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| Behaviorisrn |
Behaviorisrn
Behaviorism has been presented as a scientifically based approach to an objective psychology. Derived from the logical positivist school of philosophy, it was translated into a uniquely American (pragmatic, control-oriented) form of empiricism originally by John Watson and B. P. Skinner, and eventually by a multitude of researchers and practitioners. lt makes direct application of the same principles originally developed in controlled laboratory settings with animal subjects. Skinner's best-known work was conducted with pigeons and rats, Watson's with a white rat in the famous classical conditioning case of Albert, which he conducted with a little-known female coinvestigator (Raynor and Watson 1921). The classical conditioning paradigm associated with Watson, involving the pairing of mutually exclusive responses, has been applied by Wolpe (1958) and other practitioners of behavior therapy or desensitization, in particular for the treatment of phobias (Wolpe 1970; Podor 1974).
For example, an individual who is afraid of open spaces will first be taught relaxation techniques and will then be asked to visualize an increasingly fearful series of situations involving open spaces. Each treatment will continue only as long as the client is able to remain relaxed. As soon as she signals that she is becoming anxious, the session is terminated. Eventually the individual passes through all the imaginary situations in a relaxed state and is ready to confront the actual feared situation.
The paradigm based upon the work of Skinner and many others with operant conditioning is known as behavior modification and has been applied extensively to work with children in school settings and with severely disturbed hospitalized or institutionalized patients. In these situa- tions, contingent reinforcement is applied to increase or decrease the frequency· of a desired or target behavior. For example, a child who does ten minutes of homework may immediately be rewarded with a period of play or may accrue tokens that can be exchanged for a desired activity or other reward. In its simplest form, this is a quid pro quo arrangement.
Most applications of these methods involve a mixture of both the classical and operant models. For example, an approach that grew directly from the early feminist therapy movement, assertiveness training, is based upon desensitization followed by active modification of behavior in the actual feared situation. That is, the individual may begin by visualizing a series of imagined situations in which she is able to behave assertively. The second step may involve rehearsal of these behaviors in the artificial setting of the therapy or training, followed by performing the desired behaviors in the actual settings that had previously been problematic for her. Epistemologically, behaviorism is based upon the premise that every valid and interesting bit of information about persons is and must be, at least in principle, empirically knowable or verifiable. Universal behavioral principles, which apply not only to all people but across species, are sought and considered discoverable by controlled, objective, scientific observation, by identifying and manipulating the smallest possible separate or linked units of behavior. From this perspective, complex human psychology can be reduced to a set of fully knowable and determinate behavioral principles. Change occurs through the identification and manipulation of the smallest possible separate or linked units of behavior according to the same principles. Who and what is changed is considered a decision outside the boundaries of this method.
The feminist scholar Evelyn Fox Keller (1985) has noted that objectivity, control, individuality, and the advancement of science through competing and rising above ordinary life are the hallmarks of Western masculinity and Western masculinist science. The philosophical school of logical positivism translated to scientific empiricism within psychology falls squarely within this tradition. Adherents have claimed that this method defines both objectivity and the science of human behavior itself, by means of which one can learn to "understand, predict and control behavior" (Hassett 1984) The method of this sort of science involves drawing rigid boundaries around minutiae, which can then be carefully controlled, observed, and manipulated, presumably without any undesired influence from the controller, observer, and manipulator or from the larger environment. This approach is obviously reductionist. It purports to be absent of values but in fact has its foundation in the value-based principles of objectivity, dispassionate and uninvolved rationality, control and manipulation, and separation of fact from value, experimenter from subject, and context from subject and experimenter. The psychological world, from this perspective, is both knowable and conquerable as an aspect of the material world.
Yet one achieves objectivity by ignoring a multiplicity of important, if not crucial, influences on the experiment that lie outside its narrow boundary as drawn. These include aspects of the physical context such as the experimental design and the setting in which it occurs, the time of day, the state of readiness of the subject, and whether participation is required for credit in an undergraduate psychology course.
Additionally, aspects of the social context such as the effect of various qualities of the experimenter/ behavior modifier (Rosenthal1968}, including race, gender, and even disposition, are "controlled for" or ignored. Not only are results in laboratories generalized to the natural environment but laboratory subjects are considered to be under the influence only of those variables the experimenter wishes to study, the rest being "controlled." The gender, class, race, and personal history of the subject, along with the very effect of being an experimental or a therapeutic subject, are all too often considered extraneous variables unless they are the object of study.
Behaviorism has been presented as a scientifically based approach to an objective psychology. Derived from the logical positivist school of philosophy, it was translated into a uniquely American (pragmatic, control-oriented) form of empiricism originally by John Watson and B. P. Skinner, and eventually by a multitude of researchers and practitioners. lt makes direct application of the same principles originally developed in controlled laboratory settings with animal subjects. Skinner's best-known work was conducted with pigeons and rats, Watson's with a white rat in the famous classical conditioning case of Albert, which he conducted with a little-known female coinvestigator (Raynor and Watson 1921). The classical conditioning paradigm associated with Watson, involving the pairing of mutually exclusive responses, has been applied by Wolpe (1958) and other practitioners of behavior therapy or desensitization, in particular for the treatment of phobias (Wolpe 1970; Podor 1974).
For example, an individual who is afraid of open spaces will first be taught relaxation techniques and will then be asked to visualize an increasingly fearful series of situations involving open spaces. Each treatment will continue only as long as the client is able to remain relaxed. As soon as she signals that she is becoming anxious, the session is terminated. Eventually the individual passes through all the imaginary situations in a relaxed state and is ready to confront the actual feared situation.
The paradigm based upon the work of Skinner and many others with operant conditioning is known as behavior modification and has been applied extensively to work with children in school settings and with severely disturbed hospitalized or institutionalized patients. In these situa- tions, contingent reinforcement is applied to increase or decrease the frequency· of a desired or target behavior. For example, a child who does ten minutes of homework may immediately be rewarded with a period of play or may accrue tokens that can be exchanged for a desired activity or other reward. In its simplest form, this is a quid pro quo arrangement.
Most applications of these methods involve a mixture of both the classical and operant models. For example, an approach that grew directly from the early feminist therapy movement, assertiveness training, is based upon desensitization followed by active modification of behavior in the actual feared situation. That is, the individual may begin by visualizing a series of imagined situations in which she is able to behave assertively. The second step may involve rehearsal of these behaviors in the artificial setting of the therapy or training, followed by performing the desired behaviors in the actual settings that had previously been problematic for her. Epistemologically, behaviorism is based upon the premise that every valid and interesting bit of information about persons is and must be, at least in principle, empirically knowable or verifiable. Universal behavioral principles, which apply not only to all people but across species, are sought and considered discoverable by controlled, objective, scientific observation, by identifying and manipulating the smallest possible separate or linked units of behavior. From this perspective, complex human psychology can be reduced to a set of fully knowable and determinate behavioral principles. Change occurs through the identification and manipulation of the smallest possible separate or linked units of behavior according to the same principles. Who and what is changed is considered a decision outside the boundaries of this method.
The feminist scholar Evelyn Fox Keller (1985) has noted that objectivity, control, individuality, and the advancement of science through competing and rising above ordinary life are the hallmarks of Western masculinity and Western masculinist science. The philosophical school of logical positivism translated to scientific empiricism within psychology falls squarely within this tradition. Adherents have claimed that this method defines both objectivity and the science of human behavior itself, by means of which one can learn to "understand, predict and control behavior" (Hassett 1984) The method of this sort of science involves drawing rigid boundaries around minutiae, which can then be carefully controlled, observed, and manipulated, presumably without any undesired influence from the controller, observer, and manipulator or from the larger environment. This approach is obviously reductionist. It purports to be absent of values but in fact has its foundation in the value-based principles of objectivity, dispassionate and uninvolved rationality, control and manipulation, and separation of fact from value, experimenter from subject, and context from subject and experimenter. The psychological world, from this perspective, is both knowable and conquerable as an aspect of the material world.
Yet one achieves objectivity by ignoring a multiplicity of important, if not crucial, influences on the experiment that lie outside its narrow boundary as drawn. These include aspects of the physical context such as the experimental design and the setting in which it occurs, the time of day, the state of readiness of the subject, and whether participation is required for credit in an undergraduate psychology course.
Additionally, aspects of the social context such as the effect of various qualities of the experimenter/ behavior modifier (Rosenthal1968}, including race, gender, and even disposition, are "controlled for" or ignored. Not only are results in laboratories generalized to the natural environment but laboratory subjects are considered to be under the influence only of those variables the experimenter wishes to study, the rest being "controlled." The gender, class, race, and personal history of the subject, along with the very effect of being an experimental or a therapeutic subject, are all too often considered extraneous variables unless they are the object of study.
The behavioral approach tends to be individually or, at best, dyadically focused. For example, in working with a child who is having problems, the reinforcement contingent upon the child's behavior and applied by the mother or teacher may be altered. Contingencies maintaining the mother's or teacher's behavior are rarely considered. Mothers are given responsibility for their children's contingencies much more often in this so-called value-free literature than are children for their mothers' or are fathers for anyone's. Yet implicit in the very principle of reinforcement is its universality. The behaviorist model considers it possible, both in principle and certainly in practice, to ascertain, manipulate, and control the multiplicity of influences that affect a child at any given time.
Imagine a female child who perceives her father's hostile feelings toward his own mother. Additionally, she is aware of her mother's despair over a difficult marriage and an interrupted career at a time when women are gaining access to better jobs. Do these complex experiences affect the child only in observable and manipulable ways? What if we then add to the picture the meanings that the child attributes to these factors, in particular, her own diminished sense of self-worth? Are these aspects reducible to fragments of observable behavior whose combination is only quantitative and does not create a qualitatively different psychological constellation? Indeed, new, complex, and subjectively organized meanings will come to permeate this child's psychological experiences in an untold variety of situations.
The psychoanalytic approach has already been the subject of serious criticism (Millett 1970; Chesler 1972; Koedt 1976; Lerman 1986) as well as attempts at revision (Mitchell 1974; Alpert 1986; Bernay and Cantor 1986) by feminist scholars. It development has not proceeded according to the tenets of logical positivism; rather this approach is based upon introspection and the analysis of intrapsychic events, such as transference and countertransference, manifested interpersonally in the therapeutic relationship. Nevertheless, Freud and various psychoanalytic theorists who have followed him have sought to discover natural psychological laws that are objective and universal. Psychological phenomena are divided into two realms of experience, the conscious and the unconscious, movement from the latter to the former being a primary goal within the process of analytic therapy, along with the recapitulation of early experience in the therapeutic relationship. The approach is reductionist in that it traces all human behav ior to a few basic drives and/or early childhood experiences. It is deterministic in believing that all mental functioning is caused by identifiable factorsalready in existence. It is materialist in that it explains "higher" levels of functi ning in terms of "lower" ones.
Inherent in the analytic perspective is a gender analysis based upon unalterable anatomical and biological differences between the sexes. As the behaviorists' approach has been judged as too narrow, so the Freudian approach has been criticized by feminists for being phallocentric. lts epistemology takes male experience as the universal norm, considering possession or lack of a penis the central element in the psychological makeup of all people (Cixous 1980; Kristeva 1982; Irigaray 1985).
Those without penises are forever relegated, by definition, to inferior status and are unable fully to resolve important developmental tasks. Even women's essential role in childbirth is viewed, in part or fully, as a consolation prize, a substitute for the coveted first prize. Psychological makeup is determined by biology and by early childhood experience in the oedipal triangle formed by the child and parents. Woman is considered an homme manqué to be understood primarily and throughout her psychological development (or lack thereof} by her lack of a penis.* Unlike the behaviorist approach, the psychoanalytic clearly distinguishes between two types of people, the haves and the have-nots, the latter being forever doomed to second-class status.
Imagine a female child who perceives her father's hostile feelings toward his own mother. Additionally, she is aware of her mother's despair over a difficult marriage and an interrupted career at a time when women are gaining access to better jobs. Do these complex experiences affect the child only in observable and manipulable ways? What if we then add to the picture the meanings that the child attributes to these factors, in particular, her own diminished sense of self-worth? Are these aspects reducible to fragments of observable behavior whose combination is only quantitative and does not create a qualitatively different psychological constellation? Indeed, new, complex, and subjectively organized meanings will come to permeate this child's psychological experiences in an untold variety of situations.
The psychoanalytic approach has already been the subject of serious criticism (Millett 1970; Chesler 1972; Koedt 1976; Lerman 1986) as well as attempts at revision (Mitchell 1974; Alpert 1986; Bernay and Cantor 1986) by feminist scholars. It development has not proceeded according to the tenets of logical positivism; rather this approach is based upon introspection and the analysis of intrapsychic events, such as transference and countertransference, manifested interpersonally in the therapeutic relationship. Nevertheless, Freud and various psychoanalytic theorists who have followed him have sought to discover natural psychological laws that are objective and universal. Psychological phenomena are divided into two realms of experience, the conscious and the unconscious, movement from the latter to the former being a primary goal within the process of analytic therapy, along with the recapitulation of early experience in the therapeutic relationship. The approach is reductionist in that it traces all human behav ior to a few basic drives and/or early childhood experiences. It is deterministic in believing that all mental functioning is caused by identifiable factorsalready in existence. It is materialist in that it explains "higher" levels of functi ning in terms of "lower" ones.
Inherent in the analytic perspective is a gender analysis based upon unalterable anatomical and biological differences between the sexes. As the behaviorists' approach has been judged as too narrow, so the Freudian approach has been criticized by feminists for being phallocentric. lts epistemology takes male experience as the universal norm, considering possession or lack of a penis the central element in the psychological makeup of all people (Cixous 1980; Kristeva 1982; Irigaray 1985).
Those without penises are forever relegated, by definition, to inferior status and are unable fully to resolve important developmental tasks. Even women's essential role in childbirth is viewed, in part or fully, as a consolation prize, a substitute for the coveted first prize. Psychological makeup is determined by biology and by early childhood experience in the oedipal triangle formed by the child and parents. Woman is considered an homme manqué to be understood primarily and throughout her psychological development (or lack thereof} by her lack of a penis.* Unlike the behaviorist approach, the psychoanalytic clearly distinguishes between two types of people, the haves and the have-nots, the latter being forever doomed to second-class status.
According to the Freudian psychoanalytic perspective, all individuals pass through predictable and definable stages of psychosexual development, which must be successfully negotiated to become mature adults. All human experience is reducible to and explained by these stages of development, which are all completed in childhood and early adolescence and in relation primarily to the parents.
The same client 1 mentioned in the behavioral example, the woman afraid of open spaces, would be approached very differently by the analytically oriented therapist. The etiology of this fear, diagnosed as agoraphobia, would be sought in early childhood memories, dreams, associations, and transference in the therapeutic relationship. Undoubtedly it would be A male student once explained to me that he thought it is men who have penis envy: he admitted that he himself certainly envied his penis. This comment speaks of some men's relationship with their sexual organ, which they apparently believe has a life of its own sought in the psychosexual history in general and the oedipal or family drama in particular. Undoubtedly penis envy and castration anxiety would figure prominently. Only through uncovering the memory of the early traumatic event(s) that led to this fear, along with the accompanying affects, can a catharsis be accomplished and the anxiety discharged: that is, the underlying intrapsychic conflict must come to awareness and be resolved in the therapeutic relationship.
The analyst is viewed not as a particular person of a particular gender, class, or race with its concomitant values and perspectives but as a relatively dispassionate, neutral figure upon whom projection can occur. The analyst thereby becomes the current representation of the parent(s) of early child-hood and is, in this sense, both decontextualized and disembodied. Although more modern approaches, such as that of Harold Searles (1979), make explicit use of countertransference, it is still considered to be uniquely developed in response to the analysand. This takes place, most importantly, through the defense of projective identification, whereby the analyst is included in the picture but as a finely tuned instrument for receiving and interpreting the patient's projections and distortions and, second, through intrusion of the analyst's unresolved intrapsychic and familial conflicts stripped of any cultural meanings.
1 will not, at this point, undertake a criticism from a feminist perspective of all the latter-day revisions, adaptations, and schools of psychotherapy derived from the original Freudian school, which can be broadly subsumed under the aegis of analytically oriented approaches, those emphasizing ego functioning being most prominent. Some of this work has already been begun (Westkott 1986), as have attempts to revise or adapt the original Freudian approach 'in a manner relevant to women's psychology (Miller 1973; Alpert 1986; Bernay and Cantor 1986). The objectrelations approach, adapted to feminist psychology by Nancy Chodorow (1978) and others, will be considered at length in later chapters.
The same client 1 mentioned in the behavioral example, the woman afraid of open spaces, would be approached very differently by the analytically oriented therapist. The etiology of this fear, diagnosed as agoraphobia, would be sought in early childhood memories, dreams, associations, and transference in the therapeutic relationship. Undoubtedly it would be A male student once explained to me that he thought it is men who have penis envy: he admitted that he himself certainly envied his penis. This comment speaks of some men's relationship with their sexual organ, which they apparently believe has a life of its own sought in the psychosexual history in general and the oedipal or family drama in particular. Undoubtedly penis envy and castration anxiety would figure prominently. Only through uncovering the memory of the early traumatic event(s) that led to this fear, along with the accompanying affects, can a catharsis be accomplished and the anxiety discharged: that is, the underlying intrapsychic conflict must come to awareness and be resolved in the therapeutic relationship.
The analyst is viewed not as a particular person of a particular gender, class, or race with its concomitant values and perspectives but as a relatively dispassionate, neutral figure upon whom projection can occur. The analyst thereby becomes the current representation of the parent(s) of early child-hood and is, in this sense, both decontextualized and disembodied. Although more modern approaches, such as that of Harold Searles (1979), make explicit use of countertransference, it is still considered to be uniquely developed in response to the analysand. This takes place, most importantly, through the defense of projective identification, whereby the analyst is included in the picture but as a finely tuned instrument for receiving and interpreting the patient's projections and distortions and, second, through intrusion of the analyst's unresolved intrapsychic and familial conflicts stripped of any cultural meanings.
1 will not, at this point, undertake a criticism from a feminist perspective of all the latter-day revisions, adaptations, and schools of psychotherapy derived from the original Freudian school, which can be broadly subsumed under the aegis of analytically oriented approaches, those emphasizing ego functioning being most prominent. Some of this work has already been begun (Westkott 1986), as have attempts to revise or adapt the original Freudian approach 'in a manner relevant to women's psychology (Miller 1973; Alpert 1986; Bernay and Cantor 1986). The objectrelations approach, adapted to feminist psychology by Nancy Chodorow (1978) and others, will be considered at length in later chapters.
