BETWEEN 1913 and 1929, John B. Watson, the founder of the science of
behaviourism, claimed that scientific psychology could improve human life
beyond all recognition. The results of experiments showed how it was possible
to cure mental illness, to improve performance at work, to make better parents
of us and even to abolish sexual frustration. Watson was the first reputable
academic psychologist to give hints on how people could transform their
sex lives. He wanted a psychology of the people for the people. The science
had to help each individual to get the most out of life.
Watson wasn鈥檛 an isolated enthusiast. Freud, too, believed that psychoanalysis
could enable human beings to work and to love, the two essentials. Another
enthusiast, Gardner Murphy, a social psychologist, went so far as to suggest
in the late 1930s that the science was wise enough now to prevent wars.
Hitler, alas, did for his theoretical claims.
Historians have tended to view this early faith in psychology as naive
but lovable. Psychology was too new for either the public or the psychologists
to become sceptical or disenchanted. I assumed for years that it was only
recently that the cynical rot set in.
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Imagine my shock, then, when I finally got round to reading a collection
of essays by James Thurber, the humorist, written for the New Yorker between
1932 and 1936. In Let Your Mind Alone, published by Methuen, Thurber pokes
just as much fun at psychology and its pretensions as Woody Allen does today.
Thurber reviewed a variety of ghastly books brimming with daft advice. He
reserved special barbs for Be Glad You鈥檙e Neurotic, How to Worry Successfully,
the hippie-sounding Growing into Life and Streamline Your Mind. Thurber
tested the streamlined intelligence test and found it illogical. It claimed
that the right way to fix a leak in your roof involved contemplating Pythagoras鈥檚
theorem. Thurber thought a ladder and bucket might be more use.
Thurber also demolished the arguments of one Professor Walter Pitkin
who calculated that only 1 in 100 Americans was happy. The rest, apparently,
were either totally, or partially, psychologically blocked. Given Pitkin鈥檚
percentages, Thurber calculated there were between 78 million and 91 million
Americans who could be happy but didn鈥檛 know how, while 52 million were
doomed to discontent. The cause of this continent-wide misery, according
to Pitkin, was that people didn鈥檛 鈥楰now Themselves, they didn鈥檛 understand
the Science of Happiness, they had no Technique of Thinking鈥�. Pitkin鈥檚 books
could provide the techniques and self knowledge for scientific happiness.
Thurber also put the boot sceptical into Freudian theory. He sniped
that, for most wives, the latent content of their husbands鈥� minds was manifest
enough 鈥� especially at breakfast. He made fun of an analyst called Birch,
who suggested that people who got run over had unconscious motives. Sexual
hunger made them run out in front of cars.
I enjoyed Thurber鈥檚 book but dismissed it as a freak before its time.
Americans, after all, have been obsessed with psychology since psychology
started. Imagine my second shock, then, when I came across a second book
from the 1930s that poked fun at the infant psychology. This one was British,
and written by those ace public-school iconoclasts, W. C. Sellar and R.
J. Yeatman (who also wrote the classic 1066 and All That).
Their book, And Now All This (Methuen), includes a sharp attack on intelligence
testing, and on Freudian ideas of regression. Sellar and Yeatman invite
readers to study whether they have regressed to being a baby using the PsychoBabyCraft
test. The test requires Pitkin-like self-knowledge. Are you wearing nappies?
Are you crawling on the floor? Do you seek a bottle? If yes, you are a baby
and you know it. If no, you probably are but are denying it to yourself.
Imposing German professors, called Hoggmeister, Buggmeister and Fuggmeister,
comment in the text on the unfortunate habit adults have of denying they
are babies. That proves, of course, what babies they are. Sellar and Yeatman鈥檚
intelligence test is also a splendid exercise in the ridiculous.
For a psychologist, both these books make it uncomfortably clear how
open to ridicule psychology has always been. It isn鈥檛 a question of these
post-modern times. Other sciences don鈥檛 face these handicaps. Who laughs
at astronomy? When did you last hear a good geological joke? Does the possibility
of psychology being effective worry people? Freud would call it a defence
mechanism. That鈥檚 the nice thing one can say to comfort psychologists, many
of whom are not sure whether they became psychologists because they were
neurotic or whether they became neurotic because they became psychologists
and had to face uncertainty/satire/ridicule and so on. Both these books
offer an entertaining, and ancient, warning against psychology being pretentious.
They should be compulsory reading for any budding psychologist.
