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The Political Relevance of Behavioral and Existential Psychology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Henry S. Kariel
Henry S. Kariel*
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii
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Extract

Over the last few decades political scientists have shown an understandable interest in material brought into relief by neighboring disciplines. A concern with enriching the field of political science by drawing on sociological, economic, and psychological data has led to efforts to accommodate findings derived from study in areas in which men are subjected to non-political pressures—the constraints of society, the economy, and ultimately their own physical and psychological nature. As the conventional academic boundaries are crossed, knowledge of distinctively political matters, it has been hoped, will become richer as well as more precise. This essay seeks to clarify the promise and limits of two non-political approaches to an understanding of politics, namely those which are represented by two types of psychology, and to take account of their bearings on normative political thought.

Traditionally, normative political thought has been concerned with the analysis and understanding of the ends of political action: it has been an attempt to present and elucidate them. Setting specific points of view in a larger context, it has tended to be discursive and Utopian, speculatively enlarging the realm of public possibilities and common choices. More recently, it has been concerned with presenting models designed to assimilate empirically validated propositions about political behavior. To these concerns, various forms of non-political thought have always made their distinctive contributions.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , June 1967 , pp. 334 - 342
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1967

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References

1 That traditional political philosophy is in retreat is by now a tired proposition. It merely remains to relate the decline of the study of political philosophy and the rise of the study of political attitudes to the increasing visibility of inarticulate groups.

2 Science and Human Values (New York: Harper, 1956), p. 94.

3 Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. xi. Adorno, T. W. and his associates simply affirm that “ideology regarding each social area must be regarded as a facet of the total person and an expression of more central (‘subideological’) psychological dispositions”: The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1960), p. 207Google Scholar.

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10 Walden Two (New York: Macmillan, 1948), p. 257. The empirical relevance of Skinner's novel has been pointed out by Hacker, Andrew in “Dostoevsky's Disciples: Man and Sheep in Political Theory,” Journal of Politics, 17 (11, 1955), 590–613CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hacker does not note how the benign conditioning apparatus of Walden Two was anticipated by Chernyshevsky's, Nicolai G.What Is to Be Done? (1863)Google Scholar. Chernyshevsky's rationalist utopia was parodied so thoroughly by Dostoevsky's Notes from Under ground that Dostoevsky remains Skinner's most incisive critic. It may also be worth noting that the very weakness of Skinner's novel as a work of art (its lack of tension and movement, the flatness of its characters, its tendency to make assertions about experience rather than to display it dramatically) also makes his work unconvincing political theory. It fails to take account of possibilities which are radically different; it fails to comprehend how one man's health may be another's misery, or how one man's misery may be another's entertainment. Had Skinner's style enabled him to reveal the complexity and ambiguity of the arrangements he describes, the cause his work defends would have been implicitly challenged. But perhaps the artist simply cannot successfully depict a closed order; works of art, like the paradigms of science, necessarily expose alternatives, and thus unsettle whatever they presume to establish.

11 Skinner's fictional psychologist, quite consistently, is hostile to politics on the ground that it impedes direct action: see Walden Two, 8, 193–197.

12 Skinner, B. F., “Freedom and the Control of Men,” American Scholar, 25 (Winter, 1955–1956), 47–65, at p. 51Google Scholar; also see Walden Two, p. 159. Skinner's, ultimate value is group survival; see his Science and Human Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 430–436, 443–446Google Scholar.

13 “Freedom and the Control of Men,” pp. 47, 53; Cumulative Record (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1959), p. 34. Also see Walden Two, 175–197.

14 Cumulative Record, p. 227.

15 Walden Two, p. 159.

16 Cumulative Record, p. 227, “A proper theory,” Skinner adds, “must … abolish the conception of the individual as a doer, as an originator of action”; ibid., p. 236.

17 Thus Heinz Hartmann and Erik H. Erikson refuse to reduce ego functions to the id. See Hartmann, , Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (New York: International Universities Press, 1958)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Comments on the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Ego,” Psychonanalytic Study of the Child, 5 (1950), 74–96; Erikson, , “The Problem of Ego Identity, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 4 (10, 1956), 56–121CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; “Ego Development and Historical Change,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 2 (1946), 359–396.

18 For a therapeutic approach expressing this view, see Rogers, Carl R., Client-Centered Therapy (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1951)Google Scholar. See also Berg, J. H. van den, The Phenomenological Approach to Psychiatry (Springfield: Thomas, 1955), p. 102Google Scholar; May, Rollo, Angel, Ernest, Ellenberger, Henri F. (eds.), Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1958)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rogers, , “A Theory of Therapy, Personality, and Interpersonal Relationships,” in Koch, Sigmund (ed.), Psychology; A Study of a Science (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), Vol. III, 184–256Google Scholar.

19 Thus Carl R. Rogers asks the analyst to feel as if he were the other person—“without ever losing the ‘as if’ condition” (in Koch, loc. cit.). It may be pertinent to note the origins of existentialist psychology in the formulations of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911): see Hodges, H. A., The Philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey (New York: Humanities Press, 1952), ch. 5Google Scholar. See also Heller's, Eric analysis of Goethe's idea of scientific truth in The Disinherited Mind (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cuday, 1957), ch. 1Google Scholar; and Gewirth, Alan, “Subjectivism and Objectivism in the Social Sciences,” Philosophy of Science, 21 (04, 1954), 157–163CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An entire sociological and anthropological school finds its vindication (and limits) in this approach. Consider the methodology not only of Max Weber and Karl Mannheim but no less that of Lewis's, OscarChildren of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (1961)Google Scholar and Capote's, TrumanIn Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (1965)Google Scholar—all enlarging understanding while raising the problem of verifiability and veracity.

20 Mimeographed manuscript, September 1960, p. 6.

21 For an account of the recent shift away from “the psychological Age of Theory,” see Sigmund Koch's epilogue to vol. 3 of Koch (ed.), Psychology; for a discussion of the present range of existentialist psychology, including an extensive bibliography, see Kaam, Adrian van, The Third Force in European Psychology (Greenville, Del.: Psychosynthesis Research Foundation, 1960)Google Scholar.

22 See especially Beauvoir, Simone de, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), ch. 2Google Scholar.

23 Erikson, Erik, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950)Google Scholar; see also Wheelis, Allan, The Quest for Identity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958)Google Scholar. Erikson has been particularly concerned with showing that, as we mature in modern society, we are unprepared to meet successive crises. Our education fails to tell us to what to adjust and against what to rebel. We are made anxious by our inability to find out where we belong and who we are: child or parent, boy or girl, man or woman, entrepreneur or coordinator. And since we can gain self-knowledge only in specific encounters, our identity becomes diffuse, we lose it, and cannot get to know ourselves.

24 Marcuse, Herbert, “Actuality of Dialectic,” Diogenes, No. 31 (Fall, 1960), 80–88, 83, 84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 See Brown, Norman O., “Filthy Lucre,” in Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), ch. 15Google Scholar.

26 One need merely reflect on the fate of the “existentialist” component of political thinkers from Augustine to Marx to realize that in fact they may lead to a great deal more. Sartre's idealization of the Communist Party, Brown's of a state of “polymorphic perversity,” Fromm's of a fraternal “communitarianism”—all these constitute a jumping to conclusions, an acceptance of finalities which links them with Skinner. Yet in their case, unlike Skinner's, such conclusiveness compromises their principles. In other words, existentialist psychologists may inconsistently defend the very regime which Skinner's behaviorism consistently seeks to establish.

27 Binswanger, Ludwig, “Erfahren, Verstehen, Deuten in der Psychoanalyse,” Imago, 12 (May 6, 1926), 223–237Google Scholar; “Existential Analysis and Psychotherapy,” in Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda and Moreno, J. L. (eds.), Progress in Psychotherapy (New York: Grane and Stratton, 1956), p. 144Google Scholar. See also Sonnemann, Ulrich, Existence and Therapy (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1954)Google Scholar; May et al. (eds.), Existence; and Weisman, Avery D., The Existential Core of Psychoanalysis (Boston: Little Brown, 1965)Google Scholar.

28 Thus Heinz Hartmann notes that the psychological analysis of morality will not direct human conduct and that, moreover, the psychologically healthy person is by no means necessarily “moral”: Psychoanalysis and Moral Values (New York: International Universities Press 1960).

29 An exception is Carl R. Rogers, perhaps because he has wanted to come to terms with Skinner (the text of their actual debate is in Science, November 20, 1956, 1057–1066): see Rogers, , On Becoming a Person (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), Part VIIGoogle Scholar. However, Rogers' acceptance of behavioral methods is less than thoroughgoing: he still Insists that the phenomenological approach itself can use “objective measures, whose results are publicly replicable,” that it can lead to the “development of clearly operational steps and operational tools for the measurement of the behaviors which represent … inner variables,” and that it can (and should) lead to the discovery of “function-process relationships which hold for the inner world of personal meanings and to formulate these with sufficient precision that they may be put to empirical test”: “Toward a Science of the Person,” in Wann, T. W. (ed.), Behaviorism and Phenomenology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 109–133, 120, 131Google Scholar.

30 See Krutch's, Joseph Wood obscurantist attack on Skinner, in The Measure of Man (New York: Charter Books, 1962)Google Scholar, sensibly put in its place by Kateb, George, Utopia and Its Enemies (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963)Google Scholar. See also Matson, Floyd W., The Broken Image: Man, Science and Society (New York: George Braziller, 1964)Google Scholar; and Barzun, Jacques, Science: The Glorious Entertainment (New York: Harper and Row, 1964)Google Scholar, both polemics lashing scientism as if it were science.

31 Davis, Allison, “The Ego and Status-Anxiety,” in White, (ed.), The State of the Social Sciences, pp. 212–228, 228Google Scholar.

32 For an attempt to show how this proposition applies to Nietzsche's, work, see my “Nietzsche's Preface to Constitutionalism,” Journal of Politics, 25 (05, 1963), 211–225Google Scholar.

33 This is implicitly recognized by Bay's, ChristianThe Structure of Freedom (1958)Google Scholar, a work which has made the most of empirical findings tending to support a view of man which relies on no transcending absolutes and postulates man's irreducible, “existential” nature. Similarly, it has been possible to use the normative constructs of existentialist psychology (especially those provided by Gordon W. Allport, Henry A. Murray, and Abraham H. Maslow) to give direction to empirical analysis: see Hagen, Everett E., On the Theory of Social Change: How Economic Growth Begins (Homewood, Illinois: Dorsey Press, 1962), 88–95Google Scholar; and Pye, Lucian W., Politics, Personality, and Nation-Building: Burma's Search for Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962)Google Scholar. A useful synthesis of the literature dealing with basic needs is provided by Kurtz, Paul, Decision and the Condition of Man (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965), ch. 9Google Scholar.

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