THE 20TH CENTURY BEGAN with an incredible coincidence. In 1900 three ideas were born almost simultaneously. First, the unconscious was revealed by Freud in his book
The Interpretation of Dreams. Then came the gene, when scientists rediscovered and amplified the work on plant breeding by the Benedictine monk Gregor Mendel. Thirdly, there was Max Planck’s theory of the quantum: that energy exists in tiny packets called quanta. These three ideas — psychoanalysis, genetics and quantum physics — can reasonably be called the scientific backbone of the 20th century.
Their growth and development, however,could not have been more different. Scientific breakthroughs in genetics and physics have occurred regularly over the past 100 years, often demonstrating surprising links between the two. Psychology, by contrast, is sinking in a morass of jargon, flawed research and scientific disagreements — and is clearly failing the people that it is supposed to help.
Just this week, scientists at Bristol University overturned another accepted psychological “fact”. After studying 14,000 families, they found that children whose mothers go out to work suffer no psychological damage.
Yet it is also true that British children are suffering from an unprecedented epidemic of behavioural problems. Between 1997 and 2001 the number of prescriptions for Ritalin, given to children to help them calm down and concentrate on schoolwork, soared from 921,000 to 2,085,000. In 2001 the number of children expelled from school for bad behaviour was more than 9,000, an increase of 11 per cent on the previous year. Among adults, the average 25-year-old is up to five times more likely to be depressed as 50 years ago. Adults are 28 times more likely to have been victims of violent crime as in 1953.
What is going on? On the psychological side, life seems to be going from bad to worse, when it ought to be getting better. For the past 100 years, we are supposed to have been living in “the psychological century”. Psychoanalysts and psychotherapists did not exist before Freud, yet by the 1970s there were 200 therapies on offer, ranging from Synanon to Insight to Rolfing. At certain points in the 20th century there were more psychology graduates than any other kind. The psychological jargon that has entered the language stretches from paranoia to penis envy, and from id to identity crisis to inferiority complex. So why, amid all this new professional apparatus, are behavioural problems more widespread, depression more common and psychotherapeutic drugs taken in unprecedented quantities? Could it be that psychology is failing? I think so. In fact, I think it has failed big-time. Furthermore, it has failed not just in the sense that more people are ill or unhappy, it has failed technologically, philosophically and is already in an advanced stage of decomposition.
Freud has taken a bashing recently, especially over the efficacy (or otherwise) of his method of treatment, so I’m not going to harp on about that (although I think the criticisms are fair). Instead, an historical approach is more original and more revealing.
Look at the careers of our three “backbone” sciences. Between 1900 and now, genetics recorded one success after another. In 1910 T. H. Morgan in New York produced the first experimental results showing that mutations were always sex-linked, supporting the idea that inheritance is carried on discrete units. In 1943 Oswald Avery, also in New York, discovered DNA, and, ten years later, Watson and Crick in Cambridge identified its structure as a double-helix, explaining how reproduction worked. In the 1970s gene sequencing and cloning were developed for the mass production of insulin, and in the Eighties, thanks to Alec Jeffreys at Leicester, DNA fingerprinting became a practical aid to police work. The mapping of the Human Genome is almost complete and genetic engineering is upon us. “Dolly” the sheep is history.
In physics, after the identification in 1897, by J.J. Thomson, of the first particle, the electron, and Max Planck’s ideas about the quantum, Einstein soon conceived the photon, the idea that light exists in packets. Ernest Rutherford followed that with his discovery of the structure of the atom, how the electrons were arranged around the nucleus. Rutherford famously “split” the atom in 1919, and between then and 1932, when James Chadwick discovered the neutron, physics entered its golden age, producing such advances as quantum mechanics, the wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle. Since then we have had the aggressive and the peaceful uses of atomic energy, and a range of new particles - quarks, leptons, strings and super-strings. Idea built on idea.
Now, look at the unconscious. By 1913, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel and Carl Jung had all broken with Freud because they had different theories about how the unconscious worked. Karen Horney in the 1930s, Erik Erikson in the 1950s, and Jacques Lacan in the 1960s each came up with yet more new ideas as to what the unconscious is. Each of these people disagreed with Freud and with one another. In 1957 a survey by the American Psychoanalytic Society showed that only one in six patients undergoing psychoanalysis could be called cured, and for this reason the society refused to publish the results for ten years. In the 1980s it was revealed that Jung had doctored his clinical notes to support his theories.
These comparisons show that the gene and the quantum have far more in common with each other than with the unconscious which, on this showing, doesn’t behave like a scientific entity at all. And there are other important similarities. Most powerful of all, the new ideas produced surprising links to other sciences that the inventors of these basic concepts could not have known about in advance. Niels Bohr, for example, found that the arrangement of the electrons in the outer orbits of the atom explained the chemical properties of a substance, elegantly linking physics and chemistry. Similarly, the spread of genetic diversity across the globe is now known to mirror variations in both linguistics and archaeology. These discoveries underline the fact that the different sciences are but alternative aspects of the same reality.
The unconscious has still not been universally accepted, nor is there agreement on what it is, while the technology it has produced (psychoanalysis) is as controversial now as when it was introduced. Nor has it produced links to other sciences. On the contrary, in Totem and Taboo, Freud tried hard to forge a connection between psychoanalysis, anthropology and palaeontology, only to show himself up as hopelessly outdated in his reading. When Erich Fromm, at the Frankfurt .Institute in the 1920s, tried to mesh psychology and politics by linking Freud to Marx, he found revolutionary workers amazingly reactionary in their .child-rearing and other personal habits. .Another embarrassing failure.
I said above that, at one stage, psychology students were the single largest bunch of graduates in the 20th century. We forget now how huge psychology was in the 1970s. Whole areas that were then looked upon as ways to transform and improve our lives have disappeared. Take learning theory. There was a time when the future of education was said to lie with learning machines - screens or books in which the subject to be taught was laid out in a mainly visual manner and/or a multiple-choice way, and in which, depending on his or her answers, the “learner” followed a different trajectory from others. Far from being the future, these machines and books have all but disappeared.
Learning theory also lay behind behaviour therapy, a new technique that promised to transform psychiatric hospitals. In a famous case an obsessive patient kept washing her hands. On psychoanalytic theory, this was because, deep inside, she felt “dirty”. The behaviourists simply insisted that she take a towel every time she made a hand-washing movement until she was “satiated” with towels, when her symptoms disappeared. Despite the sensational promise of this approach, behaviour therapy never built on these early successes and is now almost as outmoded as psychoanalysis. The best known behaviourist was the Harvard professor B.F. Skinner. Yet his masterpiece, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which contained his “big idea” about freedom - that society should be organised along conditioning lines, rewarding certain behaviours and punishing others - is forgotten and unread. We understand freedom as a political, legal and/or philosophical concept, not as a psychological one.
Race relations have also lost their psychological dimension. From the end of the Second World War to the 1970s at least, the central element in the race problem was felt to be psychological: prejudice, understood as a dimension of personality. In the 1950s, in The Authoritarian Personality, Theodore Adorno and his colleagues identified from a questionnaire that the number of potential fascists in America was “alarming”. Someone with a high “F” (for fascist) score had conventional attitudes, was submissive to authority and likely to be racially prejudiced. Upbringing was to blame.
These findings, I suggest, make almost comical reading now. After the war, anti-Semitism was much greater in the communist Soviet Union than it was in the capitalist US. And look back to the recent race riots in Oldham. No one seriously suggests that Oldham residents are more “authoritarian” in their attitudes than people elsewhere in the country. Their behaviour was a function of their social situation rather than their personality. Housing shortages, unemployment and different religions explain what happened. In this case, as elsewhere, sociological factors offer a better explanation of behaviour than psychology.
Military psychology is especially relevant to the events of recent weeks. In the Vietnam War, military psychology was huge. There were a dozen think-tanks devoted to the subject, yielding hundreds of studies, on topics such as “Rifle marksmanship as a function of manifest anxiety and situational stress”. Little of this is left. Such military psychology as does exist is confined to perceptual problems having to do with man-machine relations. In Vietnam, despite the huge number of studies, and vast amounts of money, the impact of military psychology was trivial.
Or consider advertising. In the period 1955 to 1975, the high point of the psychological age, there were two psychological techniques in advertising said to be particularly effective. In subliminal advertising, a message, such as “Eat Popcorn” or “Coca-Cola”, was flashed on to the cinema screen, but so brief as to be beyond conscious experience. The message was supposed to speak directly to the unconscious. Allegedly, in some areas, sales of popcorn rose by a half and Coke by a sixth, but elsewhere it was found to be ineffective and was soon abandoned.
In motivational research, popularised by Ernest Dichter, a car was not just a car but a sexual object. Taking inspiration from Freud, Dichter said that men were drawn to flashy cars, as they were drawn to glamorous and dangerous mistresses. But they ended up buying less flashy cars, “just as he married a plain girl”. Hmm. Don’t pretty girls ever get married? “Focus groups” are still used in advertising and politics, but if you look through advertising textbooks now, you find that, in the section under “Consumer Behaviour”, the dominant approach is sociological. What advertisers want to know about consumers these days is not their deep inner psyches, but their age, sex and economic and social background. Here, as with prejudice, the sociological has stood the test of time better than the psychological.
It is also true with crime. Years ago there was a concerted attempt to find links between crime and personality. It didn’t work. Criminologists now tell us that crime falls into two broad types. The vast bulk is committed by men in adolescence or early manhood, and for this large group sociological explanations - unemployment, educational level, family background - provide the most practical understanding. Secondly, there is a much smaller group of lifetime criminals - mostly men. Their crimes might once have been called psychological, in that most lifetime criminals show “psychiatric morbidity” of one kind or another. However, many criminologists now choose to regard these differences as biological rather than psychological - this is the so-called “new biology” of crime. They are not defining psychology out of existence here; the new biology reflects the view that the psychiatric differences in lifetime criminals is biological rather than having to do with upbringing, or personality factors alone.
Piece by piece, little by little, the discipline of psychology is being dismantled.
Do you think that psychology has failed us?
E-mail debate@thetimes.co.uk
Peter Watson is the author of A Terrible Beauty: A History of the People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £16.99)
