd like to make conscious!

A younger colleague of his, Carl Jung, was to make the exploration of this "inner space" his life's work. He went equipped with a background in Freudian theory, of course, and with an apparently inexhaustible knowledge of mythology, religion, and philosophy. Jung was especially knowledgeable in the symbolism of complex mystical traditions such as Gnosticism, Alchemy, Kabbalah, and similar traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism. If anyone could make sense of the unconscious and its habit of revealing itself only in symbolic form, it would be Carl Jung.

He had, in addition, a capacity for very lucid dreaming and occasional visions. In the fall of 1913, he had a vision of a "monstrous flood" engulfing most of Europe and lapping at the mountains of his native Switzerland. He saw thousands of people drowning and civilization crumbling. Then, the waters turned into blood. This vision was followed, in the next few weeks, by dreams of eternal winters and rivers of blood. He was afraid that he was becoming psychotic.

But on August 1 of that year, World War I began. Jung felt that there had been a connection, somehow, between himself as an individual and humanity in general that could not be explained away. From then until 1928, he was to go through a rather painful process of self-exploration that formed the basis of all of his later theorizing.

He carefully recorded his dreams, fantasies, and visions, and drew, painted, and sculpted them as well. He found that his experiences tended to form themselves into persons, beginning with a wise old man and his companion, a little girl. The wise old man evolved, over a number of dreams, into a sort of spiritual guru. The little girl became "anima," the feminine soul, who served as his main medium of communication with the deeper aspects of his unconscious.

A leathery brown dwarf would show up guarding the entrance to the unconscious. He was "the shadow," a primitive companion for Jung's ego. Jung dreamt that he and the dwarf killed a beautiful blond youth, whom he called Siegfried. For Jung, this represented a warning about the dangers of the worship of glory and heroism which would soon cause so much sorrow all over Europe - and a warning about the dangers of some of his own tendencies towards hero-worship, of Sigmund Freud!

Jung dreamt a great deal about the dead, the land of the dead, and the rising of the dead. These represented the unconscious itself - not the "little" personal unconscious that Freud made such a big deal out of, but a new collective unconscious of humanity itself, an unconscious that could contain all the dead, not just our personal ghosts. Jung began to see the mentally ill as people who are haunted by these ghosts, in an age where no-one is supposed to even believe in them. If we could only recapture our mythologies, we would understand these ghosts, become comfortable with the dead, and heal our mental illnesses.

Critics have suggested that Jung was, very simply, ill himself when all this happened. But Jung felt that, if you want to understand the jungle, you can't be content just to sail back and forth near the shore. You've got to get into it, no matter how strange and frightening it might seem.

Biography

Carl Gustav Jung was born July 26, 1875, in the small Swiss village of Kessewil. His father was Paul Jung, a country parson, and his mother was Emilie Preiswerk Jung. He was surrounded by a fairly well educated extended family, including quite a few clergymen and some eccentrics as well.

The elder Jung started Carl on Latin when he was six years old, beginning a long interest in language and literature -- especially ancient literature. Besides most modern western European languages, Jung could read several ancient ones, including Sanskrit, the language of the original Hindu holy books.

Carl was a rather solitary adolescent, who didn't care much for school, and especially couldn't take competition. He went to boarding school in Basel, Switzerland, where he found himself the object of a lot of jealous harassment. He began to use sickness as an excuse, developing an embarrassing tendency to faint under pressure.

Although his first career choice was archeology, he went on to study medicine at the University of Basel. While working under the famous neurologist Krafft-Ebing, he settled on psychiatry as his career.

After graduating, he took a position at the Burghöltzli Mental Hospital in Zurich under Eugene Bleuler, an expert on (and the namer of) schizophrenia. In 1903, he married Emma Rauschenbach. He also taught classes at the University of Zurich, had a private practice, and invented word association at this time!

Long an admirer of Freud, he met him in Vienna in 1907. The story goes that after they met, Freud canceled all his appointments for the day, and they talked for 13 hours straight, such was the impact of the meeting of these two great minds! Freud eventually came to see Jung as the crown prince of psychoanalysis and his heir apparent.

But Jung had never been entirely sold on Freud's theory. Their relationship began to cool in 1909, during a trip to America. They were entertaining themselves by analyzing each others' dreams (more fun, apparently, than shuffleboard), when Freud seemed to show an excess of resistance to Jung's efforts at analysis. Freud finally said that they'd have to stop because he was afraid he would lose his authority! Jung felt rather insulted.

World War I was a painful period of self-examination for Jung. It was, however, also the beginning of one of the most interesting theories of personality the world has ever seen.

After the war, Jung traveled widely, visiting, for example, tribal people in Africa, America, and India. He retired in 1946, and began to retreat from public attention after his wife died in 1955. He died on June 6, 1961, in Zurich.

Ego, personal unconcious, and collective unconscious

Jung's theory divides the psyche into three parts. The first is the ego, which Jung identifies with the conscious mind. Closely related is the personal unconscious, which includes anything which is not presently conscious, but can be. The personal unconscious is like most people's understanding of the unconscious in that it includes both memories that are easily brought to mind and those that have been suppressed for some reason. But it does not include the instincts that Freud would have it include.

But then Jung adds the part of the psyche that makes his theory stand out from all others: the collective unconscious. You could call it your "psychic inheritance." It is the reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge we are all born with. And yet we can never be directly conscious of it. It influences all of our experiences and behaviors, most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly, by looking at those influences.

There are some experiences that show the effects of the collective unconscious more clearly than others: The experiences of love at first sight, of deja vu (the feeling that you've been here before), and the immediate recognition of certain symbols and the meanings of certain myths, could all be understood as the sudden conjunction of our outer reality and the inner reality of the collective unconscious. Grander examples are the creative experiences shared by artists and musicians all over the world and in all times, or the spiritual experiences of mystics of all religions, or the parallels in dreams, fantasies, mythologies, fairy tales, and literature.

A nice example that has been greatly discussed recently is the near-death experience. It seems that many people, of many different cultural backgrounds, find that they have very similar recollections when they are brought back from a close encounter with death. They speak of leaving their bodies, seeing their bodies and the events surrounding them clearly, of being pulled through a long tunnel towards a bright light, of seeing deceased relatives or religious figures waiting for them, and of their disappointment at having to leave this happy scene to return to their bodies. Perhaps we are all "built" to experience death in this fashion.

Archetypes

The contents of the collective unconscious are called archetypes. Jung also called them dominants, imagos, mythological or primordial images, and a few other names, but archetypes seems to have won out over these. An archetype is an unlearned tendency to experience things in a certain way.

The archetype has no form of its own, but it acts as an "organizing principle" on the things we see or do. It works the way that instincts work in Freud's theory: At first, the baby just wants something to eat, without knowing what it wants. It has a rather indefinite yearning which, nevertheless, can be satisfied by some things and not by others. Later, with experience, the child begins to yearn for something more specific when it is hungry -- a bottle, a cookie, a broiled lobster, a slice of New York style pizza.

The archetype is like a black hole in space: You only know it's there by how it draws matter and light to itself.

The mother archetype

The mother archetype is a particularly good example. All of our ancestors had mothers. We have evolved in an environment that included a mother or mother-substitute. We would never have survived without our connection with a nurturing-one during our times as helpless infants. It stands to reason that we are "built" in a way that reflects that evolutionary environment: We come into this world ready to want mother, to seek her, to recognize her, to deal with her.

So the mother archetype is our built-in ability to recognize a certain relationship, that of "mothering." Jung says that this is rather abstract, and we are likely to project the archetype out into the world and onto a particular person, usually our own mothers. Even when an archetype doesn't have a particular real person available, we tend to personify the archetype, that is, turn it into a mythological "story-book" character. This character symbolizes the archetype.

(To the right is one of his many drawings from the famous Red Book, which wasn't published until 2009.)

The mother archetype is symbolized by the primordial mother or "earth mother" of mythology, by Eve and Mary in western traditions, and by less personal symbols such as the church, the nation, a forest, or the ocean. According to Jung, someone whose own mother failed to satisfy the demands of the archetype may well be one that spends his or her life seeking comfort in the church, or in identification with "the motherland," or in meditating upon the figure of Mary, or in a life at sea.

Of the more important archetypes, we have the shadow, which represents our animal ancestry and is often the locus of our concerns with evil and our own "dark side;" there's the anima, representing the female side of men, and the animus, representing the male side of women;  and the persona, which is the surface self, that part of us we allow others to see.

Other archetypes include father, child, family, hero, maiden, animal, wise old man, the hermaphrodite, God, and the first man.

The self

The goal of life is to realize the self. The self is an archetype that represents the transcendence of all opposites, so that every aspect of your personality is expressed equally. You are then neither and both male and female, neither and both ego and shadow, neither and both good and bad, neither and both conscious and unconscious, neither and both an individual and the whole of creation. And yet, with no oppositions, there is no energy, and you cease to act. Of course, you no longer need to act.

To keep it from getting too mystical, think of it as a new center, a more balanced position, for your psyche. When you are young, you focus on the ego and worry about the trivialities of the persona. When you are older (assuming you have been developing as you should), you focus a little deeper, on the self, and become closer to all people, all life, even the universe itself. The self-realized person is actually less selfish.

The Myers-Briggs test

Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers found Jung's ideas about people's personalities so compelling that they decided to develop a paper-and-pencil test. It came to be called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and is one of the most popular, and most studied, tests around.

On the basis of your answers on about 125 questions, you are placed in one of sixteen types, with the understanding that some people might find themselves somewhere between two or three types. What type you are says quite a bit about you -- your likes and dislikes, your likely career choices, your compatibility with others, and so on. People tend to like it quite a bit. It has the unusual quality among personality tests of not being too judgmental: None of the types is terribly negative, nor are any overly positive. Rather than assessing how "crazy" you are, the "Myers-Briggs" simply opens up your personality for exploration.

The test has four scales. Extroversion - Introversion (E-I) is the most important. Test researchers have found that about 75 % of the population is extroverted.

The next one is Sensing - Intuiting (S-N), with about 75 % of the population sensing.

The next is Thinking - Feeling (T-F). Although these are distributed evenly through the population, researchers have found that two-thirds of men are thinkers, while two-thirds of women are feelers. This might seem like stereotyping, but keep in mind that feeling and thinking are both valued equally by Jungians, and that one-third of men are feelers and one-third of women are thinkers. Note, though, that society does value thinking and feeling differently, and that feeling men and thinking women often have difficulties dealing with people's stereotyped expectations.

The last is Judging - Perceiving (J-P), not one of Jung's original dimensions. Myers and Briggs included this one in order to help determine which of a person's functions is superior. Generally, judging people are more careful, perhaps inhibited, in their lives. Perceiving people tend to be more spontaneous, sometimes careless. If you are an extrovert and a "J," you are a thinker or feeler, whichever is stronger. Extroverted and "P" means you are a senser or intuiter. On the other hand, an introvert with a high "J" score will be a senser or intuiter, while an introvert with a high "P" score will be a thinker or feeler. J and P are equally distributed in the population.

Discussion

Quite a few people find that Jung has a great deal to say to them. They include writers, artists, musicians, film makers, theologians, clergy of all denominations, students of mythology, and, of course, some psychologists. Examples that come to mind are the mythologist Joseph Campbell, the film maker George Lucas, and the science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin. Anyone interested in creativity, spirituality, psychic phenomena, the universal, and so on will find in Jung a kindred spirit.

But scientists, including most psychologists, have a lot of trouble with Jung. Not only does he fully support the teleological view (as do most personality theorists), but he goes a step further and talks about the mystical interconnectedness of synchronicity. Not only does he postulate an unconscious, where things are not easily available to the empirical eye, but he postulates a collective unconscious that never has been and never will be conscious.

In fact, Jung takes an approach that is essentially the reverse of the mainstream's reductionism: Jung begins with the highest levels - even spiritualism - and derives the lower levels of psychology and physiology from them.

Even psychologists who applaud his teleology and antireductionist position may not be comfortable with him. Like Freud, Jung tries to bring everything into his system. He has little room for chance, accident, or circumstances. Personality - and life in general - seems "over-explained" in Jung's theory.

I have found that his theory sometimes attracts students who have difficulty dealing with reality. When the world, especially the social world, becomes too difficult, some people retreat into fantasy. Some, for example, become couch potatoes. But others turn to complex ideologies that pretend to explain everything. Some get involved in Gnostic or Tantric religions, the kind that present intricate rosters of angels and demons and heavens and hells, and endlessly discuss symbols. Some go to Jung. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this; but for someone who is out of touch with reality, this is hardly going to help.

These criticisms do not cut the foundation out from under Jung's theory. But they do suggest that some careful consideration is in order.

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Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler was born in the suburbs of Vienna on February 7, 1870, the third child, second son, of a Jewish grain merchant and his wife. As a child, Alfred developed rickets, which kept him from walking until he was four years old. At five, he nearly died of pneumonia. It was at this age that he decided to be a physician.

Alfred was an average student and preferred playing outdoors to being cooped up in school. He was quite outgoing, popular, and active, and was known for his efforts at outdoing his older brother, Sigmund.

He received a medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1895. During his college years, he became attached to a group of socialist students, among which he found his wife-to-be, Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein. She was an intellectual and social activist who had come from Russia to study in Vienna. They married in 1897 and eventually had four children, two of whom became psychiatrists.

He began his medical career as an opthalmologist, but he soon switched to general practice, and established his office in a lower-class part of Vienna, across from the Prader, a combination amusement park and circus. His clients included circus people, and it has been suggested (Furtmuller, 1964) that the unusual strengths and weaknesses of the performers led to his insights into organ inferiorities and compensation.

He then turned to psychiatry, and in 1907 was invited to join Freud's discussion group. After writing papers on organic inferiority, which were quite compatible with Freud's views, he wrote, first, a paper concerning an aggression instinct, which Freud did not approve of, and then a paper on children's feelings of inferiority, which suggested that Freud's sexual notions be taken more metaphorically than literally.

Although Freud named Adler the president of the Viennese Analytic Society and the co-editor of the organization's newsletter, Adler didn't stop his criticism. A debate between Adler's supporters and Freud's was arranged, but it resulted in Adler, with nine other members of the organization, resigning to form the Society for Free Psychoanalysis in 1911. This organization became The Society for Individual Psychology in the following year.

During World War I, Adler served as a physician in the Austrian Army, first on the Russian front, and later in a children's hospital. He saw first hand the damage that war does, and his thought turned increasingly to the concept of social interest. He felt that if humanity was to survive, it had to change its ways!

After the war, he was involved in various projects, including clinics attached to state schools and the training of teachers. In 1926, he went to the United States to lecture, and he eventually accepted a visiting position at the Long Island College of Medicine. In 1934, he and his family left Vienna forever. On May 28, 1937, during a series of lectures at Aberdeen University, he died of a heart attack.

Striving

Alfred Adler postulates a single "drive" or motivating force behind all our behavior and experience. By the time his theory had gelled into its most mature form, he called that motivating force the striving for perfection. It is the desire we all have to fulfill our potentials, to come closer and closer to our ideal. It is, as many of you will already see, very similar to the more popular idea of self-actualization.

"Perfection" and "ideal" are troublesome words, though. On the one hand, they are very positive goals. Shouldn't we all be striving for the ideal? And yet, in psychology, they are often given a rather negative connotation. Perfection and ideals are, practically by definition, things you can't reach. Many people, in fact, live very sad and painful lives trying to be perfect! As you will see, other theorists, like Karen Horney and Carl Rogers, emphasize this problem. Adler talks about it, too. But he sees this negative kind of idealism as a perversion of the more positive understanding. We will return to this in a little while.

Striving for perfection was not the first phrase Adler used to refer to his single motivating force. His earliest phrase was the aggression drive, referring to the reaction we have when other drives, such as our need to eat, be sexually satisfied, get things done, or be loved, are frustrated. It might be better called the assertiveness drive, since we tend to think of aggression as physical and negative. But it was Adler's idea of the aggression drive that first caused friction between him and Freud. Freud was afraid that it would detract from the crucial position of the sex drive in psychoanalytic theory. Despite Freud's dislike for the idea, he himself introduced something very similar much later in his life: the death instinct.

Another word Adler used to refer to basic motivation was compensation, or striving to overcome. Since we all have problems, short-comings, inferiorities of one sort or another, Adler felt, earlier in his writing, that our personalities could be accounted for by the ways in which we do - or don't - compensate or overcome those problems. The idea still plays an important role in his theory, as you will see, but he rejected it as a label for the basic motive because it makes it sound as if it is your problems that cause you to be what you are.

One of Adler's earliest phrases was masculine protest. He noted something pretty obvious in his culture (and by no means absent from our own): Boys were held in higher esteem than girls. Boys wanted, often desperately, to be thought of as strong, aggressive, in control - i.e. "masculine" - and not weak, passive, or dependent - i.e. "feminine." The point, of course, was that men are somehow basically better than women. They do, after all, have the power, the education, and apparently the talent and motivation needed to do "great things," and women don't.

You can still hear this in the kinds of comments older people make about little boys and girls: If a baby boy fusses or demands to have his own way (masculine protest!), they will say he's a natural boy; If a little girl is quiet and shy, she is praised for her femininity; If, on the other hand, the boy is quiet and shy, they worry that he might grow up to be a sissy; Or if a girl is assertive and gets her way, they call her a "tomboy" and will try to reassure you that she'll grow out of it!

But Adler did not see men's assertiveness and success in the world as due to some innate superiority. He saw it as a reflection of the fact that boys are encouraged to be assertive in life, and girls are discouraged. Both boys and girls, however, begin life with the capacity for "protest!" Because so many people misunderstood him to mean that men are, innately, more assertive, he limited his use of the phrase.

The last phrase he used, before switching to striving for perfection, was striving for superiority. His use of this phrase reflects one of the philosophical roots of his ideas: Friederich Nietzsche developed a philosophy that considered the will to power the basic motive of human life. Although striving for superiority does refer to the desire to be better, it also contains the idea that we want to be better than others, rather than better in our own right. Adler later tended to use striving for superiority more in reference to unhealthy or neurotic striving.

Life style

A lot of this playing with words reflects Adler's groping towards a really different kind of personality theory than that represented by Freud's. Freud's theory was what we nowadays would call a reductionistic one: He tried most of his life to get the concepts down to the physiological level. Although he admitted failure in the end, life is nevertheless explained in terms of basic physiological needs. In addition, Freud tended to "carve up" the person into smaller theoretical concepts - the id, ego, and superego - as well.

Adler was influenced by the writings of Jan Smuts, the South African philosopher and statesman. Smuts felt that, in order to understand people, we have to understand them more as unified wholes than as a collection of bits and pieces, and we have to understand them in the context of their environment, both physical and social. This approach is called holism, and Adler took it very much to heart.

First, to reflect the idea that we should see people as wholes rather than parts, he decided to label his approach to psychology individual psychology. The word individual means literally "un-divided."

Second, instead of talking about a person's personality, with the traditional sense of internal traits, structures, dynamics, conflicts, and so on, he preferred to talk about style of life (nowadays, "lifestyle"). Life style refers to how you live your life, how you handle problems and interpersonal relations. Here's what he himself had to say about it: "The style of life of a tree is the individuality of a tree expressing itself and molding itself in an environment. We recognize a style when we see it against a background of an environment different from what we expect, for then we realize that every tree has a life pattern and is not merely a mechanical reaction to the environment."

Teleology

The last point -- that lifestyle is "not merely a mechanical reaction" -- is a second way in which Adler differs dramatically from Freud. For Freud, the things that happened in the past, such as early childhood trauma, determine what you are like in the present. Adler sees motivation as a matter of moving towards the future, rather than being driven, mechanistically, by the past. We are drawn towards our goals, our purposes, our ideals. This is called teleology.

Moving things from the past into the future has some dramatic effects. Since the future is not here yet, a teleological approach to motivation takes the necessity out of things. In a traditional mechanistic approach, cause leads to effect: If a, b, and c happen, then x, y, and z must, of necessity, happen. But you don't have to reach your goals or meet your ideals, and they can change along the way. Teleology acknowledges that life is hard and uncertain, but it always has room for change!

Another major influence on Adler's thinking was the philosopher Hans Vaihinger, who wrote a book called The Philosophy of "As If." Vaihinger believed that ultimate truth would always be beyond us, but that, for practical purposes, we need to create partial truths. His main interest was science, so he gave as examples such partial truths as protons and electrons, waves of light, gravity as distortion of space, and so on. Contrary to what many of us non-scientists tend to assume, these are not things that anyone has seen or proven to exist: They are useful constructs. They work for the moment, let us do science, and hopefully will lead to better, more useful constructs. We use them "as if" they were true. He called these partial truths fictions.

Vaihinger, and Adler, pointed out that we use these fictions in day to day living as well. We behave as if we knew the world would be here tomorrow, as if we were sure what good and bad are all about, as if everything we see is as we see it, and so on. Adler called this fictional finalism. You can understand the phrase most easily if you think about an example: Many people behave as if there were a heaven or a hell in their personal future. Of course, there may be a heaven or a hell, but most of us don't think of this as a proven fact. That makes it a "fiction" in Vaihinger's and Adler's sense of the word. And finalism refers to the teleology of it: The fiction lies in the future, and yet influences our behavior today.

Adler added that, at the center of each of our lifestyles, there sits one of these fictions, an important one about who we are and where we are going.

Discussion

Criticisms of Adler tend to involve the issue of whether or not, or to what degree, his theory is scientific. The mainstream of psychology today is experimentally oriented, which means, among other things, that the concepts a theory uses must be measurable and manipulable. This in turn means that an experimental orientation prefers physical or behavioral variables. Adler, as you saw, uses basic concepts that are far from physical and behavioral: Striving for perfection? How do you measure that? Or compensation? Or feelings of inferiority? Or social interest? The experimental method also makes a basic assumption: That all things operate in terms of cause and effect. Adler would certainly agree that physical things do so, but he would adamantly deny that people do! Instead, he takes the teleological route, that people are "determined" by their ideals, goals, values, "final fictions." Teleology takes the necessity out of things: A person doesn't have to respond a certain way to a certain circumstance; A person has choices to make; A person creates his or her own personality or lifestyle. From the experimental perspective, these things are illusions that a scientist, even a personality theorist, dare not give in to.

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There would be many more psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and therapists with other theories. It is impossible to overemphasize the impact that these people, especially Freud himself, would have on psychology, and in particular on clinical psychology.  Following and offering their own slants on the issues would be Anna Freud, Heinz Hartman, Erik Erikson, Otto Rank, Sandor Ferenczi, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Harry Stack Sullivan, Henry Murray, Gordon Allport, Gardner Murphy, George Kelly, Carl Rogers, Ludwig Binswanger, and many, many more.

¹ I can't help but mention that Reil (otherwise an admirable physician) suggested that the use of a cat-piano might be helpful in getting the attention of catatonic schizophrenics. (Rhapsodies on a Cat-Piano, or Johann Christian Reil and the Foundations of Romantic Psychiatry, by Robert J. Richards

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© Copyright 2000 by C. George Boeree

A Brief History of the Lobotomy

Dr. George C. Boeree

Ukrainian translation: Коротка історія лоботомії (translated by Olena Chervona)
French translation: Une brève histoire de la lobotomie (translated by Mathilde Guibert)

The idea of brain surgery as a means of improving mental health got started around 1890, when Friederich Golz, a German researcher, removed portions of his dogs’ temporal lobes, and found them to be calmer, less aggressive.  It was swiftly followed by Gottlieb Burkhardt, the head of a Swiss mental institution, who attempted similar surgeries on six of his schizophrenic patients.  Some were indeed calmer.  Two died.

One would think that that would be the end of the idea.  But in 1935, Carlyle Jacobsen of Yale University tried frontal and prefrontal lobotomies on chimps, and found them to be calmer afterwards.  His colleague at Yale, John Fulton, attempted to induce “experimental neurosis” in his lobotomized chimps by presenting them with contradictory signals.  He found that they were pretty much immune to the process.

It took a certain Antonio Egaz Moniz of the University of Lisbon Medical School to really put lobotomy on the map.  A very productive medical researcher, he invented several significant improvements to brain x-ray techniques prior to his work with lobotomy.  He also served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Ambassador to Spain.  He was even one of the signers of the Treaty of Versailles, which marked the end of World War I.

He found that cutting the nerves that run from the frontal cortex to the thalamus in psychotic patients who suffered from repetitive thoughts “short-circuited” the problem.  Together with his colleague Almeida Lima, he devised a technique involving drilling two small holes on either side of the forehead, inserting a special surgical knife, and severing the prefrontal cortex from the rest of the brain.   He called it leukotomy, but it would come to be known as lobotomy.

Some of his patients became calmer, some did not.  Moniz advised extreme caution in using lobotomy, and felt it should only be used in cases where everything else had been tried.  He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on lobotomy in 1949.  He retired early after a former patient paralyzed him by shooting him in the back.

Walter Freeman, an American physician, with his colleague James Watts, performed his first lobotomy operation in 1936.  He was so satisfied with the results that he went on to do many thousands more, and in fact began a propaganda campaign to promote its use.  He is also famous for inventing what is called ice pick lobotomy.  Impatient with the difficult surgical methods pioneered by Moniz, he found he could insert an ice pick above each eye of a patient with only local anesthetic, drive it through the thin bone with a light tap of a mallet, swish the pick back and forth like a windshield wiper and -- voilà -- a formerly difficult patient is now passive.

Freeman recommended the procedure for everything from psychosis to depression to neurosis to criminality.  He developed what others called assembly line lobotomies, going from one patient to the next with his gold-plated ice pick, even having his assistants time him to see if he could break lobotomy speed records.  It is said that even some seasoned surgeons fainted at the site.  Even Watts thought he had gone too far.

Between 1939 and 1951, over 18,000 lobotomies were performed in the US, and many more in other countries.  It was often used on convicts, and in Japan it was recommended for use on “difficult” children.  There are still western countries that permit the use of the lobotomy, although its use has decreased dramatically worldwide.  Curiously, the old USSR banned it back in 1950 on moral grounds!

In the 1950s, people began getting upset about the prevalence of lobotomies.  Protests began, and serious research supported the protesters.  The general statistics showed roughly a third of lobotomy patients improved, a third stayed the same, and the last third actually got worse!

There have been a few famous cases over the years.  For example, Rosemary Kennedy, sister to John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy, was given a lobotomy when her father complained to doctors about the mildly retarded girl’s embarrassing new interest in boys.  Her father never informed the rest of the family about what he had done.  She lived out her life in a Wisconsin institution and died January 7, 2005, at the age of 86.  Her sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founded the Special Olympics in her honor in 1968.

To learn more about lobotomy, try these sources:

Jack Pressman,  Last Resort (1998).

Elliot Valenstein, Great and Desperate Cures (1986).

Renato Sabbatini, "The History of Psychosurgery" (Brain and Mind, June 1997).  A selection from this article is available at https://books.byui.edu/-pzc.

Jean Piaget

1896 - 1980

Dr. C. George Boeree

Biography

Jean Piaget was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, on August 9, 1896.  His father, Arthur Piaget, was a professor of medieval literature with an interest in local history.  His mother, Rebecca Jackson, was intelligent and energetic, but Jean found her a bit neurotic -- an impression that he said led to his interest in psychology, but away from pathology!  The oldest child, he was quite independent and took an early interest in nature, especially the collecting of shells.  He published his first “paper” when he was ten -- a one page account of his sighting of an albino sparrow.

He began publishing in earnest in high school on his favorite subject, mollusks.  He was particularly pleased to get a part time job with the director of Nuechâtel’s Museum of Natural History, Mr. Godel.  His work became well known among European students of mollusks, who assumed he was an adult!  All this early experience with science kept him away, he says, from “the demon of philosophy.”

Later in adolescence, he faced a bit a crisis of faith:  Encouraged by his mother to attend religious instruction, he found religious argument childish.  Studying various philosophers and the application of logic, he dedicated himself to finding a “biological explanation of knowledge.”  Ultimately, philosophy failed to assist him in his search, so he turned to psychology.

After high school, he went on to the University of Neuchâtel.  Constantly studying and writing, he became sickly, and had to retire to the mountains for a year to recuperate.  When he returned to Neuchâtel, he decided he would write down his philosophy.  A fundamental point became a centerpiece for his entire life’s work:  “In all fields of life (organic, mental, social) there exist ‘totalities’ qualitatively distinct from their parts and imposing on them an organization.” This principle forms the basis of his structuralist philosophy, as it would for the Gestaltists, Systems Theorists, and many others.

In 1918, Piaget received his Doctorate in Science from the University of Neuchâtel.  He worked for a year at psychology labs in Zurich and at Bleuler’s famous psychiatric clinic.  During this period, he was introduced to the works of Freud, Jung, and others.  In 1919, he taught psychology and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris.  Here he met Simon (of Simon-Binet fame) and did research on intelligence testing.  He didn’t care for the “right-or-wrong” style of the intelligent tests and started interviewing his subjects at a boys school instead, using the psychiatric interviewing techniques he had learned the year before.  In other words, he began asking how children reasoned.

In 1921, his first article on the psychology of intelligence was published in the Journal de Psychologie.  In the same year, he accepted a position at the Institut J. J. Rousseau in Geneva.  Here he began with his students to research the reasoning of elementary school children.  This research became his first five books on child psychology.  Although he considered this work highly preliminary, he was surprised by the strong positive public reaction to his work.

In 1923, he married one of his student coworkers, Valentine Châtenay.  In 1925, their first daughter was born; in 1927, their second daughter was born; and in 1931, their only son was born.  They immediately became the focus of intense observation by Piaget and his wife.  This research became three more books!

In 1929, Piaget began work as the director of the International Bureau of Education, a post he would hold until 1967.  He also began large scale research with A. Szeminska, E. Meyer, and especially Bärbel Inhelder, who would become his major collaborator.  Piaget, it should be noted, was particularly influential in bringing women into experimental psychology.  Some of this work, however, wouldn’t reach the world outside of Switzerland until World War II was over.

In 1940, He became chair of Experimental Psychology, the Director of the psychology laboratory, and the president of the Swiss Society of Psychology.  In 1942, he gave a series of lectures at the Collège de France, during the Nazi occupation of France.  These lectures became The Psychology of Intelligence.  At the end of the war, he was named President of the Swiss Commission of UNESCO.

Also during this period, he received a number of honorary degrees.  He received one  from the Sorbonne in 1946, the University of Brussels and the University of Brazil in 1949, on top of an earlier one from Harvard in 1936.  And, in 1949 and 1950, he published his synthesis, Introduction to Genetic Epistemology.

In 1952, he became a professor at the Sorbonne.  In 1955, he created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology, of which he served as director the rest of his life.  And, in 1956, he created the School of Sciences at the University of Geneva.

He continued working on a general theory of structures and tying his psychological work to biology for many more years.  Likewise, he continued his public service through UNESCO as a Swiss delegate.  By the end of his career, he had written over 60 books and many hundreds of articles.  He died in Geneva, September 16, 1980, one of the most significant psychologists of the twentieth century.

Theory

Jean Piaget began his career as a biologist -- specifically, a malacologist!  But his interest in science and the history of science soon overtook his interest in snails and clams.  As he delved deeper into the thought-processes of doing science, he became interested in the nature of thought itself, especially in the development of thinking.  Finding relatively little work done in the area, he had the opportunity to give it a label.  He called it genetic epistemology, meaning the study of the development of knowledge.

He noticed, for example, that even infants have certain skills in regard to objects in their environment.  These skills were certainly simple ones, sensori-motor skills, but they directed the way in which the infant explored his or her environment and so how they gained more knowledge of the world and more sophisticated exploratory skills.  These skills he called schemas.

For example, an infant knows how to grab his favorite rattle and thrust it into his mouth.  He’s got that schema down pat.  When he comes across some other object -- say daddy’s expensive watch, he easily learns to transfer his “grab and thrust” schema to the new object.  This Piaget called assimilation, specifically assimilating a new object into an old schema.

When our infant comes across another object again -- say a beach ball -- he will try his old schema of grab and thrust.  This of course works poorly with the new object.  So the schema will adapt to the new object:  Perhaps, in this example, “squeeze and drool” would be an appropriate title for the new schema.  This is called accommodation, specifically accomodating an old schema to a new object.

Assimilation and accommodation are the two sides of adaptation, Piaget’s term for what most of us would call learning.  Piaget saw adaptation, however, as a good deal broader than the kind of learning that Behaviorists in the US were talking about.  He saw it as a fundamentally biological process.  Even one’s grip has to accommodate to a stone, while clay is assimilated into our grip.  All living things adapt, even without a nervous system or brain.

Assimilation and accommodation work like pendulum swings at advancing our understanding of the world and our competency in it.  According to Piaget, they are directed at a balance between the structure of the mind and the environment, at a certain congruency between the two, that would indicate that you have a good (or at least good-enough) model of the universe.  This ideal state he calls equilibrium.

As he continued his investigation of children, he noted that there were periods where assimilation dominated, periods where accommodation dominated, and periods of relative equilibrium, and that these periods were similar among all the children he looked at in their nature and their timing.  And so he developed the idea of stages of cognitive development.  These constitute a lasting contribution to psychology.

The sensorimotor stage

The first stage, to which we have already referred, is the sensorimotor stage.  It lasts from birth to about two years old.  As the name implies, the infant uses senses and motor abilities to understand the world, beginning with reflexes and ending with complex combinations of sensorimotor skills.

Between one and four months, the child works on primary circular reactions -- just an action of his own which serves as a stimulus to which it responds with the same action, and around and around we go.  For example, the baby may suck her thumb.  That feels good, so she sucks some more...  Or she may blow a bubble.  That’s interesting so I’ll do it again....

Between four and 12 months, the infant turns to secondary circular reactions, which involve an act that extends out to the environment:  She may squeeze a rubber duckie.  It goes “quack.”  That’s great, so do it again, and again, and again.  She is learning “procedures that make interesting things last.”

At this point, other things begin to show up as well.  For example, babies become ticklish, although they must be aware that someone else is tickling them or it won’t work.  And they begin to develop object permanence.  This is the ability to recognize that, just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s gone!  Younger infants seem to function by an “out of sight, out of mind” schema.  Older infants remember, and may even try to find things they can no longer see.

Between 12 months and 24 months, the child works on tertiary circular reactions.  They consist of the same “making interesting things last” cycle, except with constant variation.  I hit the drum with the stick -- rat-tat-tat-tat.  I hit the block with the stick -- thump-thump.  I hit the table with the stick -- clunk-clunk.  I hit daddy with the stick -- ouch-ouch.  This kind of active experimentation is best seen during feeding time, when discovering new and interesting ways of throwing your spoon, dish, and food.

Around one and a half, the child is clearly developing mental representation, that is, the ability to hold an image in their mind for a period beyond the immediate experience.  For example, they can engage in deferred imitation, such as throwing a tantrum after seeing one an hour ago.  They can use mental combinations to solve simple problems, such as putting down a toy in order to open a door.  And they get good at pretending.  Instead of using dollies essentially as something to sit at, suck on, or throw, now the child will sing to it, tuck it into bed, and so on.

Preoperational stage

The preoperational stage lasts from about two to about seven years old.  Now that the child has mental representations and is able to pretend, it is a short step to the use of symbols.

A symbol is a thing that represents something else.  A drawing, a written word, or a spoken word comes to be understood as representing a real dog.  The use of language is, of course, the prime example, but another good example of symbol use is creative play, wherein checkers are cookies, papers are dishes, a box is the table, and so on.  By manipulating symbols, we are essentially thinking, in a way the infant could not:  in the absence of the actual objects involved!

Along with symbolization, there is a clear understanding of past and future.  for example, if a child is crying for its mother, and you say “Mommy will be home soon,” it will now tend to stop crying.  Or if you ask him, “Remember when you fell down?” he will respond by making a sad face.

On the other hand, the child is quite egocentric during this stage, that is, he sees things pretty much from one point of view:  his own!  She may hold up a picture so only she can see it and expect you to see it too. Or she may explain that grass grows so she won’t get hurt when she falls.

Piaget did a study to investigate this phenomenon called the mountains study.  He would put children in front of a simple plaster mountain range and seat himself to the side, then ask them to pick from four pictures the view that he, Piaget, would see.  Younger children would pick the picture of the view they themselves saw; older kids picked correctly.

Similarly, younger children center on one aspect of any problem or communication at a time.  for example, they may not understand you when you tell them “Your father is my husband.”  Or they may say things like “I don’t live in the USA; I live in Pennsylvania!”  Or, if you show them five black and three white marbles and ask them “Are there more marbles or more black marbles?” they will respond “More black ones!”

Perhaps the most famous example of the preoperational child’s centrism is what Piaget refers to as their inability to conserve liquid volume.  If I give a three year old some chocolate milk in a tall skinny glass, and I give myself a whole lot more in a short fat glass, she will tend to focus on only one of the dimensions of the glass.  Since the milk in the tall skinny glass goes up much higher, she is likely to assume that there is more milk in that one than in the short fat glass, even though there is far more in the latter.  It is the development of the child's ability to decenter that marks him as havingmoved to the next stage.

Concrete operations stage

The concrete operations stage lasts from about seven to about 11.  The word operations refers to logical operations or principles we use when solving problems.  In this stage, the child not only uses symbols representationally, but can manipulate those symbols logically.  Quite an accomplishment! But, at this point, they must still perform these operations within the context of concrete situations.

The stage begins with progressive decentering.  By six or seven, most children develop the ability to conserve number, length, and liquid volume.  Conservation refers to the idea that a quantity remains the same despite changes in appearance.  If you show a child four marbles in a row, then spread them out, the preoperational child will focus on the spread, and tend to believe that there are now more marbles than before.

Or if you have two five inch sticks laid parallel to each other, then move one of them a little, she may believe that the moved stick is now longer than the other.

The concrete operations child, on the other hand, will know that there are still four marbles, and that the stick doesn’t change length even though it now extends beyond the other.  And he will know that you have to look at more than just the height of the milk in the glass:  If you pour the mild from the short, fat glass into the tall, skinny glass, he will tell you that there is the same amount of milk as before, despite the dramatic increase in mild-level!

By seven or eight years old, children develop conservation of substance:  If I take a ball of clay and roll it into a long thin rod, or even split it into ten little pieces, the child knows that there is still the same amount of clay.  And he will know that, if you rolled it all back into a single ball, it would look quite the same as it did -- a feature known as reversibility.

By nine or ten, the last of the conservation tests is mastered:  conservation of area.  If you take four one-inch square pieces of felt, and lay them on a six-by-six cloth together in the center, the child who conserves will know that they take up just as much room as the same squares spread out in the corners, or, for that matter, anywhere at all.

If all this sounds too easy to be such a big deal, test your friends on conservation of mass:  Which is heavier:  a million tons of lead, or a million tons of feathers?

In addition, a child learns classification and seriation during this stage.  Classification refers back to the question of whether there are more marbles or more black marbles?  Now the child begins to get the idea that one set can include another.  Seriation is putting things in order.  The younger child may start putting things in order by, say size, but will quickly lose track.  Now the child has no problem with such a task.  Since arithmetic is essentially nothing more than classification and seriation, the child is now ready for some formal education!

Formal operations stage

But the concrete operations child has a hard time applying his new-found logical abilities to non-concrete -- i.e. abstract -- events.  If mom says to junior “You shouldn’t make fun of that boy’s nose.  How would you feel if someone did that to you?” he is likely to respond “I don’t have a big nose!”  Even this simple lesson may well be too abstract, too hypothetical, for his kind of thinking.

Don’t judge the concrete operations child too harshly, though.  Even adults are often taken-aback when we present them with something hypothetical:  “If Edith has a lighter complexion than Susan, and Edith is darker than Lily, who is the darkest?”  Most people need a moment or two.

From around 12 on, we enter the formal operations stage.  Here we become increasingly competent at adult-style thinking.  This involves using logical operations, and using them in the abstract, rather than the concrete.  We often call this hypothetical thinking.

Here’s a simple example of a task that a concrete operations child couldn’t do, but which a formal operations teenager or adult could -- with a little time and effort.  Consider this rule about a set of cards that have letters on one side and numbers on the other:  “If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side.”  Take a look at the cards below and tell me, which cards do I need to turn over to tell if this rule is actually true?  You’ll find the answer at the end of this chapter.

It is the formal operations stage that allows one to investigate a problem in a careful and systematic fashion.  Ask a 16 year old to tell you the rules for making pendulums swing quickly or slowly, and he may proceed like this:

A long string with a light weight -- let’s see how fast that swings.
A long string with a heavy weight -- let’s try that.
Now, a short string with a light weight.
And finally, a short string with a heavy weight.

His experiment -- and it is an experiment -- would tell him that a short string leads to a fast swing, and a long string to a slow swing, and that the weight of the pendulum means nothing at all!

The teenager has learned to group possibilities in four different ways:

By conjunction:  “Both A and B make a difference” (e.g. both the string’s length and the pendulum’s weight).

By disjunction:  “It’s either this or that” (e.g. it’s either the length or the weight).

By implication:  “If it’s this, then that will happen” (the formation of a hypothesis).

By incompatibility:  “When this happens, that doesn’t” (the elimination of a hypothesis).

On top of that, he can operate on the operations -- a higher level of grouping.  If you have a proposition, such as “it could be the string or the weight,” you can do four things with it:

Identity:  Leave it alone. “It could be the string or the weight.”

Negation:  Negate the components and replace or’s with and’s (and vice versa). “It might not be the string and not the weight, either.”

Reciprocity:  Negate the components but keep the and’s and or’s as they are.  “Either it is not the weight or it is not the string.”

Correlativity:  Keep the components as they are, but replace or’s with and’s, etc.  “It’s the weight and the string.”

Someone who has developed his or her formal operations will understand that the correlate of a reciprocal is a negation, that a reciprocal of a negation is a correlate, that the negation of a correlate is a reciprocal, and that the negation of a reciprocal of a correlate is an identity (phew!!!).

Maybe it has already occured to you:  It doesn’t seem that the formal operations stage is something everyone actually gets to.  Even those of us who do don’t operate in it at all times.  Even some cultures, it seems, don’t develop it or value it like ours does.  Abstract reasoning is simply not universal.

[Answer to the card question:  The E and the 7.  The E must have an even number on the back -- that much is obvious.  the 7 is odd, so it cannot have a vowel on the other side -- that would be against the rule!  But the rule says nothing about what has to be on the back of a consonant such as the K, nor does it say that the 4 musthave a vowel on the other side!]

References

It is hard to say, of Piaget's many works, which are most significant or interesting, but here goes:

The Moral Judgement of the Child (1932 -- one of the first five books), The Psychology of Intelligence (1947, in English 1950), The Construction of Reality in the Child (1937, in English 1954, based on observation of his own children), The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence (with Inhelder, 1958), The Psychology of the Child (with Inhelder, 1966, in English 1969), Insights and Illusions of Philosophy (1965, 1971 in English)

Gordon Allport

1897 - 1967

Dr. C. George Boeree

Gordon Allport was born in Montezuma, Indiana, in 1897, the youngest of four brothers.  A shy and studious boy, he was teased quite a bit and lived a fairly isolated childhood.  His father was a country doctor, which meant that Gordon grew up with his father’s patients and nurses and all the paraphernalia of a miniature hospital.  Everyone worked hard.  His early life was otherwise fairly pleasant and uneventful.

One of Allport’s stories is always mentioned in his biographies:  When he was 22, he traveled to Vienna.  He had arranged to meet with the great Sigmund Freud!  When he arrived in Freud’s office, Freud simply sat and waited for Gordon to begin.  After a little bit, Gordon could no longer stand the silence, and he blurted out an observation he had made on his way to meet Freud.  He mentioned that he had seen a little boy on the bus who was very upset at having to sit where a dirty old man had sat previously.  Gordon thought this was likely something he had learned from his mother, a very neat and apparently rather domineering type.  Freud, instead of taking it as a simple observation, took it to be an expression of some deep, unconscious process in Gordon’s mind, and said “And was that little boy you?”

This experience made him realize that depth psychology sometimes digs too deeply, in the same way that he had earlier realized that behaviorism often doesn’t dig deeply enough!

Allport received his Ph.D. in Psychology in 1922 from Harvard, following in the foot steps of his brother Floyd, who became an important social psychologist.  His career was spent developing his theory, examining such social issues as prejudice, and developing personality tests.  He died in Cambridge Massachusetts in 1967.

---

Theory

One thing that motivates human beings is the tendency to satisfy biological survival needs, which Allport referred to as opportunistic functioning.  He noted that opportunistic functioning can be characterized as reactive, past-oriented, and, of course, biological.

But Allport felt that opportunistic functioning was relatively unimportant for understanding most of human behavior.  Most human behavior, he believed, is motivated by something very different -- functioning in a manner expressive of the self -- which he called propriate functioning.  Most of what we do in life is a matter of being who we are!  Propriate functioning can be characterized as proactive, future-oriented, and psychological.

Propriate comes from the word proprium, which is Allport’s name for that essential concept, the self.  He had reviewed hundreds of definitions for that concept and came to feel that, in order to more scientific, it would be necessary to dispense with the common word self and substitute something else.  For better or worse, the word proprium never caught on.

To get an intuitive feel for what propriate functioning means, think of the last time you wanted to do something or become something because you really felt that doing or becoming that something would be expressive of the things about yourself that you believe to be most important.  Remember the last time you did something to express your self, the last time you told yourself, “that’s really me!”  Doing things in keeping with what you really are, that’s propriate functioning.

The proprium

Putting so much emphasis on the self or proprium, Allport wanted to define it as carefully as possible.  He came at that task from two directions, phenomenologically and functionally.

First, phenomenologically, i.e. the self as experienced:  He suggested that the self is composed of the aspects of your experiencing that you see as most essential (as opposed to incidental or accidental), warm (or “precious,” as opposed to  emotionally cool), and central (as opposed to peripheral).

His functional definition became a developmental theory all by itself.  The self has seven functions, which tend to arise at certain times of one’s life:
 1.  Sense of body
 2.  Self-identity
 3.  Self-esteem
 4.  Self-extension
 5.  Self-image
 6.  Rational coping
 7.  Propriate striving

Sense of body develops in the first two years of life.  We have one, we feel its closeness, its warmth.  It has boundaries that pain and injury, touch and movement, make us aware of.  Allport had a favorite demonstration of this aspect of self:  Imagine spitting saliva into a cup -- and then drinking it down!  What’s the problem?  It’s the same stuff you swallow all day long!  But, of course, it has gone out from your bodily self and become, thereby, foreign to you.

Self-identity also develops in the first two years.  There comes a point were we recognize ourselves as continuing, as having a past, present, and future.  We see ourselves as individual entities, separate and different from others.  We even have a name!  Will you be the same person when you wake up tomorrow?  Of course -- we take that continuity for granted.

Self-esteem develops between two and four years old.  There also comes a time when we recognize that we have value, to others and to ourselves.  This is especially tied to a continuing development of our competencies.  This, for Allport, is what the “anal” stage is really all about!

Self-extension develops between four and six.  Certain things, people, and events around us also come to be thought of as central and warm, essential to my existence.  “My” is very close to “me!”  Some people define themselves in terms of their parents, spouse, or children, their clan, gang, community, college, or nation.  Some find their identity in activities:  I’m a psychologist, a student, a bricklayer.  Some find identity in a place:  my house, my hometown.  When my child does something wrong, why do I feel guilty?  If someone scratches my car, why do I feel like they just punches me?

Self-image also develops between four and six.  This is the “looking-glass self,” the me as others see me.  This is the impression I make on others, my “look,” my social esteem or status, including my sexual identity.  It is the beginning of what others call conscience, ideal self, and persona.

Rational coping is learned predominantly in the years from six till twelve.  The child begins to develop his or her abilities to deal with life’s problems rationally and effectively.  This  is analogous to Erikson’s “industry.”

Propriate striving doesn’t usually begin till after twelve years old.  This is my self as goals, ideal, plans, vocations, callings, a sense of direction, a sense of purpose.  The culmination of propriate striving, according to Allport, is the ability to say that I am the proprietor of my life -- i.e. the owner and operator!

(One can't help but notice the time periods Allport uses -- they are very close to the time periods of  Freud's stages!  But please understand that Allport's scheme is not a stage theory -- just a description of the usual way people develop.)

Traits or dispositions

Now, as the proprium is developing in this way, we are also developing personal traits, or personal dispositions.  Allport originally used the word traits, but found that so many people assumed he meant traits as perceived by someone looking at another person or measured by personality tests, rather than as unique, individual characteristics within a person, that he changed it to dispositions.

A personal disposition is defined as “a generalized neuropsychic structure (peculiar to the individual), with the capacity to render many stimuli functionally equivalent, and to initiate and guide consistent (equivalent) forms of adaptive and stylistic behavior.”

A personal disposition produces equivalences in function and meaning between various perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and actions that are not necessarily equivalent in the natural world, or in anyone else’s mind.  A person with the personal disposition “fear of communism” may equate Russians, liberals, professors, strikers, social activists, environmentalists, feminists, and so on.  He may lump them all together and respond to any of them with a set of behaviors that express his fear:  making speeches, writing letters, voting, arming himself, getting angry, etc.

Another way to put it is to say that dispositions are concrete, easily recognized, consistencies in our behaviors.

Allport believes that traits are essentially unique to each individual:  One person’s “fear of communism” isn’t the same as another's.  And you can’t really expect that knowledge of other people is going to help you understand  any one particular person.  For this reason, Allport strongly pushed what he called idiographic methods -- methods that focused on studying one person at a time, such as interviews, observation, analysis of letters or diaries, and so on.  These are nowadays generally referred to as qualitative methods.

Allport does recognize that within any particular culture, there are common traits or dispositions, ones that are a part of that culture, that everyone in that culture recognizes and names.  In our culture, we commonly differentiate between introverts and extraverts or liberals and conservatives, and we all know (roughly) what we mean.  But another culture may not recognize these.  What, for example, would liberal and conservative mean in the middle ages?

Allport recognizes that some traits are more closely tied to the proprium (one’s self) than others.  Central traits are the building blocks of your personality.  When you describe someone, you are likely to use words that refer to these central traits:  smart, dumb, wild, shy, sneaky, dopey, grumpy....  He noted that most people have somewhere between five and ten of these.

There are also secondary traits, ones that aren’t quite so obvious, or so general, or so consistent.  Preferences, attitudes, situational traits are all secondary.   For example, “he gets angry when you try to tickle him,” “she has some very unusual sexual preferences,” and “you can’t take him to restaurants.”

But then there are cardinal traits.  These are the traits that some people have which practically define their life.  Someone who spends their life seeking fame, or fortune, or sex is such a person.  Often we use specific historical people to name these cardinal traits:  Scrooge (greed), Joan of Arc (heroic self-sacrifice), Mother Teresa (religious service), Marquis de Sade (sadism), Machiavelli (political ruthlessness), and so on.  Relatively few people develop a cardinal trait.  If they do, it tends to be late in life.

Psychological maturity

If you have a well-developed proprium and a rich, adaptive set of dispositions, you have attained psychological maturity, Allport’s term for mental health.  He lists seven characteristics:

1.  Specific, enduring extensions of self, i.e. involvement.
2.  Dependable techniques for warm relating to others (e.g. trust, empathy, genuineness, tolerance...).
3.  Emotional security and self-acceptance.
4.  Habits of realistic perception (as opposed to defensiveness).
5.  Problem-centeredness, and the development of problem-solving skills.
6.  Self-objectification -- insight into one’s own behavior, the ability to laugh at oneself, etc.
7.  A unifying philosophy of life, including a particular value orientation, differentiated religious sentiment, and a personalized conscience.

Functional autonomy

Allport didn’t believe in looking too much into a person’s past in order to understand his present.  This belief is most strongly evident in the concept of functional autonomy:  Your motives today are independent (autonomous) of their origins.  It doesn’t matter, for example, why you wanted to become a doctor, or why you developed a taste for olives or for kinky sex, the fact is that this is the way you are now!

Functional autonomy comes in two flavors:  The first is perseverative functional autonomy.  This refers essentially to habits -- behaviors that no longer serve their original purpose, but still continue.  You may have started smoking as a symbol of adolescent rebellion, for example, but now you smoke because you can’t quit!  Social rituals such as saying “bless you” when someone sneezes had a reason once upon a time (during the plague, a sneeze was a far more serious symptom than it is today!), but now continues because it is seen as polite.

Propriate functional autonomy is something a bit more self-directed than habits.  Values are the usual example.  Perhaps you were punished for being selfish when you were a child.  That doesn’t in any way detract from your well-known generosity today -- it has become your value!

Perhaps you can see how the idea of functional autonomy may have derived from Allport’s frustration with Freud (or the behaviorists).  Of course, that hardly means that it’s only a defensive belief on Allport’s part!

The idea of propriate functional autonomy -- values -- lead Allport and his associates Vernon and Lindzey to develop a categorization of values (in a book called A Study of Values, 1960) and a test of values.  Click here for a "demo" of the values test!

1.  the theoretical -- a scientist, for example, values truth.
2.  the economic -- a businessperson may value usefulness.
3.  the aesthetic -- an artist naturally values beauty.
4.  the social -- a nurse may have a strong love of people.
5.  the political -- a politician may value power.
6.  the religious -- a monk or nun probably values unity.

Most of us, of course, have several of these values at more moderate levels, plus we may value one or two of these quite negatively.  There are modern tests used for helping kids find their careers that have very similar dimensions.

Conclusions

Allport is one of those theorists who was so right about so many things that his ideas have simply passed on into the spirit of the times.  His theory is one of the first humanistic theories, and would influence many others, including Kelly, Maslow, and Rogers.  One unfortunate aspect of his theory is his original use of the word trait, which brought down the wrath of a number of situationally oriented behaviorists who would have been much more open to his theory if they had bothered to understand it.  But that has always been a weakness of psychology in general and personality in particular:  Ignorance of the past and the theories and research of others.

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References

Allport’s most significant books are Pattern and Growth in Personality (1965), The Person in Psychology (1968), and The Nature of Prejudice (1954).  He was a good writer, and none of these books are too technical

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Copyright 1998, 2006  C. George Boeree

Carl Rogers

1902- 1987

Dr. C. George Boeree

In French - translated by Kate Bondareva
In Macedonian - translated by Katerina Nestiv
In Hindi - translated by Nicol
In Croatian - translated by Milica Novak
In Italian - translated by Maxwell Edward
In Dutch - translated by anonymous
In Hungarian - translated by Zoltan Baffy
In Finnish - translated by Elsa Jansson

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Biography

Carl Rogers was born January 8, 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, the fourth of six children.  His father was a successful civil engineer and his mother was a housewife and devout Christian.    His education started in the second grade, because he could already read before kindergarten.

When Carl was 12, his family moved to a farm about 30 miles west of Chicago, and it was here that he was to spend his adolescence.  With a strict upbringing and many chores, Carl was to become rather isolated, independent, and self-disciplined.

He went on to the University of Wisconsin as an agriculture major.  Later, he switched to religion to study for the ministry.  During this time, he was selected as one of ten students to go to Beijing for the "World Student Christian Federation Conference" for six months.  He tells us that his new experiences so broadened his thinking that he began to doubt some of his basic religious views.

After graduation, he married Helen Elliot (against his parents' wishes), moved to New  York City, and began attending the Union Theological Seminary, a famous liberal religious institution.  While there, he took a student organized seminar called "Why am I entering the ministry?"  I might as well tell you that, unless you want to change your career, never take a class with such a title!  He tells us that most of the participants "thought their way right out of religious work."

Religion's loss was, of course, psychology's gain:  Rogers switched to the clinical psychology program of Columbia University, and received his Ph.D. in 1931.  He had already begun his clinical work at the Rochester Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.  At this clinic, he learned about Otto Rank's theory and therapy techniques, which started him on the road to developing his own approach.

He was offered a full professorship at Ohio State in 1940.  In 1942, he wrote his first book, Counseling and Psychotherapy.  Then, in 1945, he was invited to set up a counseling center at the University of Chicago.  It was while working there that in 1951 he published his major work, Client-Centered Therapy, wherein he outlines his basic theory.

In 1957, he returned to teach at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsisn.  Unfortunately, it was a time of conflict within their psychology department, and Rogers became very disillusioned with higher education.  In 1964, he was happy to accept a research position in La Jolla, California.  He provided therapy, gave speeches, and wrote, until his death in 1987.

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Theory

Roger's theory is a clinical one, based on years of experience dealing with his clients.  He has this in common with Freud, for example.  Also in common with Freud is that his is a particularly rich and mature theory -- well thought-out and logically tight, with broad application.

Not in common with Freud, however, is the fact that Rogers sees people as basically good or healthy -- or at very least, not bad or ill.  In other words, he sees mental health as the normal progression of life, and he sees mental illness, criminality, and other human problems, as distortions of that natural tendency.  Also not in common with Freud is the fact that Rogers' theory is a relatively simple one.

Also not in common with Freud is that Rogers' theory is particularly simple -- elegant even!  The entire theory is built on a single "force of life" he calls the actualizing tendency.  It can be defined as the built-in motivation present in every life-form to develop its potentials to the fullest extent possible.  We're not just talking about survival:  Rogers believes that all creatures strive to make the very best of their existence.  If they fail to do so, it is not for a lack of desire.

Rogers captures with this single great need or motive all the other motives that other theorists talk about.  He asks us, why do we want air and water and food?  Why do we seek safety, love, and a sense of competence?  Why, indeed, do we seek to discover new medicines, invent new power sources, or create new works of art?  Because, he answers, it is in our nature as living things to do the very best we can!

Keep in mind that, unlike Maslow's use of the term, Rogers applies it to all living creatures.  Some of his earliest examples, in fact, include seaweed and mushrooms!  Think about it:  Doesn't it sometimes amaze you the way weeds will grow through the sidewalk, or saplings crack boulders, or animals survive desert conditions or the frozen north?

He also applied the idea to ecosystems, saying that an ecosystem such as a forest, with all its complexity, has a much greater actualization potential than a simple ecosystem such as a corn field.  If one bug were to become extinct in a forest, there are likely to be other creatures that will adapt to fill the gap;  On the other hand, one bout of "corn blight" or some such disaster, and you have a dust bowl.  The same for us as individuals:  If we live as we should, we will become increasingly complex, like the forest, and thereby remain flexible in the face of life's little -- and big -- disasters.

People, however, in the course of actualizing their potentials, created society and culture.  In and of itself, that's not a problem:  We are a social creature, it is our nature.  But when we created culture, it developed a life of its own.  Rather than remaining close to other aspects of our natures, culture can become a force in its own right.  And even if, in the long run, a culture that interferes with our actualization dies out, we, in all likelihood, will die with it.

Don't misunderstand:  Culture and society are not intrinsically evil!  It's more along the lines of the birds of paradise found in Papua-New Guinea.  The colorful and dramatic plumage of the males apparently distract predators from females and the young.  Natural selection has led these birds towards more and more elaborate tail feathers, until in some species the male can no longer get off the ground.  At that point, being colorful doesn't do the male -- or the species -- much good!  In the same way, our elaborate societies, complex cultures, incredible technologies, for all that they have helped us to survive and prosper, may at the same time serve to harm us, and possibly even destroy us.

Details

Rogers tells us that organisms know what is good for them.  Evolution has provided us with the senses, the tastes, the discriminations we need:  When we hunger, we find food -- not just any food, but food that tastes good.  Food that tastes bad is likely to be spoiled, rotten, unhealthy. That what good and bad tastes are -- our evolutionary lessons made clear!  This is called organismic valuing.

Among the many things that we instinctively value is positive regard, Rogers umbrella term for things like love, affection, attention, nurturance, and so on.  It is clear that babies need love and attention. In fact, it may well be that they die without it.  They certainly fail to thrive -- i.e. become all they can be.

Another thing -- perhaps peculiarly human -- that we value is positive self-regard, that is, self-esteem, self-worth, a positive self-image.  We achieve this positive self-regard by experiencing the positive regard others show us over our years of growing up.  Without this self-regard, we feel small and helpless, and again we fail to become all that we can be!

Like Maslow, Rogers believes that, if left to their own devices, animals will tend to eat and drink things that are good for them, and consume them in balanced proportions.  Babies, too, seem to want and like what they need.  Somewhere along the line, however, we have created an environment for ourselves that is significantly different from the one in which we evolved.  In this new environment are such things as refined sugar, flour, butter, chocolate, and so on, that our ancestors in Africa never knew.  These things have flavors that appeal to our organismic valuing -- yet do not serve our actualization well.  Over millions of years, we may evolve to find brocolli more satisfying than cheesecake -- but by then, it'll be way too late for you and me.

Our society also leads us astray with conditions of worth.  As we grow up, our parents, teachers, peers, the media, and others, only give us what we need when we show we are "worthy," rather than just because we need it. We get a drink when we finish our class, we get something sweet when we finish our vegetables, and most importantly, we get love and affection if and only if we "behave!"

Getting positive regard on "on condition" Rogers calls conditional positive regard.  Because we do indeed need positive regard, these conditions are very powerful, and we bend ourselves into a shape determined, not by our organismic valuing or our actualizing tendency, but by a society that may or may not truly have our best interests at heart.  A "good little boy or girl" may not be a healthy or happy boy or girl!

Over time, this "conditioning" leads us to have conditional positive self-regard as well.  We begin to like ourselves only if we meet up with the standards others have applied to us, rather than if we are truly actualizing our potentials.  And since these standards were created without keeping each individual in mind, more often than not we find ourselves unable to meet them, and therefore unable to maintain any sense of self-esteem.

Incongruity

The aspect of your being that is founded in the actualizing tendency, follows organismic valuing, needs and receives positive regard and self-regard, Rogers calls the real self.  It is the "you" that, if all goes well, you will become.

On the other hand, to the extent that our society is out of synch with the actualizing tendency, and we are forced to live with conditions of worth that are out of step with organismic valuing, and receive only conditional positive regard and self-regard, we develop instead an ideal self.  By ideal, Rogers is suggesting something not real, something that is always out of our reach, the standard we can't meet.

This gap between the real self and the ideal self, the "I am" and the "I should" is called incongruity.  The greater the gap, the more incongruity.  The more incongruity, the more suffering.  In fact, incongruity is essentially what Rogers means by neurosis:  Being out of synch with your own self.  If this all sounds familiar to you, it is precisely the same point made by Karen Horney!

Defenses

When you are in a situation where there is an incongruity between your image of yourself and your immediate experience of yourself (i.e. between the ideal and the real self), you are in a threatening situation.  For example, if you have been taught to feel unworthy if you do not get A's on all your tests, and yet you aren't really all that great a student, then situations such as tests are going to bring that incongruity to light -- tests will be very threatening.

When you are expecting a threatening situation, you will feel anxiety.  Anxiety is a signal indicating that there is trouble ahead, that you should avoid the situation!  One way to avoid the situation, of course, is to pick yourself up and run for the hills.  Since that is not usually an option in life, instead of running physically, we run psychologically, by using defenses.

Rogers' idea of defenses is very similar to Freud's, except that Rogers considers everything from a perceptual point-of-view, so that even memories and impulses are thought of as perceptions.  Fortunately for us, he has only two defenses:  denial and perceptual distortion.

Denial means very much what it does in Freud's system:  You block out the threatening situation altogether.  An example might be the person who never picks up his test or asks about test results, so he doesn't have to face poor grades (at least for now!).  Denial for Rogers does also include what Freud called repression:  If keeping a memory or an impulse out of your awareness -- refuse to perceive it -- you may be able to avoid (again, for now!) a threatening situation.

Perceptual distortion is a matter of reinterpreting the situation so that it appears less threatening.  It is very similar to Freud's rationalization.  A student that is threatened by tests and grades may, for example, blame the professor for poor teaching, trick questions, bad attitude, or whatever.  The fact that sometimes professors are poor teachers, write trick questions, and have bad attitudes only makes the distortion work better:  If it could be true, then maybe it really was true!  It can also be much more obviously perceptual, such as when the person misreads his grade as better than it is.

Unfortunately for the poor neurotic (and, in fact, most of us), every time he or she uses a defense, they put a greater distance between the real and the ideal.  They become ever more incongruous, and find themselves in more and more threatening situations, develop greater and greater levels of anxiety, and use more and more defenses....  It becomes a vicious cycle that the person eventually is unable to get out of, at least on their own.

Rogers also has a partial explanation for psychosis:  Psychosis occurs when a person's defense are overwhelmed, and their sense of self becomes "shattered" into little disconnected pieces.  His behavior likewise has little consistency to it.  We see him as having "psychotic breaks" -- episodes of bizarre behavior.  His words may make little sense.  His emotions may be inappropriate.  He may lose the ability to differentiate self and non-self, and become disoriented and passive.

The fully-functioning person

Rogers, like Maslow, is just as interested in describing the healthy person.  His term is "fully-functioning," and involves the following qualities:

1.  Openness to experience.  This is the opposite of defensiveness.  It is the accurate perception of one's experiences in the world, including one's feelings.  It also means being able to accept reality, again including one's feelings.  Feelings are such an important part of openness because they convey organismic valuing.  If you cannot be open to your feelings, you cannot be open to acualization.  The hard part, of course, is distinguishing real feelings from the anxieties brought on by  conditions of worth.

2.  Existential living.  This is living in the here-and-now.  Rogers, as a part of getting in touch with reality, insists that we not live in the past or the future -- the one is gone, and the other isn't anything at all, yet!  The present is the only reality we have.  Mind you, that doesn't mean we shouldn't remember and learn from our past.  Neither does it mean we shouldn't plan or even day-dream about the future.  Just recognize these things for what they are:  memories and dreams, which we are experiencing here in the present.

3.  Organismic trusting.  We should allow ourselves to be guided by the organismic valuing process.  We should trust ourselves, do what feels right, what comes natural.  This, as I'm sure you realize, has become a major sticking point in Rogers' theory.  People say, sure, do what comes natural -- if you are a sadist, hurt people; if you are a masochist, hurt yourself; if the drugs or alcohol make you happy, go for it; if you are depressed, kill yourself....  This certainly doesn't sound like great advice.  In fact, many of the excesses of the sixties and seventies were blamed on this attitude.  But keep in mind that Rogers meant trust your real self, and you can only know what your real self has to say if you are open to experience and living existentially!  In other words, organismic trusting assumes you are in contact with the acutalizing tendency.

4.  Experiential freedom.  Rogers felt that it was irrelevant whether or not people really had free will.  We feel very much as if we do.  This is not to say, of course, that we are free to do anything at all:  We are surrounded by a deterministic universe, so that, flap my arms as much as I like, I will not fly like Superman.  It means that we feel free when choices are available to us.  Rogers says that the fully-functioning person acknowledges that feeling of freedom, and takes responsibility for his choices.

5.  Creativity.  If you feel free and responsible, you will act accordingly, and participate in the world.  A fully-functioning person, in touch with acualization, will feel obliged by their nature to contribute to the actualization of others, even life itself.  This can be through creativity in the arts or sciences, through social concern and parental love, or simply by doing one's best at one's job.  Creativity as Rogers uses it is very close to Erikson's generativity.

Therapy

 Carl Rogers is best known for his contributions to therapy.  His therapy has gone through a couple of name changes along the way:  He originally called it non-directive, because he felt that the therapist should not lead the client, but rather be there for the client while the client directs the progress of the therapy.  As he became more experienced, he realized that, as "non-directive" as he was, he still influenced his client by his very "non-directiveness!"  In other words, clients look to therapists for guidance, and will find it even when the therapist is trying not to guide.

So he changed the name to client-centered.  He still felt that the client was the one who should say what is wrong, find ways of improving, and determine the conclusion of therapy -- his therapy was still very "client-centered" even while he acknowledged the impact of the therapist.  Unfortunately, other therapists felt that this name for his therapy was a bit of a slap in the face for them:  Aren't most therapies "client-centered?"

Nowadays, though the terms non-directive and client-centered are still used, most people just call it Rogerian therapy.  One of the phrases that Rogers used to describe his therapy is "supportive, not reconstructive," and he uses the analogy of learning to ride a bicycle to explain:  When you help a child to learn to ride a bike, you can't just tell them how.  They have to try it for themselves.  And you can't hold them up the whole time either.  There comes a point when you have to let them go.  If they fall, they fall, but if you hang on, they never learn.

It's the same in therapy.  If independence (autonomy, freedom with responsibility) is what you are helping a client to achieve, then they will not achieve it if they remain dependent on you, the therapist.  They need to try their insights on their own, in real life beyond the therapist's office!  An authoritarian approach to therapy may seem to work marvelously at first, but ultimately it only creates a dependent person.

There is only one technique that Rogerians are known for:  reflection.  Reflection is the mirroring of emotional communication:  If the client says "I feel like shit!" the therapist may reflect this back to the client by saying something like "So, life's getting you down, hey?"  By doing this, the therapist is communicating to the client that he is indeed listening and cares enough to understand.

The therapist is also letting the client know what it is the client is communicating.  Often, people in distress say things that they don't mean because it feels good to say them.  For example, a woman once came to me and said "I hate men!"  I reflected by saying "You hate all men?"  Well, she said, maybe not all -- she didn't hate her father or her brother or, for that matter, me.  Even with those men she "hated," she discovered that the great majority of them she didn't feel as strongly as the word hate implies.  In fact, ultimately, she realized that she didn't trust many men, and that she was afraid of being hurt by them the way she had been by one particular man.

Reflection must be used carefully, however.  Many beginning therapists use it without thinking (or feeling), and just repeat every other phrase that comes out of the client's mouth.  They sound like parrots with psychology degrees!  Then they think that the client doesn't notice, when in fact it has become a stereotype of Rogerian therapy the same way as sex and mom have become stereotypes of Freudian therapy.  Reflection must come from the heart -- it must be genuine, congruent.

Which brings us to Rogers' famous requirements of the therapist.  Rogers felt that a therapist, in order to be effective, must have three very special qualities:

1.  Congruence -- genuineness, honesty with the client.
2.  Empathy -- the ability to feel what the client feels.
3.  Respect -- acceptance, unconditional positive regard towards the client.

He says these qualities are "necessary and sufficient:"  If the therapist shows these three qualities, the client will improve, even if no other special "techniques" are used.  If the therapist does not show these three qualities, the client's improvement will be minimal, no matter how many "techniques" are used.  Now this is a lot to ask of a therapist!  They're just human, and often enough a bit more "human" (let's say unusual) than most.  Rogers does give in a little, and he adds that the therapist must show these things in the therapy relationship.  In other words, when the therapist leaves the office, he can be as "human" as anybody.

I happen to agree with Rogers, even though these qualities are quite demanding.  Some of the research does suggest that techniques don't matter nearly as much as the therapist's personality, and that, to some extent at least, therapists are "born" not "made."

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References

Rogers was a great writer, a real pleasure to read.  The most complete statement of his theory is in Client-centered Therapy (1951).  Two collections of essays are very interesting:  On Becoming a Person (1961) and A Way of Being (1980).  Finally, there's a nice collection of his work in The Carl Rogers Reader, edited by Kirschenbaum and Henderson (1989).

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Copyright 1998, 2006 by C. George Boeree

Abraham Maslow

1908 - 1970

Dr. C. George Boeree

In Belarus: Маслоу
In French: Maslow (translated by Eddie Vigor)
In Ukrainian: Маслоу (translated by Olena Chervona)
In Russian: Маслоу (translated by Peter)
In Serbian: Маслов (translated by Branca Fiagic)
In Filipino: Maslow (translated by Josh Lawrenz)
In Turkish: Maslow (translated by Katie)

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Biography

Abraham Harold Maslow was born April 1, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York.  He was the first of seven children born to his parents, who themselves were uneducated Jewish immigrants from Russia.  His parents, hoping for the best for their children in the new world, pushed him hard for academic success.  Not surprisingly, he became very lonely as a boy, and found his refuge in books.

To satisfy his parents, he first studied law at the City College of New York (CCNY).  After three semesters, he transferred to Cornell, and then back to CCNY.  He married Bertha Goodman, his first cousin, against his parents wishes.  Abe and Bertha went on to have two daughters.

He and Bertha moved to Wisconsin so that he could attend the University of Wisconsin.  Here, he became interested in psychology, and his school work began to improve dramatically. He spent time there working with Harry Harlow, who is famous for his experiments with baby rhesus monkeys and attachment behavior.

He received his BA in 1930, his MA in 1931, and his PhD in 1934, all in psychology, all from the University of Wisconsin.  A year after graduation, he returned to New York to work with E. L. Thorndike at Columbia, where Maslow became interested in research on human sexuality.

He began teaching full time at Brooklyn College.  During this period of his life, he came into contact with the many European intellectuals that were immigrating to the US, and Brooklyn in particular, at that time -- people like Adler, Fromm, Horney, as well as several Gestalt and Freudian psychologists.

Maslow served as the chair of the psychology department at Brandeis from 1951 to 1969.  While there he met Kurt Goldstein, who had originated the idea of self-actualization in his famous book, The Organism (1934).  It was also here that he began his crusade for a humanistic psychology -- something ultimately much more important to him than his own theorizing.

He spend his final years in semi-retirement in California, until, on June 8 1970, he died of a heart attack after years of ill health.

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Theory

One of the many interesting things Maslow noticed while he worked with monkeys early in his career, was that some needs take precedence over others.  For example, if you are hungry and thirsty, you will tend to try to take care of the thirst first.  After all, you can do without food for weeks, but you can only do without water for a couple of days!  Thirst is a “stronger” need than hunger.  Likewise, if you are very very thirsty, but someone has put a choke hold on you and you can’t breath, which is more important?  The need to breathe, of course.  On the other hand, sex is less powerful than any of these.  Let’s face it, you won’t die if you don’t get it!

Maslow took this idea and created his now famous hierarchy of needs. Beyond the details of air, water, food, and sex, he laid out five broader layers:  the physiological needs, the needs for safety and security, the needs for love and belonging, the needs for esteem, and the need to actualize the self, in that order.

1.  The physiological needs.  These include the needs we have for oxygen, water, protein, salt, sugar, calcium, and other minerals and vitamins.  They also include the need to maintain a pH balance (getting too acidic or base will kill you) and temperature (98.6 or near to it).  Also, there’s the needs to be active, to rest, to sleep, to get rid of wastes (CO2,  sweat, urine, and feces), to avoid pain, and to have sex.  Quite a collection!

Maslow believed, and research supports him, that these are in fact individual needs, and that a lack of, say, vitamin C, will lead to a very specific hunger for things which have in the past provided that vitamin C -- e.g. orange juice.  I guess the cravings that some pregnant women have, and the way in which babies eat the most foul tasting baby food, support the idea anecdotally.

2.  The safety and security needs.  When the physiological needs are largely taken care of, this second layer of needs comes into play.  You will become increasingly interested in finding safe circumstances, stability, protection.  You might develop a need for structure, for order, some limits.

Looking at it negatively, you become concerned, not with needs like hunger and thirst, but with your fears and anxieties.  In the ordinary American adult, this set of needs manifest themselves in the form of our urges to have a home in a safe neighborhood, a little job security and a nest egg, a good retirement plan and a bit of insurance, and so on.

3.  The love and belonging needs.  When physiological needs and safety needs are, by and large, taken care of, a third layer starts to show up.  You begin to feel the need for friends, a sweetheart, children, affectionate relationships in general, even a sense of community.  Looked at negatively, you become increasing susceptible to loneliness and social anxieties.

In our day-to-day life, we exhibit these needs in our desires to marry, have a family, be a part of a community, a member of a church, a brother in the fraternity, a part of a gang or a bowling club.  It is also a part of what we look for in a career.

4.  The esteem needs.  Next, we begin to look for a little self-esteem.  Maslow noted two versions of esteem needs, a lower one and a higher one.  The lower one is the need for the respect of others, the need for status, fame, glory, recognition, attention, reputation, appreciation, dignity, even dominance.  The higher form involves the need for self-respect, including such feelings as confidence, competence, achievement, mastery, independence, and freedom.  Note that this is the “higher” form because, unlike the respect of others, once you have self-respect, it’s a lot harder to lose!

The negative version of these needs is low self-esteem and inferiority complexes.  Maslow felt that Adler was really onto something when he proposed that these were at the roots of many, if not most, of our psychological problems.  In modern countries, most of us have what we need in regard to our physiological and safety needs.  We, more often than not, have quite a bit of love and belonging, too.  It’s a little respect that often seems so very hard to get!

All of the preceding four levels he calls deficit needs, or D-needs.  If you don’t have enough of something -- i.e. you have a deficit -- you feel the need.  But if you get all you need, you feel nothing at all!  In other words, they cease to be motivating.  As the old blues song goes, “you don’t miss your water till your well runs dry!”

He also talks about these levels in terms of homeostasis.  Homeostasis is the principle by which your furnace thermostat operates:  When it gets too cold, it switches the heat on;  When it gets too hot, it switches the heat off.  In the same way, your body, when it lacks a certain substance, develops a hunger for it;  When it gets enough of it, then the hunger stops.  Maslow simply extends the homeostatic principle to needs, such as safety, belonging, and esteem, that we don’t ordinarily think of in these terms.

Maslow sees all these needs as essentially survival needs.  Even love and esteem are needed for the maintenance of health.  He says we all have these needs built in to us genetically, like instincts.  In fact, he calls them instinctoid -- instinct-like -- needs.

In terms of overall development, we move through these levels a bit like stages.  As newborns, our focus (if not our entire set of needs) is on the physiological.  Soon, we begin to recognize that we need to be safe.  Soon after that, we crave attention and affection.  A bit later, we look for self-esteem.  Mind you, this is in the first couple of years!

Under stressful conditions, or when survival is threatened, we can “regress” to a lower need level.  When you great career falls flat, you might seek out a little attention.  When your family ups and leaves you, it seems that love is again all you ever wanted.  When you face chapter eleven after a long and happy life, you suddenly can’t think of anything except money.

These things can occur on a society-wide basis as well:  When society suddenly flounders, people start clamoring for a strong leader to take over and make things right.  When the bombs start falling, they look for safety.  When the food stops coming into the stores, their needs become even more basic.

Maslow suggested that we can ask people for their “philosophy of the future” -- what would their ideal life or world be like -- and get significant information as to what needs they do or do not have covered.

If you have significant problems along your development -- a period of extreme insecurity or hunger as a child, or the loss of a family member through death or divorce, or significant neglect or abuse -- you may “fixate” on that set of needs for the rest of your life.

This is Maslow’s understanding of neurosis.  Perhaps you went through a war as a kid. Now you have everything your heart needs -- yet you still find yourself obsessing over having enough money and keeping the pantry well-stocked.  Or perhaps your parents divorced when you were young.  Now you have a wonderful spouse -- yet you get insanely jealous or worry constantly that they are going to leave you because you are not “good enough” for them.  You get the picture.

Self-actualization

The last level is a bit different.  Maslow has used a variety of terms to refer to this level:  He has called it growth motivation (in contrast to deficit motivation), being needs (or B-needs, in contrast to D-needs), and self-actualization.

These are needs that do not involve balance or homeostasis.  Once engaged, they continue to be felt.  In fact, they are likely to become stronger as we “feed” them!  They involve the continuous desire to fulfill potentials, to “be all that you can be.”  They are a matter of becoming the most complete, the fullest, “you” -- hence the term, self-actualization.

Now, in keeping with his theory up to this point, if you want to be truly self-actualizing, you need to have your lower needs taken care of, at least to a considerable extent.  This makes sense:  If you are hungry, you are scrambling to get food;  If you are unsafe, you have to be continuously on guard;  If you are isolated and unloved, you have to satisfy that need;  If you have a low sense of self-esteem, you have to be defensive or compensate.  When lower needs are unmet, you can’t fully devote yourself to fulfilling your potentials.

It isn’t surprising, then, the world being as difficult as it is, that only a small percentage of the world’s population is truly, predominantly, self-actualizing.  Maslow at one point suggested only about two percent!

The question becomes, of course, what exactly does Maslow mean by self-actualization.  To answer that, we need to look at the kind of people he called self-actualizers.  Fortunately, he did this for us, using a qualitative method called biographical analysis.

He began by picking out a group of people, some historical figures, some people he knew, whom he felt clearly met the standard of self-actualization.  Included in this august group were Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Adams, William James, Albert Schweitzer, Benedict Spinoza, and Alduous Huxley, plus 12 unnamed people who were alive at the time Maslow did his research.  He then looked at their biographies, writings, the acts and words of those he knew personally, and so on.  From these sources, he developed a list of qualities that seemed characteristic of these people, as opposed to the great mass of us.

These people were reality-centered, which means they could differentiate what is fake and dishonest from what is real and genuine.  They were problem-centered, meaning they treated life’s difficulties as problems demanding solutions, not as personal troubles to be railed at or surrendered to.  And they had a different perception of means and ends.  They felt that the ends don’t necessarily justify the means, that the means could be ends themselves, and that the means -- the journey -- was often more important than the ends.

The self-actualizers also had a different way of relating to others.  First, they enjoyed solitude, and were comfortable being alone.    And they enjoyed deeper personal relations with a few close friends and family members, rather than more shallow relationships with many people.

They enjoyed autonomy, a relative independence from physical and social needs.  And they resisted enculturation, that is, they were not susceptible to social pressure to be "well adjusted" or to "fit in" -- they were, in fact, nonconformists in the best sense.

They had an unhostile sense of humor -- preferring to joke at their own expense, or at the human condition, and never directing their humor at others.  They had a quality he called acceptance of self and others, by which he meant that these people would be more likely to take you as you are than try to change you into what they thought you should be.  This same acceptance applied to their attitudes towards themselves:  If some quality of theirs wasn’t harmful, they let it be, even enjoying it as a personal quirk.  On the other hand, they were often strongly motivated to change negative qualities in themselves that could be changed.  Along with this comes spontaneity and simplicity:  They preferred being themselves rather than being pretentious or artificial.  In fact, for all their nonconformity, he found that they tended to be conventional on the surface, just where less self-actualizing nonconformists tend to be the most dramatic.

Further, they had a sense of humility and respect towards others -- something Maslow also called democratic values -- meaning that they were open to ethnic and individual variety, even treasuring it.  They had a quality Maslow called human kinship or Gemeinschaftsgefühl -- social interest, compassion, humanity.  And this was accompanied by a strong ethics, which was spiritual but seldom conventionally religious in nature.

And these people had a certain freshness of appreciation, an ability to see things, even ordinary things, with wonder.  Along with this comes their ability to be creative, inventive, and original.  And, finally, these people tended to have more peak experiences than the average person.  A peak experience is one that takes you out of yourself, that makes you feel very tiny, or very large, to some extent one with life or nature or God.  It gives you a feeling of being a part of the infinite and the eternal.  These experiences tend to leave their mark on a person, change them for the better, and many people actively seek them out.  They are also called mystical experiences, and are an important part of many religious and philosophical traditions.

Maslow doesn’t think that self-actualizers are perfect, of course.  There were several flaws or imperfections he discovered along the way as well:  First, they often suffered considerable anxiety and guilt -- but realistic anxiety and guilt, rather than misplaced or neurotic versions.  Some of them were absentminded and overly kind.  And finally, some of them had unexpected moments of ruthlessness, surgical coldness, and loss of humor.

Two other points he makes about these self-actualizers:  Their values were "natural" and seemed to flow effortlessly from their personalities.  And they appeared to transcend many of the dichotomies others accept as being undeniable, such as the differences between the spiritual and the physical, the selfish and the unselfish, and the masculine and the feminine.

Metaneeds and metapathologies

Another way in which Maslow approach the problem of what is self-actualization is to talk about the special, driving needs (B-needs, of course) of the self-actualizers.  They need the following in their lives in order to be happy:

Truth, rather than dishonesty.
Goodness, rather than evil.
Beauty, not ugliness or vulgarity.
Unity, wholeness, and transcendence of opposites, not arbitrariness or forced choices.
Aliveness, not deadness or the mechanization of life.
Uniqueness, not bland uniformity.
Perfection and necessity, not sloppiness, inconsistency, or accident.
Completion, rather than incompleteness.
Justice and order, not injustice and lawlessness.
Simplicity, not unnecessary complexity.
Richness, not environmental impoverishment.
Effortlessness, not strain.
Playfulness, not grim, humorless, drudgery.
Self-sufficiency, not dependency.
Meaningfulness, rather than senselessness.

At first glance, you might think that everyone obviously needs these.  But think:  If you are living through an economic depression or a war, or are living in a ghetto or in rural poverty, do you worry about these issues, or do you worry about getting enough to eat and a roof over your head?  In fact, Maslow believes that much of the what is wrong with the world comes down to the fact that very few people really are interested in these values -- not because they are bad people, but because they haven’t even had their basic needs taken care of!

When a self-actualizer doesn’t get these needs fulfilled, they respond with metapathologies -- a list of problems as long as the list of metaneeds!  Let me summarize it by saying that, when forced to live without these values, the self-actualizer develops depression, despair, disgust,alienation, and a degree of cynicism.

Maslow hoped that his efforts at describing the self-actualizing person would eventually lead to a “periodic table” of the kinds of qualities, problems, pathologies, and even solutions characteristic of higher levels of human potential.  Over time, he devoted increasing attention, not to his own theory, but to humanistic psychology and the human potentials movement.

Toward the end of his life, he inaugurated what he called the fourth force in psychology:  Freudian and other “depth” psychologies constituted the first force;  Behaviorism was the second force;  His own humanism, including the European existentialists, were the third force.  The fourth force was the transpersonal psychologies which, taking their cue from Eastern philosophies, investigated such things as meditation, higher levels of consciousness, and even parapsychological phenomena.  Perhaps the best known transpersonalist today is Ken Wilber, author of such books as The Atman Project and The History of Everything.

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Discussion

Maslow has been a very inspirational figure in personality theories.  In the 1960’s in particular, people were tired of the reductionistic, mechanistic messages of the behaviorists and physiological psychologists.  They were looking for meaning and purpose in their lives, even a higher, more mystical meaning.  Maslow was one of the pioneers in that movement to bring the human being back into psychology, and the person back into personality!

At approximately the same time, another movement was getting underway, one inspired by some of the very things that turned Maslow off:  computers and information processing, as well as very rationalistic theories such as Piaget’s cognitive development theory and Noam Chomsky’s linguistics.  This, of course, became the cognitive movement in psychology.  As the heyday of humanism appeared to lead to little more than drug abuse, astrology,  and self indulgence, cognitivism provided the scientific ground students of psychology were yearning for.

But the message should not be lost:  Psychology is, first and foremost, about people, real people in real lives, and not about computer models, statistical analyses, rat behavior, test scores, and laboratories.

Some criticism

The “big picture” aside, there are a few criticisms we might direct at Maslow’s theory itself.  The most common criticism concerns his methodology:  Picking a small number of people that he himself declared self-actualizing, then reading about them or talking with them, and coming to conclusions about what self-actualization is in the first place does not sound like good science to many people.

In his defense, I should point out that he understood this, and thought of his work as simply pointing the way.  He hoped that others would take up the cause and complete what he had begun in a more rigorous fashion.  It is a curiosity that Maslow, the “father” of American humanism, began his career as a behaviorist with a strong physiological bent.  He did indeed believe in science, and often grounded his ideas in biology.  He only meant to broaden psychology to include the best in us, as well as the pathological!

Another criticism, a little harder to respond to, is that Maslow placed such constraints on self-actualization.  First, Kurt Goldstein and Carl Rogers used the phrase to refer to what every living creature does:  To try to grow, to become more, to fulfill its biological destiny.  Maslow limits it to something only two percent of the human species achieves.  And while Rogers felt that babies were the best examples of human self-actualization, Maslow saw it as something achieved only rarely by the young.

Another point is that he asks that we pretty much take care of our lower needs before self-actualization comes to the forefront.  And yet we can find many examples of people who exhibited at very least aspects of self-actualization who were far from having their lower needs taken care of.  Many of our best artists and authors, for example, suffered from poverty, bad upbringing, neuroses, and depression.  Some could even be called psychotic!  If you think about Galileo, who prayed for ideas that would sell, or Rembrandt, who could barely keep food on the table, or Toulouse Lautrec, whose body tormented him, or van Gogh, who, besides poor, wasn’t quite right in the head, if you know what I mean...  Weren’t these people engaged in some form of self-actualization?  The idea of artists and poets and philosophers (and psychologists!) being strange is so common because it has so much truth to it!

We also have the example of a number of people who were creative in some fashion even while in concentration camps.  Trachtenberg, for example, developed a new way of doing arithmetic in a camp.  Viktor Frankl developed his approach to therapy while in a camp.  There are many more examples.

And there are examples of people who were creative when unknown, became successful only to stop being creative.  Ernest Hemingway, if I’m not mistaken, is an example.  Perhaps all these examples are exceptions, and the hierarchy of needs stands up well to the general trend.  But the exceptions certainly do put some doubt into our minds.

I would like to suggest a variation on Maslow's theory that might help.  If we take the idea of actualization as Goldstein and Rogers use it, i.e. as the "life force" that drives all creatures, we can also acknowledge that there are various things that interfere with the full effectiveness of that life force.  If we are deprived of our basic physical needs, if we are living under threatening circumstances, if we are isolated from others, or if we have no confidence in our abilities, we may continue to survive, but it will not be as fulfilling a live as it could be.  We will not be fully actualizing our potentials!  We could even understand that there might be people that actualize despite deprivation!  If we take the deficit needs as subtracting from actualization, and if we talk about full self-actualization rather than self-actualization as a separate category of need, Maslow's theory comes into line with other theories, and the exceptional people who succeed in the face of adversity can be seen as heroic rather than freakish abberations.

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I received the following email from Gareth Costello of Dublin, Ireland, which balances my somewhat negative review of Maslow:

One mild criticism I would have is of your concluding assessment, where you appeal for a broader view of self-actualisation that could include subjects such as van Gogh and other hard-at-heel intellectual/creative giants. This appears to be based on a view that people like van Gogh, etc. were, by virtue of their enormous creativity, 'at least partly' self-actualised.

I favour Maslow's more narrow definition of self-actualisation and would not agree that self-actualisation equates with supreme self-expression. I suspect that self-actualisation is, often, a demotivating factor where artistic creativity is concerned, and that artists such as van Gogh thrived (artistically, if not in other respects) specifically in the absence of circumstances conducive to self-actualisation. Even financially successful artists (e.g. Stravinsky, who was famously good at looking after his financial affairs, as well as affairs of other kinds) do exhibit some of the non-self-actualised 'motivators' that you describe so well.

Self-actualisation implies an outwardness and openness that contrasts with the introspection that can be a pre-requisite for great artistic self-expression. Where scientists can look out at the world around them to find something of profound or universal significance, great artists usually look inside themselves to find something of personal significance - the universality of their work is important but secondary. It's interesting that Maslow seems to have concentrated on people concerned with the big-picture when defining self-actualisation. In Einstein, he selected a scientist who was striving for a theory of the entire physical universe. The philosophers and politicians he analysed were concerned with issues of great relevance to humanity.

This is not to belittle the value or importance of the 'small-picture' - society needs splitters as well as lumpers. But while self-actualisation may be synonymous with psychological balance and health, it does not necessarily lead to professional or creative brilliance in all fields. In some instances, it may remove the driving force that leads people to excel -- art being the classic example. So I don't agree that the scope of self-actualisation should be extended to include people who may well have been brilliant, but who were also quite possibly damaged, unrounded or unhappy human beings.

If I had the opportunity to chose between brilliance (alone) or self-actualisation (alone) for my children, I would go for the latter!

Gareth makes some very good points!

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Bibliography

Maslow’s books are easy to read and full of interesting ideas.  The best known are Toward a Psychology of Being (1968), Motivation and Personality (first edition, 1954, and second edition, 1970), and The Further Reaches of Human Nature (1971).  Finally, there are many articles by Maslow, especially in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, which he cofounded.

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Copyright 1998, 2006 by C. George Boeree

 

Albert Bandura

1925 - present

Dr. C. George Boeree

 

Biography

Albert Bandura was born December 4, 1925, in the small town of Mundare in northern Alberta, Canada.  He was educated in a small elementary school and high school in one, with minimal resources, yet a remarkable success rate.  After high school, he worked for one summer filling holes on the Alaska Highway in the Yukon.

He received his bachelors degree in Psychology from the University of British Columbia in 1949.  He went on to the University of Iowa, where he received his Ph.D. in 1952.  It was there that he came under the influence of the behaviorist tradition and learning theory.

While at Iowa, he met Virginia Varns, an instructor in the nursing school.  They married and later had two daughters.  After graduating, he took a postdoctoral position at the Wichita Guidance Center in Wichita, Kansas.

In 1953, he started teaching at Stanford University.  While there, he collaborated with his first graduate student, Richard Walters, resulting in their first book, Adolescent Aggression, in 1959.

Bandura was president of the APA in 1973, and received the APA’s Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions in 1980.  He continues to work at Stanford to this day.

 

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Theory

Behaviorism, with its emphasis on experimental methods, focuses on variables we can observe, measure, and manipulate, and avoids whatever is subjective, internal, and unavailable -- i.e. mental.  In the experimental method, the standard procedure is to manipulate one variable, and then measure its effects on another.  All this boils down to a theory of personality that says that one’s environment causes one’s behavior.

Bandura found this a bit too simplistic for the phenomena he was observing -- aggression in adolescents -- and so decided to add a little something to the formula:  He suggested that environment causes behavior, true; but behavior causes environment as well.  He labeled this concept reciprocal determinism:  The world and a person’s behavior cause each other.

Later, he went a step further.  He began to look at personality as an interaction among three “things:”  the environment, behavior, and the person’s psychological processes.  These psychological processes consist of our ability to entertain images in our minds, and language.  At the point where he introduces imagery, in particular, he ceases to be a strict behaviorist, and begins to join the ranks of the cognitivists.  In fact, he is often considered a “father” of the cognitivist movement!

Adding imagery and language to the mix allows Bandura to theorize much more effectively than someone like, say, B. F. Skinner, about two things that many people would consider the “strong suit” of the human species:  observational learning (modeling) and self-regulation.

Observational learning, or modeling

Of the hundreds of studies Bandura was responsible for, one group stands out above the others -- the bobo doll studies.  He made of film of one of his students, a young woman, essentially beating up a bobo doll.  In case you don’t know, a bobo doll is an inflatable, egg-shape balloon creature with a weight in the bottom that makes it bob back up when you knock him down.  Nowadays, it might have Darth Vader painted on it, but back then it was simply “Bobo” the clown.

The woman punched the clown, shouting “sockeroo!”  She kicked it, sat on it, hit with a little hammer, and so on, shouting various aggressive phrases.  Bandura showed his film to groups of kindergartners who, as you might predict, liked it a lot.  They then were let out to play.  In the play room, of course, were several observers with pens and clipboards in hand, a brand new bobo doll, and a few little hammers.

And you might predict as well what the observers recorded:  A lot of little kids beating the daylights out of the bobo doll.  They punched it and shouted “sockeroo,” kicked it, sat on it, hit it with the little hammers, and so on.  In other words, they imitated the young lady in the film, and quite precisely at that.

This might seem like a real nothing of an experiment at first, but consider:  These children changed their behavior without first being rewarded for approximations to that behavior!  And while that may not seem extraordinary to the average parent, teacher, or casual observer of children, it didn’t fit so well with standard behavioristic learning theory.  He called the phenomenon observational learning or modeling, and his theory is usually called social learning theory.

Bandura did a large number of variations on the study:  The model was rewarded or punished in a variety of ways, the kids were rewarded for their imitations, the model was changed to be less attractive or less prestigious, and so on.  Responding to criticism that bobo dolls were supposed to be hit, he even did a film of the young woman beating up a live clown.  When the children went into the other room, what should they find there but -- the live clown!  They proceeded to punch him, kick him, hit him with little hammers, and so on.

All these variations allowed Bandura to establish that there were certain steps involved in the modeling process:

1.  Attention.  If you are going to learn anything, you have to be paying attention.  Likewise, anything that puts a damper on attention is going to decrease learning, including observational learning.  If, for example, you are sleepy, groggy, drugged, sick, nervous, or “hyper,” you will learn less well.  Likewise, if you are being distracted by competing stimuli.

Some of the things that influence attention involve characteristics of the model.  If the model is colorful and dramatic, for example, we pay more attention.  If the model is attractive, or prestigious, or appears to be particularly competent, you will pay more attention.  And if the model seems more like yourself, you pay more attention.  These kinds of variables directed Bandura towards an examination of television and its effects on kids!

2.  Retention.  Second, you must be able to retain -- remember -- what you have paid attention to.  This is where imagery and language come in:  we store what we have seen the model doing in the form of mental images or verbal descriptions.  When so stored, you can later “bring up” the image or description, so that you can reproduce it with your own behavior.

3.  Reproduction.  At this point, you’re just sitting there daydreaming.  You have to translate the images or descriptions into actual behavior.  So you have to have the ability to reproduce the behavior in the first place.  I can watch Olympic ice skaters all day long, yet not be able to reproduce their jumps, because I can’t ice skate at all!  On the other hand, if I could skate, my performance would in fact improve if I watch skaters who are better than I am.

Another important tidbit about reproduction is that our ability to imitate improves with practice at the behaviors involved.  And one more tidbit:  Our abilities improve even when we just imagine ourselves performing!  Many athletes, for example, imagine their performance in their mind’s eye prior to actually performing.

4.  Motivation.  And yet, with all this, you’re still not going to do anything unless you are motivated to imitate, i.e. until you have some reason for doing it.  Bandura mentions a number of motives:

a.  past reinforcement, ala traditional behaviorism.
b.  promised reinforcements (incentives) that we can imagine.
c.  vicarious reinforcement -- seeing and recalling the model being reinforced.

Notice that these are, traditionally, considered to be the things that “cause” learning.  Bandura is saying that they don’t so much cause learning as cause us to demonstrate what we have learned.  That is, he sees them as motives.

Of course, the negative motivations are there as well, giving you reasons not to imitate someone:

d.  past punishment.
e.  promised punishment (threats).
d.  vicarious punishment.

Like most traditional behaviorists, Bandura says that punishment in whatever form does not work as well as reinforcement and, in fact, has a tendency to “backfire” on us.

Self-regulation

Self-regulation -- controlling our own behavior -- is the other “workhorse” of human personality.  Here Bandura suggests three steps:

1.  Self-observation.  We look at ourselves, our behavior, and keep tabs on it.

2.  Judgment.  We compare what we see with a standard.  For example, we can compare our performance with traditional standards, such as “rules of etiquette.”  Or we can create arbitrary ones, like “I’ll read a book a week.”  Or we can compete with others, or with ourselves.

3.  Self-response.  If you did well in comparison with your standard, you give yourself rewarding self-responses.  If you did poorly, you give yourself punishing self-responses.  These self-responses can range from the obvious (treating yourself to a sundae or working late) to the more covert (feelings of pride or shame).

A very important concept in psychology that can be understood well with self-regulation is self-concept (better known as self-esteem).  If, over the years, you find yourself meeting your standards and life loaded with self-praise and self-reward, you will have a pleasant self-concept (high self-esteem).  If, on the other hand, you find yourself forever failing to meet your standards and punishing yourself, you will have a poor self-concept (low self-esteem).

Recall that behaviorists generally view reinforcement as effective, and punishment as fraught with problems.  The same goes for self-punishment.  Bandura sees three likely results of excessive self-punishment:

a.  compensation -- a superiority complex, for example, and delusions of grandeur.
b.  inactivity -- apathy, boredom, depression.
c.  escape -- drugs and alcohol, television fantasies, or even the ultimate escape, suicide.

These have some resemblance to the unhealthy personalities Adler and Horney talk about: an aggressive type, a compliant type, and an avoidant type respectively.

Bandura’s recommendations to those who suffer from poor self-concepts come straight from the three steps of self-regulation:

1.  Regarding self-observation -- know thyself!  Make sure you have an accurate picture of your behavior.

2.  Regarding standards -- make sure your standards aren’t set too high.  Don’t set yourself up for failure!  Standards that are too low, on the other hand, are meaningless.

3. Regarding self-response -- use self-rewards, not self-punishments.  Celebrate your victories, don’t dwell on your failures.

 

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Therapy

Self-control therapy

The ideas behind self-regulation have been incorporated into a therapy technique called self-control therapy.  It has been quite successful with relatively simple problems of habit, such as smoking, overeating, and study habits.

1. Behavioral charts.  Self-observation requires that you keep close tabs on your behavior, both before you begin changes and after.  This can involve something as simple as counting how many cigarettes you smoke in a day to complex behavioral diaries.  With the diary approach, you keep track of the details, the when and where of your habit.  This lets you get a grip on what kinds of cues are associated with the habit:  Do you smoke more after meals, with coffee, with certain friends, in certain locations...?

2.  Environmental planning.  Taking your lead from your behavioral charts and diaries, you can begin to alter your environment.  For example, you can remove or avoid some of those cues that lead to your bad behaviors:  Put away the ashtrays, drink tea instead of coffee, divorce that smoking partner....  You can find the time and place best suited for the good alternative behaviors:  When and where do you find you study best?  And so on.

3.  Self-contracts.  Finally, you arrange to reward yourself when you adhere to your plan, and possibly punish yourself when you do not.  These contracts should be written down and witnessed (by your therapist, for example), and the details should be spelled out very explicitly:  “I will go out to dinner on Saturday night if I smoke fewer cigarettes this week than last week.  I will do paperwork instead if I do not.”

You may involve other people and have them control your rewards and punishments, if you aren’t strict enough with yourself.  Beware, however:  This can be murder on your relationships, as you bite their heads off for trying to do what you told them to do!

Modeling therapy

The therapy Bandura is most famous for, however, is modeling therapy.  The theory is that, if you can get someone with a psychological disorder to observe someone dealing with the same issues in a more productive fashion, the first person will learn by modeling the second.

Bandura’s original research on this involved herpephobics -- people with a neurotic fear of snakes.  The client would be lead to a window looking in on a lab room. In that room is nothing but a chair, a table, a cage on the table with a locked latch, and a snake clearly visible in the cage.  The client then watches another person -- an actor -- go through a slow and painful approach to the snake.  He acts terrified at first, but shakes himself out of it, tells himself to relax and breathe normally and take one step at a time towards the snake.  He may stop in the middle, retreat in panic, and start all over.  Ultimately, he gets to the point where he opens the cage, removes the snake, sits down on the chair, and drapes it over his neck, all the while giving himself calming instructions.

After the client has seen all this (no doubt with his mouth hanging open the whole time), he is invited to try it himself.  Mind you, he knows that the other person is an actor -- there is no deception involved here, only modeling!  And yet, many clients -- lifelong phobics -- can go through the entire routine first time around, even after only one viewing of the actor!  This is a powerful therapy.

One drawback to the therapy is that it isn’t easy to get the rooms, the snakes, the actors, etc., together.  So Bandura and his students have tested versions of the therapy using recordings of actors and even just imagining the process under the therapist’s direction.  These methods work nearly as well.

 

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Discussion

Albert Bandura has had an enormous impact on personality theory and therapy.  His straightforward, behaviorist-like style makes good sense to most people.  His action-oriented, problem-solving approach likewise appeals to those who want to get things done, rather than philosophize about ids, archetypes, actualization, freedom, and all the many other mentalistic constructs personologists tend to dwell on.

Among academic psychologists, research is crucial, and behaviorism has been the preferred approach.  Since the late 1960’s, behaviorism has given way to the “cognitive revolution,” of which Bandura is considered a part.  Cognitive psychology retains the experimentally-oriented flavor of behaviorism, without artificially restraining the researcher to external behaviors, when the mental life of clients and subjects is so obviously important.

This is a powerful movement, and the contributors include some of the most important people in psychology today:  Julian Rotter, Walter Mischel, Michael Mahoney, and David Meichenbaum spring to my mind.  Also involved are such theorists of therapy as Aaron Beck (cognitive therapy) and Albert Ellis (rational emotive therapy).  The followers of George Kelly also find themselves in this camp.  And the many people working on personality trait research -- such as Buss and Plomin (temperament theory) and McCrae and Costa (five factor theory) -- are essentially “cognitive behaviorists” like Bandura.

My gut feeling is that the field of competitors in personality theory will eventually boil down to the cognitivists on the one side and existentialists on the other.  Stay tuned!

 

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Readings

The place to go for Bandura’s theory is Social Foundations of Thought and Action (1986).  If it’s a little too dense for you, you might want to try his earlier Social Learning Theory(1977), or even Social Learning and Personality Development (1963), which he wrote with Walters.  If aggression is what you’re interested in, try Aggression:  A Social Learning Analysis (1973).

 

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Copyright 1998, 2006  C. George Boeree

 

George Kelly

1905 - 1967

Dr. C. George Boeree

 

George Kelly was teaching physiological psychology at Fort Hays Kansas State College in 1931. It was the time of the dust bowl and the Depression. Recognizing the pains and sorrows of the farming families of this part of west-central Kansas, he decided to do something a little more humanitarian with his life: He decided to develop a rural clinical service.

Mind you, this was hardly a money-making operation. Many of his clients had no money. Some couldn't come to him, and so he and his students would travel, sometimes for hours, to them.

At first, Kelly used the standard Freudian training that every psychology Ph.D. received in those days. He had these folks lie down on a couch, free associate, and tell him their dreams. When he saw resistances or symbols of sexual and aggressive needs, he would patiently convey his impressions to them. It was surprising, he thought, how readily these relatively unsophisticated people took to these explanations of their problems. Surely, given their culture, the standard Freudian interpretations should seem terribly bizarre? Apparently, they placed their faith in him, the professional.

Kelly himself, however, wasn't so sure about these standard Freudian explanations. He found them a bit far-fetched at times, not quite appropriate to the lives of Kansan farm families. So, as time went by, he noticed that his interpretations of dreams and such were becoming increasingly unorthodox. In fact, he began "making up" explanations! His clients listened as carefully as before, believed in him as much as ever, and improved at the same slow but steady pace.

It began to occur to him that what truly mattered to these people was that they had an explanation of their difficulties, that they had a way of understanding them. What mattered was that the "chaos" of their lives developed some order. And he discovered that, while just about any order and understanding that came from an authority was accepted gladly, order and understanding that came out of their own lives, their own culture, was even better.

Out of these insights, Kelly developed his theory and philosophy. The theory we'll get to in a while. The philosophy he called constructive alternativism. Constructive alternativism is the idea that, while there is only one true reality, reality is always experienced from one or another perspective, or alternative construction. I have a construction, you have one, a person on the other side of the planet has one, someone living long ago had one, a primitive person has one, a modern scientist has one, every child has one, even someone who is seriously mentally ill has one.

Some constructions are better than others. Mine, I hope, is better than that of someone who is seriously mentally ill. My physician's construction of my ills is better, I trust, than the construction of the local faith healer. Yet no-one's construction is ever complete -- the world is just too complicated, too big, for anyone to have the perfect perspective. And no-one's perspective is ever to be completely ignored. Each perspective is, in fact, a perspective on the ultimate reality, and has some value to that person in that time and place.

In fact, Kelly says, there are an infinite number of alternative constructions one may take towards the world, and if ours is not doing a very good job, we can take another!

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Biography

George Kelly was born on April 28, 1905, on a farm near Perth, Kansas. He was the only child of Theodore and Elfleda Kelly. His father was originally a presbyterian minister who had taken up farming on his doctor's advice. His mother was a former school teacher.

George's schooling was erratic at best. His family moved, by covered wagon, to Colorado when George was young, but they were forced to return to Kansas when water became scarce. From then on, George attended mostly one room schools. Fortunately, both his parents took part in his education. When he was thirteen, he was finally sent off to boarding school in Wichita.

After high school, Kelly was a good example of someone who was both interested in everything and basically directionless. He received a bachelor's degree in 1926 in physics and math from Park College, followed with a master's in sociology from the University of Kansas. Moving to Minnesota, he taught public speaking to labor organizers and bankers and citizenship classes to immigrants.

He moved to Sheldon, Iowa, where he taught and coached drama at a junior college, and met his wife-to-be, Gladys Thompson. After a few short-term jobs, he received a fellowship to go to the University of Edinburgh, where he received a bachelor of education degree in psychology. In 1931, he received his Ph.D. in psychology from the State University of Iowa.

Then, during the depression, he worked at Fort Hays Kansas State College, where he developed his theory and clinical techniques. During World War II, Kelly served as an aviation psychologist with the Navy, followed by a stint at the University of Maryland.

In 1946, he left for Ohio State University, the year after Carl Rogers left, and became the director of its clinical program. It was here that his theory matured, where he wrote his two-volume work, The Psychology of Personal Constructs, and where he influenced a number of graduate students.

In 1965, he began a research position at Brandeis University, where Maslow was working. Sadly, he died soon afterward, on March 6, 1967.

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Theory

Kelly's theory begins with what he called his "fruitful metaphor." He had noticed long before that scientists, and therapists, often displayed a peculiar attitude towards people: While they thought quite well of themselves, they tended to look down on their subjects or clients. While they saw themselves as engaged in the fine arts of reason and empiricism, they tended to see ordinary people as the victims of their sexual energies or conditioning histories. But Kelly, with his experience with Kansan students and farm people, noted that these ordinary people, too, were engaged in science; they, too, were trying to understand what was going on.

So people -- ordinary people -- are scientists, too. The have constructions of their reality, like scientists have theories. They have anticipations or expectations, like scientists have hypotheses. They engage in behaviors that test those expectations, like scientists do experiments. They improve their understandings of reality on the bases of their experiences, like scientists adjust their theories to fit the facts. From this metaphor comes Kelly's entire theory.

The fundamental postulate

Kelly organized his theory into a fundamental postulate and 11 corollaries. His fundamental postulate says this: "A person's processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events." (This and all subsequent quotations are from Kelly's 1955 The Psychology of Personal Constructs. ) This is the central movement in the scientific process: from hypothesis to experiment or observation, i.e. from anticipation to experience and behavior.

By processes, Kelly means your experiences, thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and whatever might be left over. All these things are determined, not just by the reality out there, but by your efforts to anticipate the world, other people, and yourself, from moment to moment as well as day-to-day and year-to-year.

So, when I look out of my window to find the source of some high-pitched noises, I don't just see exactly and completely what is out there. I see that which is in keeping with my expectations. I am ready for birds, perhaps, or children laughing and playing. I am not prepared for a bulldozer that operates with a squeal rather than the usual rumbling, or for a flying saucer landing in my yard. If a UFO were in fact the source of the high-pitched noises, I would not truly perceive it at first. I'd perceive something. I'd be confused and frightened. I'd try to figure out what I'm looking at. I'd engage in all sorts of behaviors to help me figure it out, or to get me away from the source of my anxiety! Only after a bit would I be able to find the right anticipation, the right hypothesis: "Oh my God, it's a UFO!"

If, of course, UFO's were a common place occurrence in my world, upon hearing high-pitched noises I would anticipate birds, kids, or a UFO, an anticipation that could then be quickly refined with a glance out of the window.

The construction corollary

"A person anticipates events by construing their replications."

That is, we construct our anticipations using our past experience. We are fundamentally conservative creatures; we expect things to happen as they've happened before. We look for the patterns, the consistencies, in our experiences. If I set my alarm clock, I expect it to ring at the right time, as it has done since time immemorial. If I behave nicely to someone, I expect them to behave nicely back.

This is the step from theory to hypothesis, i.e. from construction system (knowledge, understanding) to anticipation.

The experience corollary

"A person's construction system varies as he successively construes the replication of events."

When things don't happen the way they have in the past, we have to adapt, to reconstruct. This new experience alters our future anticipations. We learn.

This is the step from experiment and observation to validation or reconstruction: Based on the results of our experiment -- the behaviors we engage in -- or our observation -- the experiences we have -- we either continue our faith in our theory of reality, or we change the theory.

The dichotomy corollary

"A person's construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs."

We store our experience in the form of constructs, which he also referred to as "useful concepts," "convenient fictions," and "transparent templates." You "place" these "templates" on the world, and they guide your perceptions and behaviors.

He often calls them personal constructs, emphasizing the fact that they are yours and yours alone, unique to you and no-one else. A construct is not some label or pigeon-hole or dimension I, as a psychologist, lay on you, the "ordinary" person. It is a small bit of how you see the world.

He also calls them bipolar constructs, to emphasize their dichotomous nature. They have two ends, or poles: Where there is thin, there must be fat, where there is tall, there must be short, where there is up, there must be down, and so on. If everyone were fat, then fat would become meaningless, or identical in meaning to "everyone." Some people must be skinny in order for fat to have any meaning, and vice versa!

This is actually a very old insight. In ancient China, for example, philosophers made much of yin and yang, the opposites that together make the whole. More recently, Carl Jung talks about it a great deal. Linguists and anthropologists accept it as a given part of language and culture.

A number of psychologists, most notably Gestalt psychologists, have pointed out that we don't so much associate separate things as differentiate things out of a more-or-less whole background. First you see a lot of undifferentiated "stuff" going on (a "buzzing, blooming confusion," as William James called it). Then you learn to pick out of that "stuff" the things that are important, that make a difference, that have meaning for you. The young child doesn't care if you are fat or thin, black or white, rich or poor, Jew or Gentile; Only when the people around him or her convey their prejudices, does the child begin to notice these things.

Many constructs have names or are easily nameable: good-bad, happy-sad, introvert-extravert, flourescent-incandescent.... But they need not! They can be unnamed. Babies, even animals, have constructs: food-I-like vs. food-I-spit-out, danger vs. safety, Mommy vs. stranger.

Probably, most of our constructs are non-verbal. Think of all the habits that you have that you don't name, such as the detailed movements involved in driving a car. Think about the things you recognize but don't name, such as the formation just beneath your nose? (It's called a philtrum.) Or think about all the subtleties of a feeling like "falling in love."

This is as close as Kelly comes to distinguishing a conscious and an unconscious mind: Constructs with names are more easily thought about. They are certainly more easily talked about! It's as if a name is a handle by which you can grab onto a construct, move it around, show it to others, and so on. And yet a construct that has no name is still "there," and can have every bit as great an effect on your life!

Sometimes, although a construct has names, we pretend to ourselves that one pole doesn't really refer to anything or anybody. For example, a person might say that there aren't any truly bad people in the world. Kelly would say that he or she has submerged this pole -- something similar to repression.

It might be, you see, that for this person to acknowledge the meaningfulness of "bad" would require them to acknowledge a lot more: Perhaps mom would have to be labeled bad, or dad, or me! Rather than admit something like this, he or she would rather stop using the construct. Sadly, the construct is still there, and shows up in the person's behaviors and feelings.

One more differentiation Kelly makes in regards to constructs is between peripheral and core constructs.  Peripheral constructs are most constructs about the world, others, and even one's self.  Core constructs, on the other hand, are the constructs that are most significant to you, that to one extent or another actually define who you are.  Write down the first 10 or 20 adjectives that occur to you about yourself -- these may very well represent core constructs.  Core constructs is the closest Kelly comes to talking about a self.

The organization corollary

"Each person characteristically evolves, for his convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs."

Constructs are not just floating around unconnected. If they were, you wouldn't be able to use one piece of information to get to another -- you wouldn't be able to anticipate! When you are talked into a blind date, and your friend spends a great deal of energy trying to convince you that the person you will be going out with has a great personality, you know, you just know, that they will turn out to look like Quasimodo. How do you get from "great personality" to "Quasimodo?" Organization!

Some constructs are subordinate to, or "under," other constructs. There are two versions of this. First, there's a taxonomic kind of subordination, like the "trees" of animal or plant life you learned in high school biology. There are living things vs. non-living things, for example; subordinate to living things are, say, plants vs. animals; under plants, there might be trees vs. flowers; under trees, there might be conifers vs. deciduous trees; and so on.

Mind you, these are personal constructs, not scientific constructs, and so this is a personal taxonomy as well. It may be the same as the scientific one in your biology textbook, or it might not be. I still tend to have a species of conifer called Christmas trees.

animals -- plants
              |
      flowers -- trees        |         deciduous -- conifers                    |         Christmas trees -- othersThere is also a definitional kind of subordination, called constellation. This involves stacks of constructs, with all their poles aligned. For example, beneath the construct conifers vs. deciduous trees, we may find soft-wood vs. hard-wood, needle-bearing vs. leaf-bearing, cone-bearing vs. flower-bearing, and so on.

      conifers -- deciduous
          |           |
     soft-wood -- hard-wood
          |           |
needle-bearing -- leaf-bearing
          |           |
  cone-bearing -- flower-bearing

This is also the basis for stereotyping: "We" are good, clean, smart, moral, etc., while "they" are bad, dirty, dumb, immoral, etc.

Many constructs, of course, are independent of each other. Plants-animals is independent of flourescent-incandescent, to give an obvious example.

Sometimes, the relationship between two constructs is very tight. If one construct is consistently used to predict another, you have tight construction. Prejudice would be an example: As soon as you have a label for someone, you automatically assume other things about that person as well. You "jump to conclusions."

When we "do" science, we need to use tight construction. We call this "rigorous thinking," and it is a good thing. Who, after all, would want an engineer to build bridges using scientific rules that only maybe work. People who think of themselves as realistic often prefer tight construction.

But it is a small step from rigorous and realistic to rigid. And this rigidity can become pathological, so that an obsessive-compulsive person has to do things "just so" or break out in anxiety.

On the other hand, sometimes the relationship between constructs is left loose: There is a connection, but it is not absolute, not quite necessary. Loose construction is a more flexible way of using constructs. When we go to another country, for example, with some preconceptions about the people. These preconceptions would be prejudicial stereotypes, if we construed them tightly. But if we use them loosely, they merely help us to behave more appropriately in their culture.

We use loose construction when we fantasize and dream, when anticipations are broken freely and odd combinations are permitted. However, if we use loose construction too often and inappropriately, we appear flaky rather than flexible. Taken far enough, loose construction will land you in an institution.

The creativity cycle makes use of these ideas. When we are being creative, we first loosen our constructions -- fantasizing and brainstorming alternative constructions. When we find a novel construction that looks like it has some potential, we focus on it and tighten it up. We use the creativity cycle (obviously) in the arts. First we loosen up and get creative in the simplest sense; then tighten things up and give our creations substance. We conceive the idea, then give it form.

We use the creativity cycle in therapy, too. We let go of our unsuccessful models of reality, let our constructs drift, find a novel configuration, pull it into more rigorous shape, and try it out! We'll get back to this later.

The range corollary

"A construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite range of events only."

No construct is useful for everything. The gender construct (male-female) is, for most of us, something of importance only with people and a few higher animals such as our pets and cattle. Few of us care what sex flies are, or lizards, or even armadillos. And no-one, I think, applies gender to geological formations or political parties. These things are beyond the range of convenience of the gender construct.

Some constructs are very comprehensive, or broad in application. Good-bad is perhaps the most comprehensive construct of all, being applicable to nearly anything. Other constructs are very incidental, or narrow. Flourescent-incandescent is fairly narrow, applicable only to light bulbs.

But notice that what is relatively narrow for you might be relatively broad for me. A biologist will be interested in the gender of flies, lizards, armadillos, apple trees, philodendra, and so on. Or a philosopher may restrict his or her use of good-bad to specifically moral behaviors, rather than to all kinds of things, people, or beliefs.

The modulation corollary

"The variation in a person's construction system is limited by the permeability of the constructs within whose range of convenience the variants lie."

Some constructs are "springy," they "modulate," they are permeable, which means that they are open to increased range. Other constructs are relatively impermeable.

For example, good-bad is generally quite permeable for most of us. We are always adding new elements: We may never have seen a computer before, or a CD player, or a fax machine, but as soon as we have, we want to know the best brand to buy. Likewise, a person who will look around for a rock if a hammer is not available uses the construct concerning "things to hammer with" in a permeable fashion.

On the other hand, flourescent-incandescent is relatively impermeable: It can be used for lighting, but little else is likely to ever be admitted. And people who won't let you sit on tables are keeping their sit-upon constructs quite impermeable.

In case this seems like another way of talking about incidental vs. comprehensive constructs, note that you can have comprehensive but impermeable constructs, such as the one expressed by the person who says "Whatever happened to the good old days? There just don't seem to be any honest people around anymore." In other words, honesty, though broad, is now closed. And there are incidental constructs used permeably, such as when you say "my, but you're looking incandescent today!" Permeability is the very soul of poetry!

When there is no more "stretch," no more "give" in the range of the constructs you are using, you may have to resort to more drastic measures. Dilation is when you broaden the range of your constructs. Let's say you don't believe in ESP. You walk into a party and suddenly you hear a voice in your head and notice someone smiling knowingly at you from across the room! You would have to rather quickly stretch the range of the constructs involving ESP, which had been filled, up to now, with nothing but a few hoaxes.

On the other hand, sometimes events force you to narrow the range of your constructs equally dramatically. This is called constriction. An example might be when, after a lifetime of believing that people were moral creatures, you experience the realities of war. The construct including "moral" may shrink out of existence.

Notice that dilation and constriction are rather emotional things. You can easily understand depression and manic states this way. The manic person has dilated a set of constructs about his or her happiness enormously, and shouts "I've never imagined that life could be like this before!" Someone who is depressed, on the other hand, has taken the constructs that relate to life and good things to do with it and constricted them down to sitting alone in the dark.

The choice corollary

"A person chooses for himself that alternative in a dichotomized construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system."

With all these constructs, and all these poles, how do we chose our behaviors? Kelly says that we will choose to do what we anticipate will most likely elaborate our construction system, that is, improve our understanding, our ability to anticipate. Reality places limits on what we can experience or do, but we choose how to construe, or interpret, that reality. And we choose to interpret that reality in whatever way we believe will help us the most.

Commonly, our choices are between an adventurous alternative and a safe one. We could try to extend our understanding of, say, human heterosexual interaction (partying) by making the adventurous choice of going to more parties, getting to know more people, developing more relationships, and so on.

On the other hand, we might prefer to define our understanding by making the security choice: staying home, pondering what might have gone wrong with that last unsuccessful relationship, or getting to know one person better. Which one you choose will depend on which one you think you need.

With all this choosing going on, you might expect that Kelly has had something to say about free will vs. determinism. He has, and what he has to say is very interesting: He sees freedom as being a relative concept. We are not "free" or "unfree;" Some of us are free-er than others; We are free-er in some situations than in others; We are free-er from some forces than from others; And we are free-er under some constructions than under others.

The individuality corollary

"Persons differ from each other in their construction of events."

Since everyone has different experiences, everyone's construction of reality is different. Remember, he calls his theory the theory of personal constructs. Kelly does not approve of classification systems, personality types, or personality tests. His own famous "rep test," as you will see, is not a test in the traditional sense at all.

The commonality corollary

"To the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, his psychological processes are similar to the other person."

Just because we are all different doesn't mean we can't be similar. If our construction system -- our understanding of reality -- is similar, so will be our experiences, our behaviors, and our feelings. For example, if we share the same culture, we'll see things in a similar way, and the closer we are, the more similar we'll be.

In fact, Kelly says that we spend a great deal of our time seeking validation from other people. A man sitting himself down at the local bar and sighing "women!" does so with the expectation that his neighbor at the bar will respond with the support of his world view he is at that moment desperately in need of: "Yeah, women! You can't live with 'em and you can't live without 'em." The same scenario applies, with appropriate alterations, to women. And similar scenarios apply as well to kindergarten children, adolescent gangs, the klan, political parties, scientific conferences, and so on. We look for support from those who are similar to ourselves. Only they can know how we truly feel!

The fragmentation corollary

"A person may successively employ a variety of construction subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other."

The fragmentation corollary says that we can be inconsistent within ourselves. It is, in fact, a rare person who "has it all together" and functions, at all times in all places, as a unified personality. Nearly all of us, for example, have different roles that we play in life: I am a man, a husband, a father, a son, a professor; I am someone with certain ethnic, religious, political, and philosophical identifications; sometimes I'm a patient, or a guest, or a host, or a customer. And I am not quite the same in these various roles.

Often the roles are separated by circumstances. A man might be a cop at night, and act tough, authoritarian, efficient. But in the daytime, he might be a father, and act gentle, tender, affectionate. Since the circumstances are kept apart, the roles don't come into conflict. But heaven forbid the man finds himself in the situation of having to arrest his own child! Or a parent may be seen treating a child like an adult one minute, scolding her the next, and hugging her like a baby the following minute. An observer might frown at the inconsistency. Yet, for most people, these inconsistencies are integrated at higher levels: The parent may be in each case expressing his or her love and concern for the child's well-being.

Some of Kelly's followers have reintroduced an old idea to the study of personality, that each of us is a community of selves, rather than just one simple self. This may be true. However, other theorists would suggest that a more unified personality might be healthier, and a "community of selves" is a little too close to multiple personalities for comfort!

The sociality corollary

"To the extent that one person construes the construction processes of another, he may play a role in a social process involving the other person."

Even if you are not really similar to another person, you can still relate to them. You can, in fact, "construe how another construes," "psych him out," "get inside her head," "see where he's coming from," and "know what she means." In other words, I can set aside a portion of myself (made possible through the fragmentation corollary) to "be" someone else.

This is an important part of role playing, because, whenever you play a role, you play it to or with someone, someone you need to understand in order to relate to. Kelly thought this was so important he almost called his theory role theory, except that the name had already been taken. These ideas, in fact, came from the school of thought in sociology founded by George Herbert Mead.

Feelings

The theory so far presented may sound very cognitive, with all its emphasis on constructs and constructions, and many people have said so as their primary criticism of Kelly's theory. In fact, Kelly disliked being called a cognitive theorist. He felt that his "professional constructs" included the more traditional ideas of perception, behavior, and emotion, as well as cognition. So to say he doesn't talk about emotions, for example, is to miss the point altogether.

What you and I would call emotions (or affect, or feelings) Kelly called constructs of transition, because they refer to the experiences we have when we move from one way of looking at the world or ourselves to another.

When you are suddenly aware that your constructs aren't functioning well, you feel anxiety. You are (as Kelly said) "caught with your constructs down." It can be anything from your checkbook not balancing, to forgetting someone's name during introductions, to an unexpected hallucinogenic trip, to forgetting your own name. When anticipations fail, you feel anxiety. If you've taken a social psychology course, you might recognize the concept as being very similar to cognitive dissonance.

When the anxiety involves anticipations of great changes coming to your core constructs -- the ones of greatest importance to you -- it becomes a threat. For example, you are not feeling well. You think it might be something serious. You go to the doctor. He looks. He shakes his head. He looks again. He gets solemn. He calls in a colleague.... This is "threat." We also feel it when we graduate, get married, become parents for the first time, when roller coasters leave the track, and during therapy.

When you do things that are not in keeping with your core constructs -- with your idea of who you are and how you should behave -- you feel guilt. This is a novel and useful definition of guilt, because it includes situations that people know to be guilt-ridden and yet don't meet the usual criterion of being in some way immoral. If your child falls into a manhole, it may not be your fault, but you will feel guilty, because it violates your belief that it is your duty as a parent to prevent accidents like this. Similarly, children often feel guilty when a parent gets sick, or when parents divorce. And when a criminal does something out of character, something the rest of the world might consider good, he feels guilty about it!

We have talked a lot about adapting to the world when our constructs don't match up with reality, but there is another way: You can try to make reality match up with your constructs. Kelly calls this aggression. It includes aggression proper: If someone insults my tie, I can punch his lights out, in which case I can wear my tie in peace. But it also includes things we might today prefer to call assertiveness: Sometimes things are not as they should be, and we should change them to fit our ideals. Without assertiveness, there would be no social progress!

Again, when our core constructs are on the line, aggression may become hostility. Hostility is a matter of insisting that your constructs are valid, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Examples might include an elderly boxer still claiming to be "the greatest," a nerd who truly believes he's a Don Juan, or a person in therapy who desperately resists acknowledging that there even is a problem.

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Psychopathology and Therapy

This brings us nicely to Kelly's definition of a psychological disorder: "Any personal construction which is used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation." The behaviors and thoughts of neurosis, depression, paranoia, schizophrenia, etc., are all examples. So are patterns of violence, bigotry, criminality, greed, addiction, and so on. The person can no longer anticipate well, yet can't seem to learn new ways of relating to the world. He or she is loaded with anxiety and hostility, is unhappy and is making everyone else unhappy, too.

If a person's problem is poor construction, then the solution should be reconstruction, a term Kelly was tempted to use for his style of therapy. Psychotherapy involves getting the client to reconstrue, to see things in a different way, from a new perspective, one that allows the choices that lead to elaboration.

Kellian therapists essentially ask their clients to join them in a series of experiments concerning the clients' life styles. They may ask their clients to loosen their constructs, to slip them around, to test them, to tighten them up again, to "try them on for size." The intent is to encourage movement, essential for any progress.

Kelly, with his background in drama, liked to use role-playing (or enactment) to encourage movement. He might take the part of your mother and have you express your feelings. After a while, he might ask you to reverse roles with him -- you be your mother, and he'll be you! In this way, you become aware of your own construction of your relationship and your mother's construction. Perhaps you will begin to understand her, or see ways in which you might adapt. You may come to a compromise, or discover an entirely new perspective that rises above both.

Kelly's therapy often involves home-work, things he would ask you to do outside the therapy situation. His best known technique is called fixed-role therapy. First, he asks you for a description of yourself, a couple of pages in the third person, which he calls the character sketch. Then he constructs, perhaps with the help of a colleague, another description, called the fixed-role sketch, of a pretend person.

He writes this sketch by examining your original sketch carefully and using constructs that are "at right angles" to the constructs you used. This means that the new constructs are independent of the original ones, but they are used in a similar way, that is, they refer to the same range of elements.

If, for example, I use genius-idiot as a construct in dealing with people, I don't give them a lot of room to be somewhere in between, and I don't allow much for change. And, since we use the same constructs on ourselves as we use for others, I don't give myself much slack either. On a really good day, I might call myself a genius. On most days, I'd have no choice, if I used such a dramatic construct, but to call myself an idiot. And idiots stay idiots; they don't turn into geniuses. So, I'd be setting myself up for depression, not to mention for a life with very few friends.

Kelly might write a fixed-role sketch with a construct like skilled-unskilled. This is a much more "humane" construct than genius-idiot. It is much less judgmental: A person can, after all, be skilled in one area, yet unskilled in another. And it allows for change: If I find that I am unskilled in some area of importance, I can, with a little effort, become skilled.

Anyway, Kelly would then ask his client to be the person described in the fixed-role sketch for a week or two. Mind you, this is a full time commitment: He wants you to be this person 24 hours a day, at work, at home, even when you're alone. Kelly found that most people are quite good at this, and even enjoy it. After all, this person is usually much healthier than they are!

Should the client come back and say "Thank you, doc! I believe I'm cured. All I need to do now is be "Dave" instead of "George" for the rest of my life," Kelly would have a surprise in store: He might ask that person to play another fixed-role for a couple of weeks, one that might not be so positive. That's because the intent of this play-acting is not that the therapist give you a new personality. That would quickly come to nothing. The idea is to show you that you do, in fact, have the power to change, to "choose yourself."

Kellian therapy has, as its goal, opening people up to alternatives, helping them to discover their freedom, allowing them to live up to their potentials. For this reason, and many others, Kelly fits most appropriately among the humanistic psychologists.

Assessment

Perhaps the thing most associated with George Kelly is his role construct repertory test, which most people now call the rep grid. Not a test in the traditional sense at all, it is a diagnostic, self-discovery, and research tool that has actually become more famous than the rest of his theory.

First, the client names a set of ten to twenty people, called elements, likely to be of some importance to the person's life. In therapy, these people are named in response to certain suggestive categories, such as "past lover" and "someone you pity," and would naturally include yourself, your mother and father, and so on.

The therapist or researcher then picks out three of these at a time, and asks you to tell him or her which of the three are similar, and which one is different. And he asks you to give him something to call the similarity and the difference. The similarity label is called the similarity pole, and the difference one is called the contrast pole, and together they make up one of the constructs you use in social relations. If, for example, you say that you and your present lover are both nervous people, but your former lover was very calm, then nervous is the similarity pole and calm the contrast pole of the construct nervous-calm.

You continue in this fashion, with different combinations of three, until you get about twenty contrasts listed. By eyeballing the list, or by performing certain statistical operations on a completed chart, the list might be narrowed down to ten or so contrasts by eliminating overlaps: Often, our constructs , even though they have different words attached to them, are used in the same way. Nervous-calm, for example, may be used exactly like you use neurotic-healthy or jittery-passive.

In diagnosis and self-discovery uses, you are, of course, encouraged to use constructs that refer to people's behaviors and personalities. But in research uses, you may be asked to give any kind of constructs at all, and you may be asked to give them in response to all sorts of elements. In industrial psychology, for example, people have been asked to compare and contrast various products (for marketing analyses), good and bad examples of a product (for quality control analyses), or different leadership styles. You can find your musical style constructs this way, or your constructs about political figures, or the constructs you use to understand personality theories.

In therapy, the rep grid gives the therapist and the client a picture of the client's view of reality that can be discussed and worked with. In marriage therapy, two people can work on the grid with the same set of elements, and their constructs compared and discussed. It isn't sacred: The rep grid is rare among "tests" in that the client is invited to change his or her mind about it at any time. Neither is it assumed to be a complete picture of a person's mental state. It is what it is: a diagnostic tool.

In research, we can take advantage of a number of computer programs that allow for a "measurement" of the distances between constructs or between elements. We get a picture, created by the people themselves, of their world-views. We can compare the views of several people (as long as they use the same elements). We can compare a person's world-view before and after training, or therapy. It is an exciting tool, an unusual combination of the subjective and objective side of personality research.

For more information on the Rep Grid, see The Qualitative Methods Workbook (Part Five)!

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Discussion

Kelly published The Psychology of Personal Constructs in 1955. After a brief flurry of interest (and considerable criticism), he and his theory were pretty much forgotten, except by a few loyal students, most of whom were involved more in their clinical practices than in the advancement of the psychology of personality. Curiously, his theory continued to have a modest notoriety in England, particularly among industrial psychologists.

The reasons for this lack of attention are not hard to fathom: The "science" branch of psychology was at that time still rather mired in a behaviorist approach to psychology that had little patience with the subjective side of things; And the clinical side of psychology found people like Carl Rogers much easier to follow. Kelly was a good 20 years ahead of his time. Only recently, with the so-called "cognitive revolution," are people really ready to understand him.

It is ironic that George Kelly, always true to his philosophy of constructive alternativism, felt that, if his theory were still around in ten or twenty years, in a form significantly like the original, there would be cause for concern. Theories, like our individual views of reality, should change, not remain static.

There are legitimate criticisms. First, although Kelly is a very good writer, he chose to reinvent psychology from the ground up, introducing a new set of terms and a new set of metaphors and images. And he went out of his way to avoid being associated with other approaches to the field. This inevitably alienated him from the mainstream.

In a more positive vein, some of the words he invented are now firmly fixed in mainstream psychology (although many still think of them as "trendy!"): Anticipation has been made popular by the famous cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser; Construct, construction, construal, and all its variations can be found in books and articles right alongside of words like perception and behavior. Sadly, Kelly, just like other innovators, seldom gets any credit for for his innovations, mostly because psychologists are rarely trained to pay much attention to where ideas come from.

The "rep grid" has also become quite popular, especially since computers have made it much easier to use. As I mentioned before, it is a nice blend of the qualitative and the introspective that even critics of Kelly's overall theory have a hard time finding fault with.

Connections

Much of Personal Construct Theory is phenomenological. Kelly acknowledged his sympathies with the phenomenological theories of Carl Rogers, Donald Snygg and Arthur Combs, and the "self-theorists" Prescott Lecky and Victor Raimy. But he was skeptical of phenomenology per se. Like so many people, he assumed that phenomenology was some kind of introspective idealism. As we shall see in later chapters, that is a mistaken assumption.

But a phenomenologist would find much of Kelly's theory quite congenial. For example, Kelly believes that to understand behavior you need to understand how the person construes reality -- i.e. how he or she understands it, perceives it -- more than what that reality truly is. In fact, he points out that everyone's view -- even the hard-core scientist's -- is just that: a view. And yet he also notes, emphatically, that there is no danger here of solipsism (the idea that the world is only my idea), because the view has to be of something. This is exactly the meaning of the phenomenologist's basic principle, known as intentionality.

On the other hand, there are aspects of Kelly's theory that are not so congenial to phenomenology. First, he was a true theory-builder, and the technical detail of his theory shows it. Phenomenologists, on the other hand, tend to avoid theory. Second, he had high hopes for a rigorous methodology for psychology -- even using the experimental scientist as his "fruitful metaphor." Most phenomenologists are much more skeptical about experimentation.

The emphasis on theory-building, fine detail, and the hope for a rigorous methodology do make Kelly very appealing to modern cognitive psychologists. Time will tell whether Kelly will be remembered as a phenomenologist or a cognitivist!

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Readings

The basic reference for George Kelly is the two volume Psychology of Personal Constructs (1955). The first three chapters are available in paperback as A Theory of Personality (1963). Another paperback, written especially for the "layperson," is Bannister and Fransella's Inquiring Man: The Theory of Personal Constructs (1971).

Kelly wrote a number of very interesting articles as well. Most of them are collected into Clinical Psychology and Personality: Selected papers of George Kelly, edited by Brendan Maher (1969). There are other collections of works, by Kelly and his followers, available. Look especially for collections edited by Don Bannister.

Lastly, there is a Kellian journal, called The Journal of Personal Construct Psychology. It includes theoretical and research articles by Kellians and psychologists with similar orientations.

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Copyright 1997, 2006  C. George Boeree