Admirable Evasions. Theodore Dalrymple

on presenting the rat to the baby. He tested the baby a month or so after the conditioning had ceased, but still the baby showed a conditioned response to the rat, albeit muted by comparison with the conditioned response immediately after he had been conditioned. Watson says confidently:

       Emotional disturbances in adults cannot be traced back to sex alone. They must be retraced along at least three collateral lines – to conditioned and transferred responses set up in infancy and early youth in all three of the fundamental human emotions.

      Humans, in the view of the behaviorists, are but glorified pigeons playing table tennis. When someone’s behavior was explained by the mental processes within him, one of the most influential of the subsequent behaviorists, B. F. Skinner, asked why anyone should seek the explanation of the explanation. According to him, all talk of subjective experience and consciousness stifled further enquiry. This, of course, is mistaken. Psychoanalysis might have made outrageous claims for itself, premature announced understanding, but no one could say that it did not seek to explain the thoughts that people had. Skinner’s remark, moreover, suggests that he thought he had found, if not the complete explanation of human life, at least the fundamental principle of such an explanation. All that remained to be filled in was the detail: for example, how Beethoven’s late quartets were a conditioned response to Beethoven’s then circumstances.

      Skinner’s remark also suggests that an explanation of the type he sought actually exists and is available to human beings. This might not be so for metaphysical reasons. If the metaphysical arguments that lead to this conclusion were correct – that in effect, mankind will never be able to pluck out the heart of its own mystery as if men were laboratory specimens – then efforts to explain mankind to itself, of the kind of which Skinner might approve, are fundamentally misguided and destined to fail. Unfortunately, such error would not be confined to the intellectual sphere, but would be likely to spill over into the “real” world of action and policy. Skinner himself was quite clear about this: he thought that a society could be erected, if not now then at some time in the not very distant future, on behaviorist principles. All we had to do was choose a goal and condition people to achieve it. There were, of course, no metaphysical questions as to which goal to choose, or who was to condition the conditioners. Skinner wrote a utopian novel, Walden 2, to illustrate his theory of a rationally designed society. It seems to me about as realistic as the socialist utopias started in late nineteenth-century Paraguay. Perhaps Skinner’s greatest achievement was in stimulating Anthony Burgess’s response to behaviorism in A Clockwork Orange, in which Alex is conditioned out of his love for classical music by means of electric shocks administered while he hears Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

      Black box psychology now seems to us almost as bizarre a cultural product as phrenology or spiritualism. Its ferocious determination to eliminate from study the one thing that (as far as we know, though somewhere in the universe there may be other beings like us) gives worth to the universe, namely human self-consciousness, out-puritans the Puritans. From the claim that the contents of consciousness cannot be studied scientifically, and therefore should not be the object of study at all, it was but a short step to denial of either the existence or the importance of human self-consciousness. Of course, if it were really true that the contents of consciousness could not be studied scientifically, another possible conclusion might be drawn: that the attempt at a scientific psychology that explains Man to himself is doomed to failure. The very thing that is most important to us is the very thing that is out of our reach. The history of psychology bears some resemblance to the myth of Sisyphus: punished for his deceitfulness, he was made to roll a rock up a hill, only for it to roll back to the bottom just as he reached the brow of the hill with it. Psychology repeatedly announces huge advances in human self-understanding, only for the announcement to be shown to be premature, whereupon another school promptly steps into what might be called the self-promotional breach.

      This is not to say that behaviorism was in no respects an improvement on Freudianism. It had its limited successes. Though the administration of aversive stimuli to homosexuals and alcoholics did not “cure” them (electric shocks on the presentation of sexually arousing images to the first, and of a drug, apomorphine, that caused nausea on the presentation of alcohol to the latter, on the grounds that a little bit of what revolts you does you good), specific phobias (such as those to spiders) did respond relatively well to treatment on behaviorist principles. This meant that patients no longer had to seek, tediously and expensively, for the psychological buried treasure of the symbolic meaning of their fear of spiders, but could actually be helped to lose their irrational fear, which on occasion could be crippling. Confronted with evidence that this was the case, the psychoanalysts promptly argued, with the inventive cunning that each of us possesses when a pet theory of ours is refuted by the evidence, that unless the buried treasure were found, the phobia would be replaced by some other symptom, possibly worse than the original one. No such symptom substitution has ever been found, but of course for psychoanalysis some symptoms lie too deep for visibility, except to itself.