Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  The Chomsky-Skinner affair was as personal as Snow-Leavis. Skinner apparently never finished reading the review, believing the other man had completely – and perhaps deliberately – misunderstood him. And he never replied.39 One consequence of this, however, was that Chomsky’s review became more widely known, and agreed with, than Skinner’s original book, and as a result Skinner’s influence has been blunted. In fact, he never denied that a lot of behavior is instinctive; but he was interested in how it was modified and could, if necessary, be modified still further. His views have always found a small but influential following.

  Whatever the effects of Chomsky’s attack on Skinner, it offered no support for Freud or psychoanalysis. Although conventional Freudian analysis remained popular in a few isolated areas, like Manhattan, several other well-known scientists, while not abandoning Freudian concepts entirely, began to adapt and extend them in more empirically grounded ways. One of the most influential was John Bowlby.

  In 1948 the Social Commission of the United Nations decided to make a study of the needs of homeless children: in the aftermath of war it was realised that in several countries large numbers of children lacked fully formed families as a result of the men killed in the fighting. The World Health Organization (WHO) offered to provide an investigation into the mental health aspects of the problem. Dr Bowlby was a British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who had helped select army officers during the war. He took up a temporary appointment with the WHO in January 1950, and during the late winter and early spring of that year he visited France, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, Great Britain, and the United States of America, holding discussions with workers involved in child care and child guidance. These discussions led to the publication, in 1951, of Maternal Care and Mental Health, a famous report that hit a popular nerve and brought about a wholesale change in the way we think about childhood.40

  It was this report that first confirmed for many people the crucial nature of the early months of an infant’s life, when in particular the quality of mothering was revealed as all-important to the subsequent psychological development of a child. Bowlby’s book introduced the key phrase maternal deprivation to describe the source of a general pathology of development in children, the effects of which were found to be widespread. The very young infant who went without proper mothering was found to be ‘listless, quiet, unhappy, and unresponsive to a smile or a coo,’ and later to be less intelligent, bordering in some cases on the defective.41 No less important, Bowlby drew attention to a large number of studies which showed that victims of maternal deprivation failed to develop the ability to hold relationships with others, or to feel guilty about their failure. Such children either ‘craved affection’ or were ‘affect-less.’ Bowlby went on to show that studies in Spain during the civil war, in America, and among a sample of Copenhagen prostitutes all confirmed that delinquent groups were comprised of individuals who, more than their counterparts, were likely to have come from broken homes where, by definition, there had been widespread maternal deprivation.42 The thrust of this research had two consequences. On the positive side, Bowlby’s research put beyond doubt the idea that even a bad home is better for a child than a good institution. It was then the practice in many countries for illegitimate or unwanted children to be cared for in institutions where standards of nutrition, cleanliness, and medical matters could be closely monitored. But it became clear that such an environment was not enough, that something was lacking which affected mental health, rather in the way that vitamins had been discovered to be lacking in the artificial diets created for neglected children in the great cities of the nineteenth century. And so, following publication of the WHO report, countries began to change their approach to neglected children: adoptions were favoured over fostering, children with long-term illnesses were not separated from their parents when they went to hospital, and mothers sent to prison were allowed to take their young babies with them. At work, maternity leave was extended to include not just the delivery but the all-important early months of the child’s life. There was in general a much greater sensitivity to the nature of the mother—child bond.43

  Less straightforward was the link the WHO report found between a disrupted early family life and later delinquency and/or inadequacy. This was doubly important because children from such ‘broken’ families also proved in many cases to be problem parents themselves, thus establishing what was at first called ‘serial deprivation’ and later the ‘cycle of deprivation.’ Not all deprived children became delinquent; and not all delinquent children came from broken homes (though the great majority did). The exact nature of this link assumed greater intellectual prominence later on, but in the 1950s the discovery of the relationship between broken homes and delinquency, mediated via maternal deprivation, offered hope for the amelioration of social problems that disfigured postwar society in many Western countries.

  The great significance of Bowlby’s report was the way it took an essentially Freudian concept – the bond between mother and child – and examined it scientifically, using objective measures of behavior to understand what was going on, rather than concentrating on the inner workings of ‘the mind.’ As a psychoanalyst, Freud’s work had led Bowlby to focus on the mother-child bond, and to discover its vital practical significance, but Maternal Care and Mental Health has only one reference to Freud, and none at all to the unconscious, the ego, id, or superego. In fact, Bowlby was as much influenced by his observations of behavior among animals, including a series of studies carried out in the 1930s in Nazi Germany. So Bowlby’s work was yet another instance of ‘mind’ being eschewed in favour of behavior. The fact that he was a psychoanalyst himself only underlined the inadequacy of traditional Freudian concepts.

  Interest in the child as a psychological entity had been spasmodically entertained since the 1850s. The Journal of Educational Psychology was founded in the United States in 1910, and the Yale Psycho-Clinic, which opened a year later, was among the first to study babies systematically. But it was in Vienna, in the wake of World War I, that child psychology really began in earnest, due partly to the prevailing Freudian atmosphere, now much more ‘respectable’ than before, and partly to the straitened circumstances of the country, which affected children particularly badly. By 1926 there were forty different agencies in Vienna concerned with child development.

  The man who was probably the greatest child psychologist of the century was influenced less by Freud than by Jung. Jean Piaget was born in Neufchâtel, Switzerland, in 1896. He was brilliant even as a boy, publishing his first scientific paper when he was ten, and by fifteen he had a Europe-wide reputation for a series of reports on molluscs. He studied psychiatry under both Eugen Bleuler (who coined the term schizophrenia) and Carl Jung, then worked with Théodore Simon at the Sorbonne.44 Simon had collaborated with Alfred Binet on intelligence tests, and in Paris Piaget was given the task of trying out a new test devised in England by Cyril Burt. This test had questions of the following kind: ‘Jane is fairer than Sue; Sue is fairer than Ellen; who is fairer, Jane or Ellen?’45 Burt was interested in intelligence in general, but Piaget took something rather different from this test, an idea that was to make him far more famous and influential than Burt ever was. Piaget’s central idea had two aspects. First he claimed that children are, in effect, tabulae rasae, with no inbuilt logical – i.e., intellectual – capabilities; rather, these are learned as they grow up. Second, a child goes through a series of stages in his or her development, as he or she grasps various logical relations and then applies them to the practicalities of life. These theories of Piaget arose from a massive series of experiments carried out at the International Centre of Genetic Epistemology which Piaget founded in Geneva in 1955. (Genetic epistemology is concerned with the nature and origins of human knowledge.)46 Here there is space for just one experiment. At six months a baby is adept at reaching for things, lifting them up, and dropping them. However, if an object is placed under a cushion, the baby loses interest even if th
e object is still within reach. Piaget claimed, controversially, that this is because the six-month-old child has no conception that unseen objects continue to exist. By roughly nine months, the child no longer has this difficulty.47

  Over the years, Piaget described meticulously the infant’s growing repertoire of abilities in a series of experiments that were close to being games.48 Although their ingenuity is not in doubt, critics found some of his interpretations difficult to accept, chiefly that at birth the child has no logic whatsoever and must literally ‘battle with the world’ to learn the various concepts needed to live a successful life.49 Many critics thought he had done no more than observe a maturational process, as the child’s brain developed according to the ‘wiring’ set down at birth and based, as Chomsky had said, on the infant’s heredity. For these critics, logic ‘was the engine of development, not the product,’ as Piaget said it was.50 In later years the battle between nature and nurture, and their effects on behaviour, would grow more heated, but the significance of Piaget was that he aligned himself with Skinner and Bowlby in regarding behavior as central to the psychologist’s concern, and showing how the first few years of life are all-important to later development. Once again, with Piaget the concept of mind took a back seat.

  One other development in the 1950s helped discredit the traditional concept of mind: medical drugs that influenced the workings of the brain. As the century wore on, one ‘mental’ condition after another had turned out to have a physical basis: cretinism, general paralysis of the insane, pellagra (nervous disorder caused by niacin deficiency) – all had been explained in biochemical or physiological terms and, more important, shown themselves as amenable to medication.51

  Until about 1950 the ‘hard core’ of insanity – schizophrenia and the manic-depressive psychoses – lacked any physical basis. Beginning in the 1950s, however, even these illnesses began to come within the scope of science, three avenues of inquiry joining together to form one coherent view.52 From the study of nerve cells and the substances that governed the transmission of the nerve impulse from one cell to another, specific chemicals were isolated. This implied that modification of these chemicals could perhaps help in treatment by either speeding up or inhibiting transmission. The antihistamines developed in the 1940s as remedies for motion sickness were found to have the side effect of making people drowsy – i.e., they exerted an effect on the brain. Third, it was discovered that the Indian plant Rauwolfia serpentina, extracts of which were used in the West for treatment of high blood pressure, was also used in India to control ‘overexcitement and mania.’53 The Indian drug acted like the antihistamines, the most active substance being promethazine, commercially known as Phenergan. Experimenting with variants of promethazine, the Frenchman Henri Laborit hit on a substance that became known as chlorpromazine, which produced a remarkable state of ‘inactivity or indifference’ in excited or agitated patients.54 Chlorpromazine was thus the first tranquiliser.

  Tranquilisers appeared to work by inhibiting neurotransmitter substances, like acetylcholine or noradrenaline. It was natural to ask what effect might be achieved by substances that worked in the opposite way – might they, for instance, help relieve depression? At the time the only effective treatment for chronic depression was electroconvulsive therapy. ECT, which many viewed as brutal despite the fact that it often worked, was based on a supposed antagonism between epilepsy and schizophrenia: induction of artificial fits was believed to help. In fact, the first breakthrough arose accidentally. Administering the new antituberculosis drug, isoniazid, doctors found there was a marked improvement in the well-being of the patients. Their appetites returned; they put on weight and they cheered up. Psychiatrists quickly discovered that isoniazid and related compounds were fairly similar to neurotransmitters, in particular the amines found in the brain.55 These amines, it was already known, were decomposed by a substance called monoamine oxidase; so did isoniazid achieve its effect by inhibiting monoamine oxidase, preventing it from decomposing the neurotransmitters? The monoamine oxidase inhibitors, though they worked well enough in relieving depression, had too many toxic side effects to be lasting as a family of drugs. Shortly afterward, however, another relative of chlorpromazine, Imipramine, was found to be effective as an antidepressant, as well as increasing people’s desire for social contact.56 This entered widespread use as Tofranil.

  Ad these substances reinforced the view that the ‘mind’ was amenable to chemical treatment. During the 1950s and early 1960s, many tranquilisers and antidepressants came into use. Not all were effective with all patients; each had side effects. But whatever their shortcomings, and despite the difficulties and complexities that remain, even to this day, these two categories of drugs, besides relieving an enormous amount of suffering, pose profound questions about human nature. They confirm that psychological moods are the result of chemical states within the brain, and therefore throw into serious doubt the traditional metaphysical concept of mind.

  In trying to be an amalgam of Freud and Sartre, of psychoanalysis and existentialism, R. D. Laing’s ideas were going against the grain then becoming established in psychiatry. Why then, when it is debatable whether Laing’s approach ever cured anyone, did he become a cult figure?

  In the context of the times, Laing and colleagues such as David Cooper in Britain and Herbert Marcuse in America focused their attention on the personal liberation of individuals in a mass society, as opposed to the earlier Marxist idea of liberation of an entire class through revolution. Gregory Bateson, Marcuse, and Laing all argued that man lived in conflict with mass society, that society and the unconscious were constantly at war, the schizophrenic simply the most visible victim in this war.57 The intolerable pressures put on modern families led to the famous ‘double bind,’ in which all-powerful parents tell a child one thing but do another, with the result that children grow up in perpetual conflict. Essentially, Laing and the others were saying that society is mad and the schizophrenic response is no more or less than a rational reaction to that complex, confusing world, if only the private logic of the schizophrenic can be unravelled. For Laing, families were ‘power units’ on top of whatever else they might be, and it is liberation from this power structure that is part of the function of psychiatry. This led to experiments in specially created clinics where even the power structure between psychiatrist and patient was abolished.

  Laing became a cult figure in the early 1960s, not only because of his radical approach to schizophrenia (anti-psychiatry, and radical psychiatry became popular terms), but also because of his approach to experience.58 From about 1960, Laing was a fairly frequent user of the so-called mind-altering drugs, including LSD. Like others, he believed that the ‘alternative consciousness’ they provided could be clinically useful in the liberation of false consciousness created by schizophrenogenic families, and for a time he persuaded the British Home Office to give him a licence to experiment (in his offices in Wimpole Street, London) with LSD, which was then manufactured commercially in Czechoslovakia.59 As the 1960s progressed, Laing and Cooper were taken up by the New Left. The linking of psychiatry and politics seemed new, radical, in Britain but went back to the teachings of the Frankfurt School and its original attempts to marry Marx and Freud. This is one reason why the Laing cult was overshallowed by the Marcuse cult in America.

  Herbert Marcuse, sixty-two in 1960, had been part of the Frankfurt School and, like Hannah Arendt, studied under Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl. With Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno he had emigrated to the United States following Hitler’s rise to power, but unlike them, he did not return once the war was over. He put his linguistic skills at the disposal of wartime intelligence and remained in government service some time after 1945.60 As an erstwhile Marxist, Marcuse’s mind was radically changed by Hitler, Stalin, and World War II. Afterward he was motivated, he said, by three things: that Marxism had not predicted the rise of Nazism, the emergence out of capitalist society of an irrational, barbaric movement; the
effects of technology on society, especially Fordism and Taylorism; and the fact that prosperous America still contained many hidden and uncomfortable assumptions and contradictions.61 Marcuse’s attempt at a rapprochement of Freud and Marx was more sophisticated than either Erich Fromm’s or Laing’s. He felt that Marxism, as an account of the human condition, failed because it took no measure of individual psychology. In Eros and Civilisation (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse examined the conformist mass society around him, where high-technology material goods were both the epitome of scientific rationalism and the means by which conformity in thought and behavior was maintained, and he offered a new emphasis on aesthetics and sensuality in human life.62 For him, the most worthwhile response to mass society on the part of the individual was negation (an echo of Sartre’s l’homme revolté). The United States was one-dimensional because there were no longer any permissible alternative ways to think or behave. His was, he said, a ‘diagnosis of domination’. Life moved ‘forward’ by means of ‘progress,’ thanks to reason and ‘the rigidity’ of science.63 This was, he said, a stifling totality that had to be countered with imagination, art, nature, ‘negative thought,’ all put together in ‘a great refusal.’64 The already disastrous results in recent decades of very conformist societies, the new psychologies of mass society and affluence, what were perceived as the dehumanising effects of positivist science and philosophy – all combined, for Marcuse, into ‘a criminally limited’ one-dimensional world.65 For many, Laing and Marcuse went together because the former’s schizophrenics were the natural endpoint of the one-dimensional society, the reject-victims of a dehumanising world where the price of nonconformity carried the risk of madness. This had uncomfortable echoes of Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka, looking back even to the speeches of Hitler, who had threatened with imprisonment the artists who painted in ways he thought ‘degenerate.’ In the early 1960s the baby-boom generation was reaching university age. The universities were expanding fast, and on campus the notions of Laing, Marcuse, and others, though quite at variance with the clinical evidence, nonetheless proved irresistible. Riesman had found that it was a characteristic of the ‘other-directed’ personality that it hated its own conformist image. The popularity of Laing and Marcuse underlines that. And so the stage was set for personal, rather than political change. The 1960s were ready to begin.