After Freud

Alright. Back to the past, not back to the future. We're back to the past talking more about
history. History of psychology and specifically looking at the ripples, I guess, from that big stone
that Freud threw into this discipline that was developing. It was developing with a very scientific
focus and then Freud suddenly brought in this medical curveball, as it were, and stopped it
being about sort of the study of the conscious mind. And instead kind of shaped it toward the
study of pathology, of mental disorders. In fact, along the way developed all these theories that
extended well beyond mental disorders. And became in a sense of theories about human
behavior but theories that the scientific community felt just couldn't be tested. They were not
scientific theories.They were just pulled out of thin air, very fascinating, very interesting.

But how do you know if it's real and if you can never test whether it's real or not, then it's not
science. Okay? So how did they react to this? Let's find out. Lecture four, psychology after
Freud.

Alright. Well, perhaps not surprisingly the reaction was to suddenly retreat and, and in fact,
become more scientific than ever before. And, and what I'm referring to of course now is the
scientific group within psychology. Though the clinical psychology that Freud started continued
on and flourished, okay. And I'll come back to that in a point, but it's certainly not the case that
people went flocking away from clinical psychology.

Once Freud had kind of set that stake in the ground, it was there, and it continued on. But the
more scientific-minded psychologists, they did react to Freud's ideas. And they reacted by
saying, oh my goodness, we want to be a science of the mind, a science of psychology. We
really have to be scientific. we cannot just come up with things like id and ego, and throw it out
there, and, and suggest maybe it's true, if we can't prove that's true we have to be much more
disciplined. Now specifically they really went to a far end of the discipline scale. The suggestion
was by most behaviorists and that's why this new school of Psychology is called behaviorism.

Behaviorists said, here's the best way to go. Let's restrict our experiments and our theories to
things we can manipulate and things we can measure precisely. Some people call this SR
psychology, Stimuli, which are things you can manipulate and responses which are things you
can measure. And, you know, what happens in between? Let's not talk about that because we
don't know. Those are theoretical things. We can't see what happens between when we present
a stimulus and a person responds and so let's just not go there. Let's keep that separate.

Okay, let me give you an example and I'm going to use this example for a couple of reasons.
First to show that you can still get out some very interesting issues despite these constraints
but, also I hope to give you a sense that these are constraints, boundaries and therefore it's not
surprising that future psychologists are going to try to break out of them. But here's a good
example to give you a start.
So this is the little Albert experiment. It's one of the famous psychology experiments partly
because of its dubious ethics. It's a little worrisome. If this was your child I don't think you would
be happy about it. But this is how the experiment worked. We start with Albert here, little Albert,
and before anything happens we have little Albert in a room and we expose him to nice, little,
furry creatures. And we look at his response. So the stimulus here, a little furry rabbit. And the
response would be literally how Albert responded. And as kind of suggested in this picture, if
you ignore the ominous hammer for a second. Albert's okay with the rabbit, okay? And early on,
before anything happened in this experiment, Albert was fine with furry critters. No fear
response, no negativity at all. Now he did show negativity to other stimuli. So let's forget about
the critters for a second and say, okay, we have Albert in a room. And somebody bangs on
something metal with a hammer, making that clanging sound. That scares Albert. So Albert gets
scared and he cries and he reacts in fear. So the rabbit doesn't produce any reaction. Hammer
produces fear, and so now the experiment is, well what if we now associate the critter with the
noise? 'Kay, what if we reliably do the following, we have Albert in a room right now, there's
nothing else in the room, but then we introduce a furry critter. And if Albert approaches the
critter or if the critter approaches Albert then we clang. We hit our hammer on that thing and
clang which of course makes Albert cry because he's scared of that noise. We give him trial
after trial of this. We introduce another critter, another clang, another critter, another clang. Let's
say we do that 20 times. Then we're not going to clang it anymore. We're not going to hit
anything anymore. But now we just bring the critter in. What's Albert gonna do? Well what Albert
does is he acts scared.

Okay he's learned to associate this critter that used to be perfectly fine for him with something
that scared him. And now he reacts in fear, not only to rabbits, by the way, but to stuffed rabbits,
to shoals that are furry, to anything sort of like that. He's suddenly scared of all these things. So
to the behaviorists they say, okay, now this is a cool experiment. because we've just
manipulated the stimuli in ways we can measure. You know, the rabbit was there without the
clang and then we had a rabbit with the clang. so this is all very clear and scientific what we did.
And the behaviors that Albert shows are clearly measurable and categorizable in a way we all
agree. And what we've shown in this experiment is that something like fear can be conditioned.
Okay. You can learn to become scared of something, and that's what we've demonstrated. So,
you know.

Well, behaviorism was really important for psychology. It was that retreat to a much more
scientific place and so now we really had a pretty big split. We had clinical psychology going
strong but clinical psychology was really about the treatment, predominantly a mental disorder.

Then we had this experimental psychology that was more just generally inquisitive about, you
know, human nature and what we can learn. But the problem was that this behaviorist
approach, restricting yourself to stimuli and responses, there's only so much you can do within
that space. And it was kind of like psychologists needed a way out and they got a way out.
In the 1960s, computers started to become more common. And that's important because
computers formed a very important analogy for psychologists. There were devices that kind of
did things humans did. They took input and they produced output. So kind of like a behavioral
stimulus response. But, there were also very clear concrete things that happened in between.

So that input was plotted into the computer but then if you're a technician or an engineer, you
can really specify how that information was passed from component to component. How it was
changed and how it ultimately, for example, produced something on the computer screen. So
this notion was called Information processing. That's what a computer did, processed
information.

And when a lot of psychologists looked at this they said, it's kind of like what we do, isn't it? As a
memory system, it's getting inputs from the world and it's producing outputs to the world. Maybe
we can think of this as analogous to a human. Maybe we can think of the hardware as the brain,
and then the program, the software, as thoughts and cognitive experiences and so suddenly this
was an analogy. There was this concrete notion of memory in a computer, and suddenly things
like memory, which seemed really squishy before, didn't seem quite as theoretical. It seemed
much more reasonable to talk about various components of an information processing system.

And a lot of that way of thinking was now imported into psychology and with it came the notion
that, okay we agree with the behaviors. We have to be scientific, but what we don't agree with is
that you have to be able to directly measure everything you're interested in. If what you're
interested in leaves some sort of trace, so if learning leaves a trace of some sort and we can
look at that trace, we can make inferences about learning. We can go ahead and talk about that
theoretical construct and infer what the data tells us about that.

So that really opened the door. And it was kind of a middle ground. We're going to be a little
theoretical. We're going to deal with some of these abstract concepts, but we're going to do it
scientifically. Now cognitive psychology was primarily interested in the individual. Thinking about
sort of the average individual. And how does the average memory system work, and the
average attention system work. This was also a time of course of civil unrest in, in the 60s, and
70s, and think of things like Vietnam, political unrest, you know, communism versus fascism,
although fascism was large, was largely kind of deteriorating by that point in time.

But there was political instability and so people kind of, some psychologists said well, I want to
know more than that. I want to actually study things like how humans influence each other, and
how groups work together, how things like prejudice are formed. This was also during the times
in America, things like segregation.

And so this new kind of psychology opened up, social psychology. That's really about how
humans interact with one another. At the same time, both of these, you can kind of say, are still
focused on the average human being. The way an average human being's system works, the
way that average human being is influenced by others. Some psychologists thought, well, that's
interesting, but I actually want to know how a given individual is different from another. So they
study things like, for example, intelligence. What makes one person more intelligent than
another person? And is there anything we can do about that? So it's often the educational
systems that really drove studies of individual differences and trying to learn about that.
Things like personality would fall under this too. How is my personality different from your
personality? Can we measure that? How, how stable are our personalities? So these are things
that make one individual different from another. That's now a thriving area of psychology. I'm just
kind of throwing out some of the things that are big now.

Cross-cultural psychology is newer but really critical and really interesting in the context of
something like this mook. The idea behind this is, hey, the way we think and the way we behave
is partly determined by the culture in which we live. That there isn't human behavior. There,
there's a culturally bound human behavior in which might be considered perfectly reasonable
behavior within one culture but may not be considered reasonable behavior within a different
culture or even you know more suddenly than that perhaps there are ways in which culture
determines the way humans think and so this is an area called cross-cultural psychology. And
it's becoming quite big now because of, of, of how much our cultures are intermixing in this
globalized world.

It's really important that we understand each other and how we're different. As I mentioned,
clinical psychology, of course, has been, has been marching on. I highlight it here because I just
want to be clear that it's, it's not just Freud. Since Freud’s other schools of clinical psychology
have also opened up. I'll give you one taste of that.

There's one kind of clinical psychology that's called Positive psychology. And the pause of
psychology is also a reaction of Freud in a way. Because it was kind of like these people looking
at Freud's theory and saying, gee he's focusing on aggression, sexuality. Kind of like the darkest
aspects of human nature. But there's some good things about humans. There's things like
empathy and creativity. And altruism, shouldn't we study those? Shouldn't we try to understand
those? What about a clinical approach that isn't focused on disorders, but is focused on helping
individuals reach their maximum potential. And so a positive psychologist doesn't even talk
about the people they see as patients, they call them clients. And they think of themselves kind
of like a financial planner would think, you know I'm helping you get a healthy bank account.
Well positive psychologists are trying to lie to lead a mentally healthy life, so they're not focused
on the problems. They're focused on the positive side of things, that gives you a taste of clinical
psychology.

But the last one I really want to highlight and it's partly because of its recency, but also because
of its dominance is what I'm calling the Biological Revolution. With scanning devices, brain
scanning devices, becoming so powerful and so within reach to researchers over the last, oh I'd
say, you know, 20 years, but especially the last 10, let's say. We can now watch the brain in
action. And so while a cognitive psychologist would say they're primarily interested in the
software, the mind, and how information is processed, we can now ask our participants to do
some information processing tasks. But we can watch their brain as they do it.
So we can actually, in addition to seeing how they do on the task, we can learn the
relationship between that and the underlying hardware, the brain. So over the last little while
we've learned a lot about the brain from these devices. And, it's become so omnipotent that any
of these areas that we talked about now you could remove the word psychology. And throw in
the word neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, well this doesn't really
happen in psychology but, cross cultural neuroscience, clinical neuroscience as areas where,
yeah, maybe someone's interested in prejudice let's say, but maybe they're interested in seeing
how prejudicial behavior is related to the brain. And so they're considering the brain at the same
time. So that's a very important part of psychology, in fact it's so important now, that's where
we're going to begin.

Summary:

- Clinical Psychology: Beyond Freud

- Behaviorism : Stimuli and Response Psychology (little Albert experiment)

- Cognitive Psychology : Information Processing

- Social Psychology : how humans interact with each other

- Cross-cultural Psychology

- Positive Psychology : a type of clinical psychology

- Biological Revolution : understanding the brain