11 Shaping the Coherent Self: A Moral Achievement
11 As the previous chapters have emphasized, a person’s self is an abstract pattern of the person’s actions. This chapter, from an article by Marvin Frankel (MF) and myself (HR), takes this conception and applies it to a clinical problem—the development of incoherent patterns in a person’s life. The self becomes incoherent, the chapter claims, when different situations come to serve as signals for different, sometimes incompatible, behavioral patterns. From this viewpoint, self-examination or understanding another person is accomplished not by probing deeply within the self or another person for hidden motives but rather by exploring widely over time for superordinate signals in the person’s life (meta-discriminative stimuli) that can make behavioral patterns coherent. The implications of this perspective are explored in the contexts of moral accountability, self-deception, and psychotherapy.
Here is a passage from the novel The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy (1994):
By day he sits in the park. . . . He watches passersby. He has become convinced that those aims and purposes with which they imagine their movements to be invested are in reality but a means by which to describe them. He believes that their movements are the subject of larger movements in patterns unknown to them and these in turn to others. He finds no comfort in these speculations. . . . (p. 14)
For the character in McCarthy’s book and, for all we know, McCarthy himself, this view of human motives as a series of interwoven behavioral patterns, however true it may be, is bleak and soulless. We quote the passage here because we believe that this view is not only true but also not at all bleak or soulless. It forms the basis for teleological behaviorism—a useful, meaningful, rich, and philosophically sustainable psychology (Rachlin, 1992, 1994, 1997). Teleological behaviorism identifies people’s mental lives with the wider and more abstract patterns of their actual lives (their habits). It differs from other ways of understanding mental life in that it refuses to consider the mind as a prisoner within the body, a prisoner with whom only that person can communicate. On the contrary, the patterns that comprise a person’s mental life are there to be seen by anyone as they occur.
Like McCarthy’s character, the teleological behaviorist sees aims and purposes as patterns of movements. But the teleological behaviorist goes further. For her, all mental terms—sensation, perception, imagination, thought, belief, knowledge, and so forth—refer to patterns in overt behavior. Any superiority of a person’s perception of his own mind over another person’s perception of his mind lies in the quantity of his observations of his own behavior (he is always there when he is behaving), not in their quality. There is nothing inherently superior in a first-person perspective on the mind over a third-person perspective. In fact, because your behavior is more clearly seen by an observer than by you, a third-person perspective may be more accurate. The meanings of mental terms (expectancy, belief, purpose, feeling, etc.) are, after all, socially learned (Gergen, 1991). For example, a child of five informs his father that surely it will stop raining and he will be able to go out and play. The father replies, smiling, “You are an optimistic little fellow aren’t you?” whereupon the child asks, “Am I?” learning the meaning of that concept.
Sounds and sights correlated with behavior are, in the behaviorist’s language, called discriminative stimuli. For the behaving person they serve as signals for valuable behavioral patterns. A red traffic light is a discriminative stimulus for stopping the car because, in the red light’s presence, it is safer to stop than go. The actor who acts one way while on the stage and another way off the stage is responding in complex ways to two complex sets of discriminative stimuli. Good actors are able to turn on and off entire personalities (that is, behavioral patterns) in different situations as one or another situation presents itself. This art takes a great deal of skill. Good acting is good imagining (see discussion of imagination in Chapter 2). Actors often complain that their “real” personalities become lost among the roles they play. That is, the off-stage discriminative stimuli fail to control the actor’s behavior as they should—resulting in neglect of family and friends—and the actor feels “alive” only on the stage. The same might happen to a businessperson. The set of discriminative stimuli controlling her behavior at work comes to overlap in harmful ways with the set of discriminative stimuli controlling her behavior at home. We often fail to make the subtle behavioral adjustments constituting discrimination among complex, overlapping everyday-life situations. In such cases we need to discover, in our environments, still more complex and abstract sets of rules (moral rules) that may guide our behavior both in business and among our families and friends—both on stage and off, as it were. We call these rules meta-discriminative stimuli.
In its emphasis on the externality of mental life and in its view of the mind as existing in patterns of behavior, teleological behaviorism differs from both neurocognitive and modern holistic psychologies. Neurocognitive psychologies are molecular and materialistic. They see the mind as a machine, like a computer; neuroscientists study its hardware, cognitive scientists study its software. Whether cognitive science is potentially reducible to brain physiology or whether cognitive psychology and neuroscience are, in principle, separate spheres of investigation is a matter of debate in both psychology and philosophy (Dennett, 1978). But, whatever the ferocity of their differences, cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists are as one in their antagonism to behaviorism. The ultimate object of both is to understand the workings of the nervous system (however it may be conceived). And the nervous system is, without question, inside the organism. This tendency to internalize concepts, to identify mental terms with internal organs or internal physical or spiritual actions, is the common attribute of all non-behavioral psychologies (Stout, 1996). Overt behavior (verbal and non-verbal) of the person as a whole is important to non-behavioral psychology only to the extent that it reveals the workings of an internal organ or the actions of an internal entity. For the behaviorist, it is just the opposite. For the behaviorist, sympathy, pity, joy, rage, and other emotional states are characterized by their distinct behavioral trajectories rather than the place or places in the brain activated during their expression (see Figure 6.1 in Chapter 6).
In its non-mechanistic character, teleological behaviorism may seem to resemble modern “holistic” psychology (Miller, 1992). However, teleological behaviorism differs from holistic psychology in exactly the same way that it differs from cognitive psychology and neuroscience—that is, in its ultimate object, which is to understand the mind as overt behavior, observable in principle by another person. For the modern holistic psychologist, behavior is only a byproduct of the mind, which can be understood only by phenomenological observation—not by wide behavioral observation (observation over an extended time period) but by deep observation within yourself (Rogers, 1951).
The language of teleological behaviorism is not only different from that of neurocognitive and holistic psychologies, but it is also different from folk psychology—the way people understand their own minds. We generally locate motives, feelings, and beliefs within ourselves; we see ourselves as causal agents; we believe that our mental motives precede and produce our actions. Our everyday language has a great affinity with the holistic psychologies and may explain the wide acceptance of the psychotherapies that emerge from holistic perspectives (Norcross, 2002, p. 6). Teleological behaviorism, on the other hand, requires a radical shift in perspective and argues instead that thinking is a way of acting over time, rather than a prologue to action. We will discuss everyday mentalistic language and implications for psychotherapy in later sections.
From a teleological-behavioral viewpoint, a person’s self is that person’s pattern of interactions with the world, particularly interactions with other people—social interactions. It is common to claim that our selves are separate entities inside our bodies—cognitive entities, such as the totalitarian self that permits only self-serving data to become conscious, or physiological or spiritual entities—existing independently of overt behavior and responsible for that behavior as well (Shrum & McCarthy, 1992). The postulation of an internal self, however common, is what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1949) called a category mistake. [Of course, physiological mechanisms exist. The organism is not literally empty. But the framework offered here suggests that there is no unified internal module, no introspecting cause of behavior, which could be identified as a self. The self is the socially behaving organism, not something within the organism.]
To take the simplest example of a category mistake, a three- or four-year-old child might say, “Daddy, Mommy, what is a dog?” And let us say the parent has on her bookshelf a book of photographs of dogs. So she takes out the book and shows the child: “Here’s a dog and it’s a collie, here’s a dog and this is a corgi, here’s a dog and this is a dachshund.” The child looks and says, “Oh, that’s a collie, that’s a dachshund, that’s a corgi. Where’s the dog? I don’t see the dog.” There is, of course, no abstract dog that could be placed alongside a group of particular dogs. By assuming that there is, the child is making a category mistake. Now substitute “self” for “dog.” To say that a person’s self is independent of the pattern of the person’s interactions with therapist, teacher, friend, stranger, is to commit a category mistake in the same way as the child who said, “Show me a picture of the dog.” It is a category mistake to consider the self as an entity independent of the behavioral patterns of that person. If you were able to categorize all of a person’s actions into the patterns they form, you would know all there is to know about that person’s self (Frankel & Sommerbeck, 2005).
How can a self, seen as pattern of social interactions, be coherent or incoherent? Imagine that a woman, let us call her Xenia, gathers together all of the people she has ever encountered in her life, everyone living or dead (the dead are briefly resurrected) who has had an influence on her, for a three-day symposium on the subject of Xenia’s life. She tells them, “I want you to give an exhaustive account of me to each other. Exhaustive, every love affair, everything I’ve ever said or done, as you know it.” When the symposium participants tell each other everything they know about her, what common behavioral patterns will be found? There might be very little that they could all agree on. Some participants might be appalled when they hear what the others have to say. Some of them might say, “I can’t imagine Xenia, the Xenia I know, doing that! That’s just unbelievable!” Those participants would be saying, in essence, “This person is incoherent.” The incoherence is the inability of an observer to explain the logic or the consistency of Xenia’s various social interactions. The newspapers abound with such examples. Recently a medical student in Boston was arrested and charged with murdering a woman he had met through a website. His fiancée, fellow students, parents, none of them, could believe him to be capable of such an act. [Friends and relatives of the recent Boston marathon bombers cannot reconcile the boys they thought they knew with their crime.]
Some symposium participants might be disaffected from Xenia because some of the things they heard were about them: “Xenia said this about me? I thought she was my friend. I’m not going to talk to her anymore.” The incoherence therefore is in the judgment of the observer. It may be surprising that the observer, rather than Xenia herself, should determine her own coherence or incoherence. But it is the thesis of this chapter that if we were to place Xenia in the room with the other symposium participants, she might be as likely as any of them to be appalled by what she heard. She might say things like, “Oh my God, I forgot that. . . you’re right.” On the other hand, she may well understand the coherence of her actions, even if friends and members of her family do not.
Let us consider two examples of incoherent selves. The first is a composite of numerous cases in the literature on World War II and its aftermath. Herr Stauffen, as we will call him, was a mailman in a small town in eastern Prussia. He was known for his warmth, his friendliness, and his consideration. People liked him. During World War II he had been an SS officer; as an SS officer, he was known by his victims as imperious, arrogant, and greedy. He wore his cap in such a way that a shadow was cast half down his face. There is a photograph of Herr Stauffen as the SS officer, and you can see in his features a cruel, smug look of superiority. It is important to note that Herr Stauffen was perfectly content as a mailman, husband, and father. It would never have occurred to anyone to suggest that he see a psychotherapist. Similarly, when he was an SS officer, he was perfectly content, and again it would never have occurred to anyone to suggest that he see a psychotherapist. However, when the picture of Herr Stauffen the SS officer was shown to Herr Stauffen the mailman, he could not bear to look at it. He became extremely distressed. He said, “This is not me. This person is horrible. I cannot stand the sight of him.” But now imagine going back to 1943, locating the SS officer, and saying to him, “Herr Stauffen, you were my mailman. I have a picture of you as a mailman.” We suspect he would have been embarrassed. Herr Stauffen as the SS officer would likely look at the face in the picture, see its ingratiated expression of weakness, and say, “That cannot be me. I could not have been so weak.” The SS officer and the mailman cannot bear the sight of each other. As a couple, they would be incompatible. The two social interactions are incoherent. The mailman cannot understand the SS officer, and the SS officer cannot understand the mailman.
Hans Frank, the governor-general of German-occupied Poland during World War II, stated: “We must obliterate the Jews. We cannot kill them with poison. But somehow or other we will achieve their extermination” (Perisco, 1994, p. 22). Frank did achieve considerable success in implementing this program of extermination. Less than four years later, on trial for his life, Frank made a serious suicide attempt and stated: “It’s as though I am two people. . . . The Frank you see here (he was supposedly a repentant and born-again Christian) and Frank, the German leader. I wonder how that other Frank could do those things. This Frank looks at the other and says, Hans what a louse you are” (Perisco, 1994, p. 85). Lifton (1986), in his study of Nazi doctors who performed medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, takes people like Frank seriously and refers to such incoherence as the product of “mental doubling.” Lifton assumes that people are generally coherent but on occasion incoherent. For him, incoherence requires an explanation, rather than coherence. In the story this book is telling, the reverse is the case. The coherent self is the achievement and incoherence the general rule.
Consider a more complicated example. MF was living in Prague for a year, a few years ago. Billy, whom MF had known in college, was visiting Prague for a week. They were in Billy’s hotel room, and they got into a conversation, the topic of which was Billy’s dissatisfaction with his current life. At one point MF asked him a critical question—a very critical question, MF thought—and then the phone rang. Billy picked up the phone. It was his wife, Leslie. He started to speak to her. MF began to read a magazine but could still follow the tone of the conversation. Billy was speaking to Leslie in a warm, caring, confident way. He was asking about the children. There was every sign of contentment and, clearly, a sustained commitment to family. Billy then hung up and turned to MF; MF looked up from the magazine and said, without missing a beat, “So?” and again put that critical question to him.
Billy said, “What are you talking about?” He was angry.
“Billy, I just asked you this question, don’t you remember?”
“No, no,” Billy responded, his voice rising in evident agitation.
In an effort to calm Billy down, MF asked, in as compassionate a tone as he could command, “Look, may I review the entire conversation with you?” Billy agreed and MF started to review. Together, they went over the 10- to 15-minute conversation to the point where the question came up. As they reached that point, Billy got pale. He does not usually get pale. He is generally the life of the party; anxiety is alien to his character. But here he was, vulnerable and fragile and anxious. Then MF said, “Remember, Billy. . .” and again asked the question. Billy covered his face and anxiously—hysterically—cried, “Am I going crazy? Am I going crazy? Something’s wrong with me.” He had no explanation for this sudden loss of memory. “What’s wrong with me?” he asked. He went on in this vein for about a minute. Finally, MF took him by his elbow and said, “Relax, relax, you’re not going crazy.” But MF was seriously concerned. Billy was looking to him now for help, to save him from this blatant and terrifying incoherence. “No, no you’re not crazy. Relax. Here’s what happened. . . .”
A mark of the incoherence in Billy’s life is the fact that his wife calls him William. She hates the name Billy. She thinks it is a child’s name, and she resents the fact that his old friends call him Billy; to her, it is like calling him Junior. Her husband, whom she would like to see as a masculine presence, should be William. MF said, “Look, here’s what happened. Nothing more than this. When you’re with Leslie, you’re William. And William is a businessman, a good husband and father, not deeply religious perhaps but certainly willing to go through the motions for the sake of his wife and children. When you’re talking to Leslie you love her. Whatever doubts you have, they’re normal, and therefore okay, and that’s you, that’s William. Billy is different. Billy is an outspoken atheist, does all sorts of things that if Leslie were to know she’d go bananas. When Billy is talking to me he is ambivalent about Leslie. In fact, Leslie didn’t marry Billy, she married William. As for me, I’m not interested in William at all. And what happened here is that when you got off the phone you were William, but I was talking to Billy. It was as if Leslie were in the room with us. So, when I resumed the conversation, you wanted to say, ‘How could you tell me this in front of Leslie? She’ll leave me!’ You didn’t recognize Billy, he came on you too quickly; you didn’t have a month to recuperate from being with me.”
The similarity of these two examples should be clear. Billy and William are unfamiliar to each other, just as the SS officer and the mailman are unfamiliar to each other. They are parts of an incoherent self, an incoherence that neither of them can explain. MF and Billy were discriminative stimuli for each other in that their mutual presence signaled the general rules in which their relationship would be enacted. For example, they enjoyed challenging each other to take social risks that could have embarrassing consequences. They were also discriminative stimuli for one another in that their comments and gestures served as signals to act in certain ways. In the case of Billy/William, MF was a discriminative stimulus and provided the social rewards that created Billy—just as Billy created MF. However, the rewards that people provide for each other are complex; they are not arranged in 1:1 fashion with a simple pattern of behavior as they are in an experiment.
There are multiple social rewards and multiple social discriminative stimuli signaling social actions. Imagine, for example, Billy/William, Leslie, and MF all present at the same party. Normally this would be a problem for Billy/William. How to act? But suppose that, at the party, Leslie had too much to drink. Billy could then act as Billy because an inebriated Leslie might actually be amused by Billy and even, in that context, prefer him to William. Billy might even come to believe that his wife had changed, that he could be Billy all of the time, only to discover the following day that she preferred William at the breakfast table—because Billy eats his breakfast too rapidly.
If one person acts in one way, another person might or might not react in another way, and might or might not do it next week, or next month, or next year. A consequence of this complexity is that the individual may lose a sense of who he is. Billy emerges at a party with his wife, and William emerges at the breakfast table. It is as if each of us is looking at our own behavior through a peephole in time. We see what happens at one time and place and must remember and infer the rest. This is not an easy task. This is why people are often unaware of their own motives—not because they cannot look deeper into themselves, but because they do not piece together the discriminative stimuli and rewards that control their patterns of behavior. As an outside observer, MF could see the contrasting behavioral trajectories of Billy and William, whereas William and Billy were in an either/or position.
Now consider a much less severe example, familiar to teachers. Recently, one of MF’s students at Sarah Lawrence College, a woman about 21 years old, asked him if he was going to graduation. MF said, “Well, I may, I may not, I don’t know.”
“I’d like you to come and meet my father, but I hope he doesn’t embarrass me.”
“No, you hope you don’t embarrass yourself.”
“What do you mean by that?”
What MF meant was that in a situation such as graduation, when a Sarah Lawrence student brings her parents face to face with a teacher with whom she has studied, the student often faces an uncomfortable dilemma. At Sarah Lawrence the relationship between students and teachers is fairly egalitarian. Teachers are encouraged to treat students as adults. But, at graduation, 21-year-old women and men become about 14. In other words, they become daughters and sons. Parental pride in their achievement overwhelms them. They are thrilled that their parents are proud of them, but also ashamed of it. They are ashamed to care so much that their parents are proud of them because when you get to be an adult your pride is supposed to be in your achievement, not in someone else’s pleasure in your achievement. What happens at graduation is that the parent/child relationship clashes with the teacher/student relationship. In such a situation, students do not know how to behave. If they relate to their teacher as they always do, their parents suddenly see a woman or a man. If they relate to their parents as sons or daughters, they are uncomfortable with the teacher.
The student may have been perfectly consistent in her actions as a student and equally consistent in her actions as a daughter, but inconsistent across the two patterns. At graduation the two patterns come painfully into conflict. From a behavioral viewpoint, the problem with inconsistent behavior lies not in its internal causes but in its potential external consequences. For the student, a childish display at graduation in front of a valued teacher or seemingly cold conduct before her beloved parents could put either of these relationships at risk. The consequences, in the case of Billy, may be the loss of his wife or friend. In the case of Herr Stauffen, the consequences could be loss of his life. Some pedophiliac priests seem able to live comfortably with their inconsistencies so long as there is no threat of being discovered.
It may be argued that a person can have both insight and outsight to differing degrees and that we are creating a false dichotomy between them. But “insight” and “outsight” stand for two explanations of a single phenomenon. From a teleological-behavioral viewpoint, attributing some specific act to an internal cognition or emotion (apparent insight) is actually attributing that act to a temporally extended pattern of interaction with the environment (actual outsight). There is only one thing to explain, not two things. For the teleological behaviorist, cognitions and emotions are such patterns and not internal events at all.
Confusion among discriminative stimuli is common in a psychotherapeutic relationship. The client may have a profound outsight in the therapeutic context; that is, he recognizes a currently operative discriminative stimulus (such as the imperious nature of his spouse), but fails to bring the implications of that outsight into the currents of his life (and remains a victim of that spouse’s bullying). This may happen because the client is not the spouse, friend, or parent of the therapist. When the client is confronted with the discriminative stimuli of spouse, friend, or parent, the outsight may simply dissolve.
Aristotle’s golden mean is not a midpoint between two extremes, as is often understood, but rather a wider perspective (a final cause) different from either of the extremes. For example, the extremes of rashness and cowardice are resolved by courage. The extremes of surliness and obsequiousness are resolved by friendliness. Similarly, justice is a mean between too much for one person and too much for another. [“Actions. . . are called just and temperate when they are such as the just and temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate but the man who does them as just and temperate men do them” (Nicomachean Ethics, chap. 4, 1105b, 5; italics in original). For example, two people may perform the same just act (say they are storekeepers who return an overpayment to a customer), but both acts are not necessarily just. To be just, the act has to appear in the context of a series of other acts that form a pattern—a habit. A particular act done merely to win praise (as determined by other acts in the pattern), or in the context of a promotional campaign, or by compulsion, or by accident, would not be just—no matter how closely it resembled a particular act within a just pattern.]
MF’s friend Billy had an impulsive devil-may-care attitude and for this reason was fun to be around; William was stodgy, conventional, somewhat ingratiating, and less fun to be around. The resolution to this incompatibility would be a new identity rather than a little less or more of William and/or Billy. In effect, coherence is an achievement, rather than a given. The individual may be in search of a meta-discriminative stimulus to resolve a conflict.
It is important to note that the person who broke down was neither William nor Billy; neither of them was inclined to hysterical breakdown. The person who broke down was a new person who was no longer with his old friend MF but instead with his momentary therapist. William/Billy would have had to orient himself to a new and broader discriminative stimulus to navigate his relationships with both Leslie and MF. But he did not do this. In fact, as stated above, MF became friends with William, thus ending the life of Billy.
If people are literally the pattern of their social interactions, then the more you act one way, the more you are that person. Had Hitler and the fascist government not come along, the mailman may very well have lived all his life and died a nice, considerate, normal person. Suppose that after the war this person returned to his mailman job and lived exactly as before. If evidence were brought forward that he committed crimes when he was an SS officer, should the mailman be held accountable? You might say, “Well, too bad we couldn’t catch him when he was the SS officer, then we’d be punishing the person who did the crimes. He’s no longer that person.” If a dog had rabies and bit someone, and if we could cure rabies and the dog were cured, would you kill it? No, you would say the dog is not the same dog anymore. But most people feel, quite correctly, that human beings should be held accountable for nearly all of their non-compelled actions. The question of whether we can hold the mailman accountable is fundamental to the concept of a coherent self. We should indeed hold the mailman accountable because the rules (the meta-discriminative stimuli) that governed his behavior were too narrow (or too concrete or too affected by immediate rewards); they did not disallow the behavior of the SS officer. The mailman is responsible because his behavior was not governed by available meta-discriminative stimuli. Christianity, for example, could conceivably have rendered the SS social interaction inoperable. The mailman is guilty, in essence, of having an incoherent self.
None of us can predict how he would act under drastically altered circumstances. For some of us, perhaps for most of us, this is fortunate. As many studies in social psychology have shown, behavior tends to be more sensitive to immediate social reinforcement than to the abstract meta-discriminative stimuli that might have controlled coherent patterns.
Consider Billy/William on this issue. In that Prague hotel, after the events described above, MF explained to Billy what the discriminative stimuli were—Leslie was one and MF was one. Once this split was (compassionately) made explicit, Billy’s confusion abated; MF showed Billy that he could be William and there would be no aversive consequences to the relationship; given that 95 percent of his life was spent as William, the choice was easy to make. Billy was destroyed, at that moment at any rate. The dissonance (incoherence) between Billy and William was rendered irrelevant because there were no harmful consequences resulting from the incoherence.
Should Billy/William be held responsible for his anger? After all, it is William who is angry at MF; Billy is not there. If MF should say, “William, I’m holding you responsible for this,” he would be talking not to his friend, but to Leslie’s husband. In the mirror-image situation, Leslie would be talking not to her husband but to MF’s friend. The same moral issue exists here as with the mailman/SS officer, although the magnitude here is much less. MF can hold Billy responsible for not learning a rule that allows him to be Billy for an entire evening. Leslie can hold him responsible for not learning a rule that allows him to be William for a life. In other words, Billy and William, like the SS officer and the mailman, are responsible because they failed to learn a rule that makes their different social interactions coherent. Consequently, their actions as husband and friend were inconsistent and unreliable. An angry William was not a good friend and an angry Billy was not a good husband. [We hope the reader understands that neither MF nor HR is holding himself aloof in this regard.]
Recall the example of a three-day symposium in which people were asked to say all they knew about Xenia. It would be a sign that Xenia was living an incoherent life if people in that room were shocked. Moreover, if Xenia herself were in that room, and if she were living an incoherent life, she might well have been more shocked than some of those people. Why? Because they, or at least some of them, know her better than she knows herself. They have a bird’s-eye view of her behavioral path, while she is like a passenger in a car, driven this way and that. From the teleological-behavioral perspective, it is a myth to think that we necessarily know ourselves better than the people who observe us, especially the significant people in our lives. The therapist is also an observer. She may attain a bird’s-eye view of the client’s behavioral patterns. It is the therapist’s job to discover, and put before the client, the incoherent social interactions of his life.
The emergence of the talking cure at the end of the nineteenth century was an effort to deal with a new kind of person, a person who was no longer living in apparent continuity with his past. That the past of the individual had become invisible can be illustrated with the following thought experiment. Imagine Freud entering a small village in Poland and meeting a peasant. The peasant might invite Freud to dinner that evening; there at the head of the table would be the peasant’s mother and at the other end the peasant’s father; if the grandparents were alive they would be seated there as well. The peasant is living in his history. He does not require Freud to recreate it for him. The life of the peasant was a continuous whole; clear, natural discriminative and meta-discriminative stimuli guided the peasant from one period of his life to another. For employment he would probably do what his father did. He would marry a woman raised in the same village and taught by the same schoolmaster. Most relevant, the peasant would be known by nearly everyone with whom he came in contact. The notion of a compartmentalized life was not conceivable under the watchful eyes of the villagers and under a heaven inhabited by a God whose commandments had the power of law. But Freud did not treat this person. The patients he encountered felt that they had left their pasts behind. Freud had to tell them that, while the objects in their lives might be novel, their relationships to those objects were shaped by historical forces. In this context, Freud agreed with Wordsworth that “the Child is father of the Man,” with the important qualification that for Freud the child was charged with sexuality; so the relevant history of the man, for Freud, was his sexual history. Freud argued that the modern man was more historically anchored than he knew and more bound by his biological nature than he realized.
Let us consider, then, how Freud approached the task of creating historical coherence (and how his conception of its nature may be compared and contrasted to teleological behaviorism). In Freud’s analysis of hysteria—the case of Dora—he describes Dora’s relationship to Herr K., a friend of the family and her companion on weekend walks (Freud, 1959). On one particular weekend afternoon, Herr K. invited Dora and his wife to meet with him to view a church festival from the window of his business office. Dora alone showed up because Herr K. had managed to dissuade his wife from coming. During this time he “...suddenly clasped the girl to him and pressed a kiss upon her lips.” (p. 36). But Dora would have none of it and fled with a “violent feeling of disgust.” Freud then proceeds with his diagnosis:
...the behavior of this child of fourteen was already entirely and completely hysterical. I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement [a “natural” discriminative stimulus for sexual behavior] elicited feelings that were predominantly or exclusively unpleasurable [from which she violently escaped] . . . . The elucidation of the mechanism of this reversal of affect is one of the most important and at the same time one of the most difficult problems in the psychology of the neuroses. (p. 37)
Critics of Freud’s analysis have stressed his failure to understand the sexuality of a young woman, but they have not offered alternative explanations for her conduct. Dora herself did not offer an explanation for her revulsion since, like Freud’s critics, she did not think any explanation was necessary (Rieff, 1959). In her eyes it was self-evident that Herr K’s sexual overture was wrong and she was, in effect, a simple victim. But Freud recounts a number of her actions that suggest she was attracted to Herr K. For example, she blushed at one point in the presence of Herr K., and her friend commented that she seemed to be in love with him; she took weekly walks with Herr K. and accepted the flowers he brought to her each weekend.
Freud’s case history allows us to view Dora’s behavior as resulting from a conflict between two different patterns of behavior, rather than simply repressed sexuality. With the right questions, Dora might have confessed that she was flattered by Herr K.’s interest in her and was playfully flirtatious. She might have also acknowledged that such conduct was not befitting a young woman and that was why she blushed. But she may have added that playing the coquette was a far cry from wanting to be sexually engaged. If, for the moment, we imagine that this were Dora’s explanation of her conduct, it would be apparent that for her there is incoherence between the coquette and the middle-class young woman. From a teleological behavioral perspective, Dora is not only a failed coquette, but she does not have a moral stance that would permit compatibility between acting as a respectable young woman and being occasionally coquettish. We can say that the culture failed to provide Dora with meta-discriminative stimuli that would allow her to be a respectable young woman and a coquette at the same time. In these terms, Dora suffered from a conflict between selves.
In contrast, Freud’s theory of normal infantile sexuality attributes Dora’s “hysteria” to her sexual feelings for her father. Freud approaches Dora as a divided self, pushed by the passionate strivings of the id and restrained by the puritanical conscience of the super-ego (all occurring internally). For Freud, the conflict between the coquette and the young woman is due to the repression of her strong physical affection for her father (expression of which would certainly have been punished in her middle-class, Victorian family). Consequently, Freud would expect Dora to be sexually frigid if she were married. Freud was a sexual reductionist. For him, a failed performance of coquetry would not be the result of poor (that is, narrowly based) behavioral control, but of sexual repression. Freud viewed Dora’s problem as intra-personal whereas, from a behavioral perspective, Dora suffered from an incompatibility between two behavioral trajectories. Dora, the vain coquette, was in conflict with Dora, the innocent and dutiful daughter. The conflict was actually interpersonal.
Why, in Freud’s terms, does Dora reject the sexual advance of the man she is attracted to? The sexual overture of Herr K. was, according to Freud, “an occasion for sexual excitement” (a discriminative stimulus for an intrinsically pleasurable act). But Dora failed to respond with sexual pleasure in the presence of her desire because the repressed incest with her father short-circuited what Freud deemed her natural and healthy response. Freud hoped that, by simply bringing such deeply buried motives into consciousness, patients would discover within themselves guidelines that would render their lives more coherent.
Despite his claim that psychoanalysis was not a Weltanschauung, a particular view of the world, but should be judged as a science in no less a way than biology, Freud did offer a way of looking at the human condition and a way to live comfortably in it. In this particular case, Dora did not accept Freud’s view of her conduct and left her analysis. She insisted that she did not love Herr K. She insisted even more strongly that she did not incestuously love her father. We will never know what her fate would have been if Freud had treated Dora as suffering from incoherent selves rather than an internal divided self and had entered into a therapeutic reconciliation of the various behavioral patterns she exhibited. Such reconciliation would be, we argue, a moral achievement.
In contrast to the psychoanalyst and the cognitive therapist, a teleological behaviorist would not shy away from directly aiding patients in finding meta-discriminative stimuli in the external, temporally extended environment (ethics, religion, moral codes, examples from literature) that might guide their behavior. The relationship between therapist and client would be similar to the relationship between a graduate student and his thesis advisor. George Kelly (1955) claimed that to be of any help the therapist, like a thesis advisor, had to possess a more complex construct system (a higher meta-discriminative rule) than the student.
Insofar as a teleological understanding requires an appreciation of complex and possibly conflicting narrative trajectories over time, an understanding of literature may be an important aspect of clinical training and treatment; this is what authors do in presenting us with lives over time. Incoherent lives have been a central concern of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. How much more instructive (or outsightful) for Dora would have been a discussion that compared the seeming pattern of her life to the lives of Elizabeth and her sister Lydia in Pride and Prejudice or Amy in Little Women?
From the teleological perspective, self-knowledge requires an understanding of present and future reinforcement contingencies. People may fail to change because, despite an understanding of the historical sources of their current behavior, they do not see an alternative future pattern. A liberated slave may understand the historical basis of his difficulties, but this does not help him to live as a free man. A person may understand and prefer a new pattern to the old one and yet not know how to act in specific cases. In The Psychology of Personal Constructs, George Kelly did in fact describe a therapy in which clients rehearsed novel roles to play in their lives in their therapeutic hour before enacting these roles for a two-week period (Kelly, 1955). Indeed, in the current psychotherapeutic climate it is not uncommon for therapists to give homework to their clients to enable them to transfer their therapeutic learning to other settings.
These psychotherapeutic implications of teleological behaviorism may be further illustrated by the moral education of Dickens’s character Ebenezer Scrooge. A Christmas Carol opens with Scrooge as utterly lacking in Christmas spirit, a selfish materialist incapable of any kind of fraternity not leading to a profitable material exchange. At the end of the story, “He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old City knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world.” The transformation comes about through the intervention of three therapeutic agents: ghosts of Scrooge’s Christmas past, Christmas present, and Christmas yet to come. In the pattern of his life, Scrooge is able to see the full spectrum of his social engagement; thus he is able to see himself. But most important, he is also allowed to see the pattern of the life of his clerk, Bob Cratchit; by contrast Scrooge cannot help but see the emptiness of his own life unless he changes. Perhaps unwittingly, perhaps indirectly, therapists who may not take kindly to a teleological behavioral perspective succeed because they facilitate the “outsight” necessary for the change. The mystery is less deep than it appears. Actually, society provides Bob Cratchits for us all, and the wise therapist makes excellent use of such models. In this chapter I have simply tried to provide a theoretical rationale for doing so.
As an example of people’s difficulty in accepting a teleological behavioral view of their lives, let us return to the case of Scrooge. He was not a willing voyager. He did not want to see his past, present, and alternative future patterns. But what did he fear? He insists again and again that he cannot change. He is what he is. But he does change. How? Scrooge is compelled to see that he did indeed choose his fate, though that fate was unforeseen by him when he made a series of individual choices (as alcoholism is unforeseen by the person who consumes drink after drink). Just prior to his journey to the past and future, Scrooge is confronted by the ghost of his former partner Marley. Marley is in evident anguish as he displays himself in chains.
“You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”
“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”
Marley was unable to see, as it was being forged, the pattern he was creating in his daily life, the pattern he implores Scrooge to recognize before it is too late. It is only after Marley’s ghost’s visit that Scrooge comes to understand the pattern his own life is taking—the misery of which is more than the simple sum of his individual selfish acts. With this knowledge, as we have seen, Scrooge is confronted with a future pattern of life much better in all respects than the one he had been living.
The opportunity to behave in a new pattern, a new fate, is what makes teleological behaviorism threatening. The less threatening nature of insight therapies becomes apparent if you consider the many women who accepted the notion of an inner, unconscious penis envy to explain both their professional ambitions and their inability to completely submerge themselves in the lives of their husbands and children. These women of the twentieth century could accept an inner unconscious motive because it seemed to explain their discontent. They could not have what men had in the social world because they were not men! The unconscious cause or motive of their despair was hardly their fault, and the remedy was vague with regard to subsequent action. Instead, therapeutic attention was centered on the historical causes of the over-determined penis envy. If that could only be resolved, the despair would dissipate. With a teleological behavioral analysis, a woman’s behavior would be able to conform to a larger (and possibly risky) pattern. She may verbalize the ultimate value of that pattern but still not be willing to pay the immediate social and economic price or take the risk of failing.
The teleological behavioral perspective also poses a threat to the client’s authenticity. Consider, for example, a client, let us call him Harry, who suffers from morbid thoughts of illness and dying and who regards the slightest ailment as a sign of cancer or heart disease. Harry would be instructed by an analyst or a cognitive psychotherapist to attend to the inner-self, to examine what repressed motives (psychoanalysis), mistaken beliefs (cognitive therapy), or denied and distorted feelings (person-centered) serve as the mental context for these anxieties. Once these are identified and accepted by the client, a causal inference connects these internal workings of the self to the public suffering self.
In contrast, the teleological behaviorist attempts to illuminate a system of social contingencies connecting the person to the community. Consequently, the client is informed that almost all of his actions, words, and even expressive behavior (facial and postural) serve as a form of social currency historically designed to elicit reinforcement (immediate and short-term) from the community. Many clients might feel they are being judged as insincere or inauthentic because the therapist is informing them that they are outer-directed and manipulative. Such a view goes against the grain of their experience. Their sufferings are unquestionably real; for such clients, being real means existing in their inner selves, not their public selves. How can one explain to a client that the inner self may be viewed as a pattern of social behavior? How can one explain to a client that the thoughts of Rodin’s Thinker might more productively be conceptualized as a presently unseen pattern of overt actions over time than an equally unseen internal physiological or spiritual state? How can one explain to a client that genuineness or congruence does not need to be conceptualized only as harmony between experience (inner) and behavior (outer) but also, or rather, as harmony between the pattern of his behavior and that of the world around him—“A Dance to the Music of Time,” in the words of Anthony Powell (1951) [from the title of a painting by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665)]. To be a genuine husband or wife or parent is to do all the actions demanded by these tasks. To be truly in love is to act consistently in a loving way, rather than to say or do any one thing; still less is being in love being in one or another internal physiological state.
If this perspective can be successfully explained, the teleological behavioral therapist would urge Harry, as a start, to cease presenting to the public a face and manner that suggests morbid concern. In this way, the client eschews immediate social reinforcement. Dewey (1922) stated that all thinking is problem solving. Hypochondria solves the problem of exacting attention and concern from significant others. Once that outlet is eliminated, the therapist may help the client to discover less destructive ways of securing such concern. But, of course, a given behavioral pattern may involve many different kinds of reinforcement (may be “over-determined”). Harry may disarm people when speaking to them of his vulnerabilities; it may be his way of maintaining intimate relationships. To give up such confessions would require alternative ways of creating intimate bonds. Moreover, the people who previously offered care and sympathy would have to find alternative ways of relating to Harry. It would not be surprising if these people objected to a therapy that forced them to find new ways of being significant to Harry. In offering clients interpretations that illuminate behavioral patterns, a clinical teleological behaviorist would empower the client. But such power inevitably requires the giving up of historical reinforcement for novel, unknown reinforcement and in so doing would upset the social cocoon of which he is a part. Clients may also object that by censoring their health concerns they are in effect lying by omission. In fact, they are creating a new truth of fearlessness. Would we say that a person on a diet is lying when he refuses a piece of cake that he craves?
The immediate consequences of outsight, as we have defined it here, typically involve the giving up of immediate social reinforcement and engaging in behavior historically reinforced only as part of highly abstract patterns. This is what makes clarity of outsight so threatening. In contrast, insight therapists draw an ambiguous line from thought to action and an even more ambiguous prescription for appropriate action. Thus, the client is able to enjoy the social reinforcement of his verbal behavior as a client while contemplating possible changes in his behavior. However in need of reflection and refinement the theory behind insight therapy may be, it can yield positive results when the patient goes beyond verbal behavior to other social actions. Some women must have benefited from resolving their nonexistent penis envy. Unfortunately, such therapies also reinforce the division between mind and body, experience and behavior and, most unfortunately, the split between the individual and the community. It is my hope that the perspective here offers an opportunity for reconciling such incoherence in self, other, and the world at large.
Chapter 11 is a revised version of Frankel and Rachlin (2010), Shaping the Coherent Self: A Moral Achievement, Beliefs and Values, 2, 66–79. Reprinted with permission of The International Beliefs and Values Institute.