PSYCHOLOGY

Behaviourism & Freud

Beginning in the 1930s, behaviourism flourished in the United States, with leading the way in demonstrating the power of through reinforcement. Behaviourists in university settings conducted experiments on the conditions controlling learning and "shaping" behaviour through reinforcement, usually working with animals such as rats and pigeons. Skinner and his followers explicitly excluded mental life, viewing the human mind as an impenetrable "black box," open only to conjecture and speculative fictions. Their work showed that social behaviour is readily influenced by manipulating specific and by changing the consequences or reinforcement (rewards) to which behaviour leads in different situations. Changes in those consequences can modify behaviour in predictable stimulus-response (S-R) patterns. Likewise, a wide range of , both positive and negative, may be acquired through processes of conditioning and can be modified by applying the same principles.

Freud And His Followers

Concurrently, in a curious , the theories and therapeutic practices developed by the Vienna-trained physician and his many disciples—beginning early in the 20th century and enduring for many decades—were undermining the traditional view of as essentially rational. Freudian theory made secondary: for Freud, the and its often socially unacceptable irrational motives and desires, particularly the sexual and aggressive, were the driving force underlying much of and . Making the unconscious conscious became the therapeutic goal of clinicians working within this framework.

Freud proposed that much of what humans feel, think, and do is outside awareness, self-defensive in its motivations, and unconsciously determined. Much of it also reflects conflicts grounded in early childhood that out in complex patterns of seemingly paradoxical behaviours and symptoms. His followers, the psychologists, emphasized the importance of the higher-order functions and processes (e.g., competence motivation, self-regulatory abilities) as well as the individual's psychological . They also shifted their focus to the roles of interpersonal relations and of secure attachment in and adaptive functioning, and they pioneered the analysis of these processes in the clinical setting.