- both extravagantly praised and savagely castigated for his theories
- outsider, an isolated Jew in anti-Semitic Vienna, the son of an impoverished itinerant Jewish trader, lifelong anxiety about money, Godless Jew,
- The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud hypothesized that dreams fulfill wishes that would otherwise wake us and that their basic purpose is to enable us to continue sleeping. Freud said that whenever he had eaten salty food he dreamed of drinking in great gulps. But wish fulfillment of many dreams is far subtler. The unconscious mind disguises disturbing elements, transforming them into relatively innocuous ones.
- The dynamic unconscious, mind has three levels of functioning: conscious, preconscious, and the unconscious. The last was the largest and most influential part; far from being a warehouse of inactive material, it was an area of highly active and powerful primitive drives and forbidden wishes that constantly generated pressure on the conscious mind, in disguised or altered form, thereby motivating and determining much of our behavior.
- The structure of the psyche: conscious, preconscious, and the unconscious is too simple. Freud later depicted instead a tripartite psyche comprising id, ego, and superego. They are names of groups of mental processes that serve different functions. In the newborn, all mental processes are id processes, unconscious and primary. There is nothing akin to logical reasoning in the id; it is a cauldron of instinctual demands for the satisfaction of primitive desires having to do with self-preservation, sexuality and aggression.The demands of the id operate in accordance with the pleasure principle. Since social life would be impossible if the id directed behavior, child is trained and educated, the conscious mind understands, reasons and functions according to secondary-process thinking; this is ego, or self. Much of the ego, however, is not conscious. Many of its processes are preconscious - not repressed but not in the spotlight of attention (when a solution pops into mind seemingly from nowhere, it is because we were working on it all along). The preconscious operates many of our well-learned skills, freeing the conscious mind to use its limited attention elsewhere (like trained musician's figures automatically strike the right notes). In contrast, the superego, which monitors and censors the ego, is unconscious and critically important. Perceived commands like "you must not" or "you should" are transformed by identification into "I must not" or "I should". This mechanism turns all sorts of moral values into internalized and self-imposed rules; collectively, they form the "ego ideal" or superego, what we usually call conscience.
- Repression is the fundamental defense against all anxiety-producing wishes, memories or feelings, and the very bedrock of the psychological structure. The psyche finds adaptive ways to handle the repressed material. It does so by means of a number of other defenses unconsciously: denial, rationalization (acts out of one motive but justifies the act in terms of another that is more acceptable), reaction formation (exaggerating and displaying for all to see a trait exatcly opposite to the repressed one), displacement (directs repressed feelings towards an acceptable substitute, new wife who looks like dead wife), intellectualization (ostensibly intellectual interest in an impermissible desire), projection (attribute one's own unacceptable impulses to the object of those impulses, people who deny racial hatred may believe that persons of the other race hate them), sublimation (writing/performing, sublimations of the impulse to exhibit oneself; surgery, a noble transformation of the urge to do harm; athletic games, sublimations of aggression).
- A number of elements in Freudian psychology have recently been validated by contemporary neuroscience, making real his 1905 fantasy that psychological phenomena would someday be explicable in physical terms. Among them for instance, the major brain structures essential for forming conscious memories are not functional during the first two years of life (Freud called infantile amnesia, it is not we forget our earlier memories, we simply cannot recall them to consciousness).
+ Alfred Binet, IQ test
+ Here come the behaviorists
+ Thorndike and Pavlov
- two different principles of behaviorism: the laws of natural learning (the chickens' associating a particular color with the reward of the sweet-tasting corn, the cat's associating a step on the treadle with escape and food), and the laws of conditioning (the dog's salivating at the sound of the metronome, a stimulus artificially linked to the salivary reflex).
+ Edward Lee Thorndike (1874-1947), Massachusetts, USA
- homely, lonely and painfully shy child who found satisfaction in his studies
- others classified him as functionalist, behaviorist, but he himself as neither
- studied under William James who approved his project on animals
- the cats had not learned to escape by means of reasoning or insight; rather, by trial and error they slowly eliminated useless movements and made the connection between the appropriate action and the desired goal (which Thorndike formulated a theory of "connectionism").
- although human behavior is vastly more sophisticated than that of cats, behaviorists argued that it is explicable by the same principles; the difference, Thorndike said, is simply that "the number, delicacy and complexity of cell structures" in the human brain make for a corresponding "number, delicacy, and complexity of associations". He even held that the reason human culture develops so slowly is that it is the result of trial-and-error learning with accidental success, the same method by which animals acquire associations.
+ Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), Russian, physiologist
- born in Russian farming village, abandoned priesthood after reading Darwin's Origin of Species and Ivan Sechenov's Reflexes of the Brain
- "conditioned reflexes", dog's salivating, a psychologist would have called the conditioning process associative learning, but Pavlov explained it in physiological terms. he theorized tht an unconditioned response, such as salivating on taking food into the mouth, was a brain reflex: a direct connection existed between the sensory and motor nerves in the spine or lower brain centers. In contrast, a conditioned response, such as salivating at the sound of a bell or other formerly neutral stimulus, was the result of new reflexive pathways created by the conditioning process in the cortex of the brain.
- Timing. the sequence of the stimuli is critical. Only if the neutral stimulus precedes the unconditioned reflex.
- Extinction. Unlike the unconditioned reflex, the connection between a conditioned stimulus and a conditioned reflex is impermanent.
- Generalization. If the conditioned stimulus is slightly different (louder voice, brighter color), it still works.
- Differentiation. differentiate the noise and ignore.
- the fundamental unit of learning in animals and human beings: nothing but "a long chain of conditioned reflexes" whose acquisition, maintenance, and extinction were governed by the laws he discovered.
+ John B. Watson, South Carolina
- son of a petty farmer of violent nature and unsavory reputation. When he was thirteen, his father abandoned the family and ran off with another woman, like his father, violent when young
- somehow developed the desire to make something of himself and had the courage to request a personal interview with the president of Furman College, particularly liked those philosophy courses which included psychological subjects.
- did excellent work at University of Chicago and at thirty was offered the chair of psychology at Johns Hopkins University
- gifted huckster, energetically and skillfully peddled himself and his ideas to his colleagues, rose swiftly to the top of his profession while launching the behaviorist movement, and later, having been expelled from academia because of a sexual scandal, had a second and financially lucrative career as psychological adviser to a major advertising firm
- self-assured, flamboyant outside, insecure, afraid of the dark, emotionally frozen inside. reject introspection and self-revelation, dealt only with external acts.
- "the behaviorist manifesto", 1) the content of psychology should be behavior, not consciousness; 2) its method should be objective rather than introspective; 3) its purpose should be "prediction and control of behavior" rather than fundamental understanding of mental events.
- infants have three innate emotional responses to certain stimuli: fear at hearing a loud sound or at suddenly being dropped; rage when its arm or head movements are forcibly restrained; and love when stroked, rocked, gently patted, and the like.
- "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select--doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors."
+ "B.F. Skinner (1904-1990), neobehaviorist, Pennsylvania
- "subjective entities" such as mind, thought, memory, and reasoning do not exist but are only "verbal constructs, grammatical traps into which the human race in the development of language has fallen"
- he considered theory of learning unnecessary, everything we do and are is determined by our history of rewards and punishments
- on his very first TV appearance he posed a dilemma originally propounded by Montaigne -- "Would you, if you had to choose, burn your children or your books?" -- and said he himself would burn his children, since his contribution to the future would be greater through his work than through his genes.
- "We do not need to try to discover what personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plans, purposes, intentions, or other perquisites of autonomous man really are in order to get on with a scientific analysis of behavior... Thinking is behaving. The mistake is in allocating the behavior to the mind."
- "We are what we are because of our history. We like to believe we can choose, we can act... [but] I don't believe a person is either free or responsible." The "autonomous" human being is an illusion the good person is one who has been conditioned to behave that way, and the good society would be one based on "behavioral engineering" -- the scientific control of behavior through methods of positive reinforcement.
- Walden Two (1948), his vision of the ideal, scientifically controlled society in the form of a Utopian. The book became a cult book with undergraduates, and has sold well over two million copies.
- "operant conditioning", in "classical conditioning" (Pavlov's), the crucial element in the behavior change is the new stimulus (dog salivating); in "instrumental conditioning" (Thorndike's), the crucial element in behavior change is the response (accidental stepping on the treadle); in "operant conditioning", by rewarding a series of little random movements, one by one, the experimenter can shape the behavior of the animal until it acts in ways that were not part of its original or natural repertoire.
- human being -- a mindless robot assembled by operant conditioning from a multitude of meaningless bits.
- instant rewarding, powerful reinforcer of behavior, used in school and mental hospital
+ Problems with Behaviorism
- The failure of universal learning: different species has its own built-in circuitry that enables it to learn some things easily and instinctively, others with difficulty, and still others not at all
- purposive thinking? at the beginning of an extinction trial an animal would respond to the stimulus with greater vigor than it had during a long series of reinforcements. (in Behaviorism, the response should fade because no stimulus)
+ Here come the Gestaltists in Germany
+ 1890, Christian von Ehrenfels, an Austrian psychologist, pointed out that when a melody is transposed, every note is changed, yet we hear the very same melody. He explained that we recognize the sameness of relations among the parts of the whole -- what he called the melody's Gestaltqualitat or "form quality," a crucial characteristic perceived by the mind, rather than the ears.
+ 1897, Ernst Mach, a physicist noted that when we see a circle at different angles, it seems circular to us even though it looks ellipsoidal to a camera. The image on the retina changes but the inner experience of seeing a table does not.
+ The three men of Gestalt: Wertheimer, the "intellectual father, thinker, and innovator," Koffka "the salesman of the group", and Kohler "the inside man, the doer". In only ten years, breached the defenses of Wundtian psychology and established the legitimacy of their new mentalism -- a psychology of the mind based on demonstrations and experimental evidence rather than on rationalist arguments and metaphysical speculations.
+ Maz Wertheimer, Prague
- On a train, Wertheimer noticed the illusion that distant telegraph poles, houses, and hilltops, though stationary, seemed to be speeding along with train. Why?
- the illusion of motion takes place not at the level of sensation, in the retina, but of perception, in the mind, where incoming discrete sensations are seen as an organized unity with a meaning of its own. Wertheimer called such an overall perception a Gestalt, a German word that means form, shape, or configuration but that he used to mean a set of sensations perceived as a meaningful whole.
- our mental operations consist chiefly of Gestalten rather than strings of associated sensations and impressions, as followers of Wundt and associationists believed. A Gestalt, he said, was not a mere accumulation of associated bits but a structure with an identity; it was different from and more than the sum of its parts. The acquisition of knowledge often took place through a process of "centering" or structuring and thereby seeing things as an orderly whole.
- laws of Gestalten. Proximity: when we see a number of similar objects, we tend to perceive them as groups (e.g., 323-845-7451); Similarity: when similar and dissimilar objects are mingled, we see the similar ones as groups (e.g., 11 00 1111 0000 11); Continuation of direction: in many patterns, we tend to see lines that have a coherent continuation or direction (e.g., "hidden figure" puzzles); Pragnaz: we tend to see the simplest shape; Closure: special case of laws of Pragnaz, when we see a familiar or coherent pattern with some missing parts, we fill them in and perceive the simplest and best Gestalt; Figure-ground perception: when we pay attention to an object, we see little or nothing of the background; Size constancy: an object of known size, when far off, projects a tiny image on the retina, yet we sense its real size.
+ Kohler
- famous chimpanzee studies, Kohler created a number of different problems for his apes to solve. The simplest were detour problems (no trouble for apes). More complicated were tool problems. Some chimpanzees took a long time to see that boxes could be used to reach the bananas, and they never did use them well. Others, clearly smarter, learned to stack boxes even when it took more than two boxes. The ape would seem to suddenly see a solution at some juncture and Kohler called the sudden discovery"insight" (like Gauss's insight on 1+2+...+100), and defined it as "the appearance of a complete solution with reference to the whole layout of the problem", obviously quite a different process from the trial-and-error learning of Thorndike's cats.
- "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select--doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors."
+ "B.F. Skinner (1904-1990), neobehaviorist, Pennsylvania
- "subjective entities" such as mind, thought, memory, and reasoning do not exist but are only "verbal constructs, grammatical traps into which the human race in the development of language has fallen"
- he considered theory of learning unnecessary, everything we do and are is determined by our history of rewards and punishments
- on his very first TV appearance he posed a dilemma originally propounded by Montaigne -- "Would you, if you had to choose, burn your children or your books?" -- and said he himself would burn his children, since his contribution to the future would be greater through his work than through his genes.
- "We do not need to try to discover what personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plans, purposes, intentions, or other perquisites of autonomous man really are in order to get on with a scientific analysis of behavior... Thinking is behaving. The mistake is in allocating the behavior to the mind."
- "We are what we are because of our history. We like to believe we can choose, we can act... [but] I don't believe a person is either free or responsible." The "autonomous" human being is an illusion the good person is one who has been conditioned to behave that way, and the good society would be one based on "behavioral engineering" -- the scientific control of behavior through methods of positive reinforcement.
- Walden Two (1948), his vision of the ideal, scientifically controlled society in the form of a Utopian. The book became a cult book with undergraduates, and has sold well over two million copies.
- "operant conditioning", in "classical conditioning" (Pavlov's), the crucial element in the behavior change is the new stimulus (dog salivating); in "instrumental conditioning" (Thorndike's), the crucial element in behavior change is the response (accidental stepping on the treadle); in "operant conditioning", by rewarding a series of little random movements, one by one, the experimenter can shape the behavior of the animal until it acts in ways that were not part of its original or natural repertoire.
- human being -- a mindless robot assembled by operant conditioning from a multitude of meaningless bits.
- instant rewarding, powerful reinforcer of behavior, used in school and mental hospital
+ Problems with Behaviorism
- The failure of universal learning: different species has its own built-in circuitry that enables it to learn some things easily and instinctively, others with difficulty, and still others not at all
- purposive thinking? at the beginning of an extinction trial an animal would respond to the stimulus with greater vigor than it had during a long series of reinforcements. (in Behaviorism, the response should fade because no stimulus)
+ Here come the Gestaltists in Germany
+ 1890, Christian von Ehrenfels, an Austrian psychologist, pointed out that when a melody is transposed, every note is changed, yet we hear the very same melody. He explained that we recognize the sameness of relations among the parts of the whole -- what he called the melody's Gestaltqualitat or "form quality," a crucial characteristic perceived by the mind, rather than the ears.
+ 1897, Ernst Mach, a physicist noted that when we see a circle at different angles, it seems circular to us even though it looks ellipsoidal to a camera. The image on the retina changes but the inner experience of seeing a table does not.
+ The three men of Gestalt: Wertheimer, the "intellectual father, thinker, and innovator," Koffka "the salesman of the group", and Kohler "the inside man, the doer". In only ten years, breached the defenses of Wundtian psychology and established the legitimacy of their new mentalism -- a psychology of the mind based on demonstrations and experimental evidence rather than on rationalist arguments and metaphysical speculations.
+ Maz Wertheimer, Prague
- On a train, Wertheimer noticed the illusion that distant telegraph poles, houses, and hilltops, though stationary, seemed to be speeding along with train. Why?
- the illusion of motion takes place not at the level of sensation, in the retina, but of perception, in the mind, where incoming discrete sensations are seen as an organized unity with a meaning of its own. Wertheimer called such an overall perception a Gestalt, a German word that means form, shape, or configuration but that he used to mean a set of sensations perceived as a meaningful whole.
- our mental operations consist chiefly of Gestalten rather than strings of associated sensations and impressions, as followers of Wundt and associationists believed. A Gestalt, he said, was not a mere accumulation of associated bits but a structure with an identity; it was different from and more than the sum of its parts. The acquisition of knowledge often took place through a process of "centering" or structuring and thereby seeing things as an orderly whole.
- laws of Gestalten. Proximity: when we see a number of similar objects, we tend to perceive them as groups (e.g., 323-845-7451); Similarity: when similar and dissimilar objects are mingled, we see the similar ones as groups (e.g., 11 00 1111 0000 11); Continuation of direction: in many patterns, we tend to see lines that have a coherent continuation or direction (e.g., "hidden figure" puzzles); Pragnaz: we tend to see the simplest shape; Closure: special case of laws of Pragnaz, when we see a familiar or coherent pattern with some missing parts, we fill them in and perceive the simplest and best Gestalt; Figure-ground perception: when we pay attention to an object, we see little or nothing of the background; Size constancy: an object of known size, when far off, projects a tiny image on the retina, yet we sense its real size.
+ Kohler
- famous chimpanzee studies, Kohler created a number of different problems for his apes to solve. The simplest were detour problems (no trouble for apes). More complicated were tool problems. Some chimpanzees took a long time to see that boxes could be used to reach the bananas, and they never did use them well. Others, clearly smarter, learned to stack boxes even when it took more than two boxes. The ape would seem to suddenly see a solution at some juncture and Kohler called the sudden discovery"insight" (like Gauss's insight on 1+2+...+100), and defined it as "the appearance of a complete solution with reference to the whole layout of the problem", obviously quite a different process from the trial-and-error learning of Thorndike's cats.
- insight thinking does not take place in simpler animals. girl>dog>chicken
- insight learning does not depend on rewards, as did the stimulus-response learning of Thorndike's cats. The chimpanzees were, of course, seeking a reward, but their learning was not brought about by the reward; they solved the problem before eating the fruit.
- another finding is that when animals achieved an insight, they learned more than the solution to that particular problem; they were able to generalize and apply the solution in modified form to different problems (deductive reasoning?).
- chicken experiment: the chickens had learned to associate food not with a specific color but with a relationship of two backgrounds. The animals and humans perceive and learn nearly everything in terms of relationships. This object stands on top of that one, is between two others, is bigger than, smaller than, earlier or later than another, and so on.
+ Karl Duncker,
- studied with borh Wertheimer and Kohler at Berlin
- deeply depressed by the outbreak of war, committed suicide in 1940
- Education creates expertise but also functional fixedness (similar to Freud's preconscious?). An expert sees the tools he has at hand in terms of the functions he knows they serve a neophyte may, while coming up with uninformed and even absurd suggestions, see them more creatively.
+ Koffka
- instinctive behavior is not a chain of reflexive responses mechanically triggered by a stimulus; rather, it is a group or pattern of reflexes -- A Gestalt imposed by the creature on its own actions -- aimed at achieving a particular goal.
- against the behaviorist doctrine that all learning consists of chains of associations created by rewards, Koffka argued the much learning takes place through the processes of organization and reorganization in the mind in advance of reward. But the exact cause of those organizing processes, he admitted, was not yet known.
- The theory of organization: "psychophysical" forces inherent in the brain -- neuronal energy fields -- act like the force fields else where in nature that always seek the simplest or best-fitting configuration. Hence the mind's tendency to construct and reconstruct information in the form of "good Gestalten".
- Memory hypothesis: physiological basis of memory is the formation of "traces" in the central nervous system -- permanent neutral changes induced by experience. Another keen guess, unlike associationism, which said that new experiences are merely added to old ones, Koffka said that new experiences interact with traces, and that this interaction is the cause of mental development.
To be continued from Part Three: Specialization and Synthesis..
