AT EIGHTEEN, I was still brainy, but now I was in the big leagues, at Princeton University, and I had no idea how brainy I was relative to the amazing other freshmen I met: National Merit Scholars, winners of national science competitions, math and physics geniuses already publishing, even speed readers. I asked Bob Darling, later my roommate, how long it took him to read Thomas Mann’s dense Tonio Kruger. He said, “About three minutes.” It took me five hours.
I was no longer Jewish, but I was still very much lower caste, although I didn’t know exactly which variety of low. As I walked down Prospect Street past the Ivy Club, which had a larger endowment than the University of Pennsylvania, I knew that I would never walk up the path to its doors. Princeton’s social strata made Albany’s seem scalable. I desperately needed to avoid this nasty, inaccessible part of Princeton, but I couldn’t imagine how.
I was depressive, and I was a pessimist. I toyed with writing about death and dying, and I wore black much of the time. I was morbidly introspective and through freshman year kept a handwritten journal full of dark thoughts.
I was ambitious and hungry. I wanted Mrs. Albert to know my name.
I was an intellectual, and I was at home in the life of the mind. My caste problem and my craving for the life of the mind were addressed in one fell swoop. Darwin Labarthe was president of the Class of 1961, that year’s senior class. I never personally met him as an undergraduate, but he was my hero. On our first day as freshmen, we assembled in the ornate Victorian Alexander Hall. Darwin told us in his crisp staccato about the honor code—either giving or receiving aid on an examination automatically led to expulsion and the extirpation of one’s name from all records—and about what was expected of us: Princeton in the nation’s service. It was a stirring speech, but Darwin was much more than a speech maker.
The year of “dirty bicker,” 1958, was a bad one for Princeton’s reputation. Bicker was Princeton’s equivalent of fraternity “rush.” A week of interviewing sophomores culminated in their admission to one of the fifteen Prospect Street eating clubs, which were the centers of social life for upperclassmen. The clubs were selective, and every year some unfortunate sophomores were “hosed,” rejected by all the clubs. There was a gentlemen’s agreement that these losers would be absorbed into the fold, one per club. In 1958 twenty-three sophomores were hosed, mostly Jewish and mostly National Merit Scholars. No club was willing to absorb them, and Princeton’s anti-intellectualism and racism made headlines the world over.
Attempts to work around the clubs had a long and bitter history for Princeton’s presidents. Woodrow Wilson tried to abolish them, and the trustees asked him to resign for this heresy. He exited to the lesser posts of the New Jersey governorship and the American presidency, harboring deep animosity toward his Princeton foes until his death.
Darwin approached Robert Goheen, the very young new president of Princeton. In 1957, in a single electrifying hour, Goheen had been promoted from lowly assistant professor of Greek and Latin to associate professor with tenure to full professor and then to president. It would be his job to drag the southern gentleman’s resort that was Princeton belatedly into the twentieth century of civil rights for black people. His encounter with Darwin was defining. Darwin asked him to underwrite a rival system to the clubs—a nonselective eating facility that would become an epicenter of undergraduate intellectual life. President Goheen, knowing well Woodrow Wilson’s fate, at first demurred. But the persistent Darwin brought the valedictorian and the celebrated Princeton Tiger mascot into President Goheen’s office to lobby and threatened a public walkout from the club system. President Goheen saw the wisdom of the idea and grasped it with both hands. The new “alternate facility” was duly named after Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson Lodge was flooded with takers, not just the most intellectually serious of the undergraduates but many distinguished faculty as well. And it solved both my problems. I joined in my sophomore year and found myself surrounded by people just like me. We engaged every evening in some of the most stimulating discussions of my life. About fifty faculty, including President Goheen himself, Walter Kaufman, Hans Aarsleff, James Ward Smith, Sam Glucksberg, Julian Jaynes, Malcolm Diamond, John Wheeler, Bruce Goldberg, Richard Rorty, and Robert Nozick, could be found there every evening, dining with rapt undergraduates. I have spent much of my academic life trying to replicate those evenings—since they are the very essence of what a university is about.
IN 2010 I go with my sixteen-year-old son Darryl on the campus tour of Princeton. Wilson Lodge and its descendants—the “college system”—have grown and flourished to such an extent that the tour guide, as we walk down Prospect Street, calls the eating clubs the “alternate facility.” I write President Goheen an admiring letter saying that he succeeded where Woodrow Wilson failed. In one of his last letters before his death, Robert Goheen agrees. I treasure his handwritten letter.
THE GRANDEUR AND grandiosity of Freud’s vision stayed with me all through high school and into my first year at Princeton University. I took no psychology courses early in my undergraduate days but rather immersed myself in the life of the philosophy department. I avoided psychology courses because the sophisticated upperclassmen called them “guts”—populated by the jocks and gentleman’s C students—and at Princeton in the early 1960s, the psychology department was undistinguished, utterly without gods. On the other hand, the philosophy department was chock-full of great men.
Of the greats, the one who became my friend was Robert Nozick. He was a mere graduate student at the time, only four years older than I, but his unique brilliance was obvious even then. He paced up and down in his baggy brown suit—graduate students wore academic robes at dinner but suits in class—and told us freshmen that Descartes was wrong and that Aristotle could be greatly improved upon. This was nothing short of astonishing. Philosophy was alive, something one can do rather than just study. Bob went on to become one of the preeminent philosophers of the twentieth century, with a range of philosophical contributions from the foundations of logic to happiness to liberty and ethics and everything in between. At the Harvard memorial service for Bob (he died of intestinal cancer in 2002 at age sixty-three), his son said, “Some boys brag about their fathers, saying he was the strongest man in the world, or the handsomest man in the world. Well, my father was the smartest man in the world.” Many of us could only nod agreement.
In the mother’s milk of meeting the first world-class intellects that I had ever known, I also imbibed their unspoken premises. There were two. The first premise in the Princeton philosophy department was rigor. It was not enough to know what was true; you had to be entitled to know what was true by the rigorous and compelling argument that got you there.
Poor Freud. His work was rich with insight, and the landscape of his vision was almost boundless. His intuition leapt from mountaintop to mountaintop, but the valleys were too shrouded in mist to make out clearly. Rigor? This Freud did not have, as emblematized by his nomination for the Nobel Prize in literature, not medicine. Was there some way, I wondered, to answer the great questions that Freud investigated with the rigor so prized by my mentors?
In psychology, as in many disciplines, the degree of rigor and the importance of a problem are all too often reciprocal. This dilemma goes under the name “internal versus external validity,” or, without the jargon, “rigor versus reality.” The more the method captures the real-world issue (external validity), the less rigor (internal validity) it has. Conversely the more rigor the method has, the more poorly it captures the real world. How unfortunate. This is the “white rats and college sophomore” issue: researchers can control and measure what rats and sophomores do in the laboratory, but any finding’s application to real human problems is always a strain. Are stomach ulcers in the rat exposed to unpredictable electric shocks really the same thing as duodenal ulcers in a woman who has lost her job?
Freud was aware of this dilemma, and the story attributed to him—a man looks under a streetlight, where the light is better, for a watch he has dropped elsewhere—is about just this. It tells us where Freud stood on the importance of external validity over rigor. Freud believed that the possibility of a revolutionary insight could justify going way beyond the evidence.
In direct contrast, the behaviorists—militantly—looked where the light was good, even at the cost of not finding their lost watches. The behaviorists are the direct descendants of what I call “atomism.”
ATOMISM—THE SECOND AND more insidious premise slipped into the mother’s milk of my Princeton education—is the thesis that real understanding comes only by working from the ground up. We can gain clarity about real-world issues only if we first discover and analyze the simple building blocks of the complex real world and then reassemble them to reconstruct reality. The model is the periodic table of the elements. Chemistry was a muddle until the relationship among elements was first understood and codified in the periodic table. Only then could molecules be understood and could chemistry take off.
Philosophical atomism began at the turn of the last century with the work of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein and had its full flowering in logical positivism and behaviorism. Russell and Alfred North Whitehead1 showed that arithmetic, which seemed sloppy to them, could be derived from just a few premises of logic and thus placed on much firmer ground. Only on such firm ground could indubitable truth rest. In his Tractatus logico-philosophicus,2 Wittgenstein took this much further. To understand reality, he argued, one must discover its “logical atoms” and how they combine. Absent such bedrock, alleged understanding is just confusion. This idea is famously distilled in the Wagnerian close of the Tractatus:
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, so muss man schweigen.
Whereof one cannot speak, so must one consign to silence.
Matters of good and evil, of beauty, of politics, of science, of religion, in Wittgenstein’s view, lacked the bedrock and could not be rigorously and thoroughly understood. It is commonly thought that Wittgenstein was drawing the boundaries of the island of what could be known. A more romantic interpretation offered by one of the many followers who fell in love with him is that Wittgenstein was “drawing the boundaries of the ocean.”
A cruder interpretation is that of logical positivism, which trans-muted the closing epigram of the Tractatus into the “verification principle”: only statements that can be verified empirically (or are tautologies) are meaningful. Logical positivism enjoyed its moment in the sun in the 1950s but fell out of fashion because, among other problems, it could not be applied to itself: the verification principle is itself neither a tautology nor verifiable.
When applied to what philosophy should work on, atomism urges that before real-world problems—ethics, science, politics, morality, beauty, happiness, and the like—can be tackled, the basic philosophical confusions about language, knowledge, and the mind must be sorted out.
This issue formed the nub of the dramatic story of Wittgenstein’s poker.3 In 1946, in the shadow of the Holocaust, Karl Popper rebuked the members of the Moral Philosophy Club in Cambridge, the very den that Ludwig Wittgenstein and his besotted lion cubs inhabited. Wittgenstein was by then the leading “analytic” philosopher in the world, and his cubs were fierce in their devotion to him. Popper contended that there were real problems in the world, and it was the job of philosophy to tackle them. Wittgenstein, he contended, had suborned an entire generation of philosophers by seducing them into working on the preliminaries to the preliminaries—puzzles rather than problems. Wittgenstein reacted by brandishing a fireplace poker at Popper and then walked out, slamming the door.
Most of my teachers at Princeton worked in the deep shadow of Wittgenstein, and the careful, logical analysis of puzzles was the work given to good students there. The iconoclasts, like Professor Walter Kaufman, who worked on atheism and morality, and Professor Arthur Szathmary, who worked on beauty, were ostracized. Bob Nozick survived because he played the analytic game as well as anyone. But as we shall see, it was not the only game he played superbly.
Robert Nozick, pictured here as a second-year graduate student at Princeton, was in 1961 my first teacher in philosophy. He went on to become one of the world’s preeminent philosophers and played a major role in the founding of positive psychology thirty-five years later. Courtesy of Getty Images.
Logical atomism and logical positivism eventually fell out of favor in philosophy; they did not, however, fall out of favor in scientific psychology. They found their voice in “operationalism,” psychology’s attempt to imitate physics. A notion such as “intelligence” was too fuzzy for science, but if translated—“operationalized”—into an IQ test score, intelligence suddenly became an object whose presence or absence—and even amount—science could measure objectively.
My senior thesis in philosophy solved a small puzzle. It was a careful analysis of the difference between “same” and “identical,” a step on the road to undermining the thesis that mind and body are identical, because “identical” entails having the same spatiotemporal coordinates. Mind and body have the same temporal coordinates (they occur at the same time) but not the same spatial ones (they do not occur in the same place). So mind and body are not identical. QED. My thesis even won the philosophy prize at graduation.
In the summer between my junior and senior years, I did my first laboratory work in psychology, another small school-boy puzzle. In Byron Campbell’s lab, I looked at the effects of electric shock as punishment. I disconfirmed a current theory about masochism in rats by showing that they would stay away from shock, and the stronger the shock, the more they stayed away. Both my senior thesis and this first bit of psychology were atomistic and rigorous approaches to well-defined issues. Both were of journal quality. The rat study led to my very first publication4 (in the top journal), and the argument of my senior thesis found its way, not under my name but rather under that of my advisor, George Pitcher, into the philosophical literature. Both were just baby steps in a professional academic career, and I was quite proud of them.
But neither was deeply satisfying. Although I did not know it yet, the battle line was drawn. How much rigor? How much reality? This was a central theme of the transformation of psychology over the next fifty years and my role in it.
Although I could not articulate why then, both these professional steps were indeed preliminaries to the preliminaries, and neither shed light on the place where I had dropped my watch.
MY LIFE WAS, of course, not all philosophy and psychology. Dating played a large, preoccupying role, but I was ill prepared. From the onset of puberty through the end of college, I was stuck in all-male settings. Women were mysterious and exotic, and I was not at ease with them. Vassar and Bryn Mawr were the women’s colleges that Princeton men most looked to for being “fixed up.” The Vassar freshman yearbook had photos, and a busload of Princeton freshmen traveled to Poughkeepsie to meet the photo of their choice. But first there was a lottery, and I actually won it. So I had the very first pick. A gorgeous Swedish blonde, Monica Skenske, stood out head and shoulders, and she was mine. We arrived at Vassar and exited the bus in order of the lottery. Monica was there in the front of the line waiting for me. She was indeed spectacularly beautiful, but she was also a foot taller than I am. We were a nonstarter.
More than a year later, I spent the summer before my junior year at Berkeley. I was mostly playing bridge at the Bear’s Lair and shyly ogling women. But there I took my very first psychology course. Martin Orne, a bear of a man at six and a half feet tall and nearly three hundred pounds, was a social psychologist and the very model of an enlightened psychoanalyst, with more than a trace of a Viennese accent. He offered a small seminar with an opaque title: “Demand Characteristics in the Social Psychological Experiment.” I signed up. “Demand characteristics” turned out to be the artifacts that bias subjects in experiments to do just what the experimenter wants them to do. So if a subject walks into a room labeled “Sensory Deprivation Laboratory,” is greeted by a researcher wearing a white coat and stethoscope, and signs onerous waivers about hallucinations and danger of death, sure enough, when deprived of sights and sounds for a few hours, she will have hallucinations. If the sign said, “Meaning Deprivation Laboratory,” the researcher wore jeans, and there were no waiver forms, there would be no hallucinations. This kind of debunking appealed to my critical intelligence, my negativity, and my search for “relevant” science. I was hooked in the very first half hour. Martin was the perfect blend of the clinic and the laboratory, and in later years he would wind up at the University of Pennsylvania as a professor in the psychiatry department. We would be colleagues and friends through his wrongful persecution by the American Psychiatric Association for allegedly mishandling Anne Sexton’s privacy5 until his untimely death in 2000.
I was also one of three hundred students in an art history lecture course. On the first day, I spotted a statuesque blonde and grabbed the seat next to her. She looked familiar, and thrillingly she did not move her foot when mine brushed it. At the end of the lecture she stood up. She was a foot taller than I. It was Monica Skenske.
I had better luck with the Bryn Mawr college women. My roommate and bridge partner, Brian X. Schmidt, introduced me to his high school friend and weekend date, Kerry. A Bryn Mawr sophomore majoring in Greek and Latin, she regaled me with descriptions of her research into Greek mythology and her wondrous professor, Mabel Lang. I was fascinated—she was actually the first female I had met who was both comely and, like me, serious about academic work.
Serendipity interceded. Two weeks later I was on a train to Philadelphia, and a frumpily dressed middle-aged woman struck up a conversation. She told me she was a professor at Bryn Mawr.
“Do you know a Mabel Lang? I just heard such glowing things about her from one of her students,” I asked.
“I am Mabel Lang,” she said, “and who said such nice things about me?”
“Kerry Mueller.”
“Oh, yes, Kerry. I am so pleased to have such an enthusiastic student of Greek. My work is so arcane, the mysteries of Linear B and all that, most of my students—even the brightest of the Bryn Mawr girls—don’t much care, but to find an undergraduate so devoted …” Mabel said, and she went on and on.
I was now smitten, not with Mabel (with whom Kerry was smitten) but with Kerry. We began to spend weekends together, and as captain of the Ivy League championship bridge team, I had car privileges; my little red VW plied US Route 1 between Princeton and Bryn Mawr most weekends.
We lived through two national traumas together.
“I think we are all going to die this weekend,” pronounced my roommate, Wilfrid Schmid, to Kerry and me from the top of our two-story suite in Dodge-Osborn. Wilfrid was as sober an undergraduate as I knew. His father was a noted Greek scholar, resident at the Institute for Advanced Studies, and his mother, he reminded us, was murdered by the Americans in the fire-bombing of Dresden. Wilfrid was a math major. The highest grade at Princeton in the 1960s, the equivalent of an A+, was a 1. A 1+ equaled 100 percent. Wilfrid would graduate valedictorian with all 1+s, except for a single 1 in a politics course. We had hoped that Princeton would trot out insigne cum laude (used only once, a century previously) for him, but Wilfrid and two of his other roommates (eight of us roomed together in the suite) were relegated to a mere summa cum laude.
“Politics is hard,” he muttered, excusing his poor grade and also commenting on the Cuban Missile Crisis now upon us. We were glued to the radio in our suite for days, awaiting the end, but it did not come, and we staggered on to November 1963.
“YOUR PRESIDENT HAS been shot,” a German graduate student, Helmut Lamm, shouted to me as I crossed Washington Road to the psychology laboratory.
“President Goheen?” I asked.
When I look back and ask myself which was the saddest event of my life (and which the happiest), I am surprised. Not the death of my mother, or the miscarriage of one of my children, not even close. It was the slaying of John F. Kennedy and equally the slaying of Robert F. Kennedy. Kerry and I hunkered down in front of the oversized black-and-white television at Wilson Lodge with about one hundred Princetonians and their dates (it was supposed to have been a party weekend) and a dozen of the faculty. Few of us were not red-eyed with weeping. Back then, before the revelations about his private life, he was our hero. We personally identified with him in ways we could not with his predecessor or his successor. He set forth our vision, and we became the bearers of his torch: “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage— and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed.”
Soon we got further tragic news. The body of one of our roommates, Alan Toll Dunham, an unstained golden boy from Toll Valley, Colorado, was fished out of the Hudson River. On November 22, he apparently jumped off the George Washington Bridge and shot himself in the head. I never discovered why, but even fifty years later I still glimpse him from behind on busy streets and rush up to embrace him once again, as I did on his very last day at Princeton.
Kerry and I were not overthrown by the rush of events. The very next weekend, we drove to Albany and announced to my parents that we were engaged. We were married the day before graduation.
PETER MADISON TRIED to help me find where I had dropped my watch.
Princeton hired Peter, a fish-out-of-water faculty member, during my sophomore year. Almost every other one of his colleagues in the department was an experimental psychologist who tilted toward rigor rather than reality, and this profile characterized almost all the faculty of the prestigious psychology departments in America. I used to wonder how this came about, so I asked Jerome Bruner, one of the deans of American experimental psychology.
Jerry, recently dead at age one hundred, said, “It happened in 1946, and I was there.” The decisive moment came in a smoke-filled room at the annual conclave of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, an honorary fraternity (now a sorority as well) of the most senior and most rigid professors in the field. (I am a member, though increasingly marginalized for reasons that will become clear.) By 1946 this group was professing operationalism in the hope that by imitating physics—the top dog in the scientific hierarchy—psychology would gain the status of a real science and win the prestige and funding it so craved. But pressure was building in the other direction: America’s soldiers were returning from war, suffering countless injuries of body and mind, and the Veterans Administration Act of 1946 promised employment and grants for psychologists, potentially transforming psychology from an academic backwater into a health-care (read “illness-care”) profession. Three powerful chairmen of psychology departments, Gary Boring from Harvard, Samuel Fernberger from Penn, and Herbert Langfeldt from Princeton, huddled and then announced to the society that in the future their great departments would “hire no applied psychologists.” Psychology would be the physics of the mind.
Peter Madison was a personality psychologist, not an experimental psychologist, and he certainly did not do physics of the mind. Princeton would not have hired him had the University Counseling Service not needed a new head and had benighted undergraduates not been demanding, even then, courses on “relevant” issues such as mental illness and sex—problems rather than puzzles. Peter was recruited from Swarthmore College, where he studied the lives of individual college students intensively, a project he continued at Princeton. I volunteered to be a subject. This entailed writing my autobiography—now lost6—of which the present book is my second attempt.
Peter Madison (born Patras Matuliatis), 1928–2009. Peter taught me personality psychology at Princeton and, at a crucial moment of professional choice, set me on the path of psychology rather than philosophy. © 1978 David Madison.
In writing my autobiography I had to choose a pseudonym. I chose “Jeffrey.” Peter asked me why. I told him about Jeffrey Albert. Midway through my explanation, Peter stopped me, puzzled. He knew of Jeffrey. Jeff entered Princeton with me, but by sophomore year he had crashed and burned. He had been expelled for using hard drugs and was now hospitalized at an expensive private sanitarium. En route Jeff had casually stolen a girlfriend from me, sleeping with her and then discarding her, but not until she had discarded me. Peter asked me why I would name myself after such a shipwreck—exactly the right question. Why would I, now just beginning to blossom, nevertheless still envy Jeffrey?
I took the entire gamut of personality and intelligence tests and was interviewed at length by Peter’s “Advanced Personality” class. I did all this not out of mere narcissism and curiosity about myself; it seemed like a better way of learning about “soft” psychology from the inside rather than taking one of those notorious “gut” courses. One of his personality inventories asked me what my “ideal” future self was. I wrote, “To be like Wittgenstein, surrounded by devoted students and followers.” Another measured my IQ with a test that was sensitive to the upper end. Peter told me my IQ was 185.
I GOT TO know Peter well. He was tall, soft-spoken, self-effacing, and, like I am now, very hard of hearing. I leaned on him for personal advice, which I badly needed by the tail end of my senior year. In April 1964, I opened one fat envelope and was thrilled to find that I had been granted a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship to study experimental psychology wherever I chose. But another fat envelope arrived shortly thereafter, and I found that I had also been offered a Fulbright fellowship to study analytic philosophy with Geoffrey Warnock at Magdalen College, Oxford. A psychologist or a philosopher?
Actually it was a trilemma. I had been an avid tournament bridge player since my teens, and I was captain of Princeton’s championship team. (In fact I am writing this paragraph while waiting for the next hand to be dealt in a large internet bridge tournament.) At about the same time as the two fat envelopes arrived, Mark Blumenthal, the captain of the University of Pennsylvania’s second-place bridge team, asked me to turn pro with him. I gave this serious thought since I loved the game of bridge.
Unlike academia, bridge has a clear bottom line: either you win or you lose. Even better, bridge knowledge is cumulative: it is perhaps more of a science than psychology or philosophy. In those days progress in bidding systems was really being made, and bridge had almost as many serious journals as psychology.
But three facts eliminated bridge as a profession for me. First, I really was not all that good at it. There are “naturals” in bridge. The cards just fly off their hands, and they often can’t even tell you how they know what to do. They just do it. I, in contrast, was a “student.” I usually had to think, sometimes for minutes, getting a headache in the process and, more often than not, arriving at the wrong answer. Second, making a living was chancy. The pros, other than the very top ones, slept in their cars and were grateful to land a novice partner who would pay them twenty-five dollars a day. Within a year Mark, astonishingly, went on to become one of the highest-paid professionals in bridge, joining the Dallas Aces. But I never believed that I played at his level. Academia, at least, paid a (barely) living wage, even for the less-than-stellar professor. Third, and this was decisive for me, bridge is just a game, even if the best of all games. I wanted to help human beings, not just play.
So the choice came down to academic psychology or philosophy. I asked Bob Nozick what I should do, and imparting the cruelest and kindest advice I have ever gotten, he said, “Marty, philosophy is a good preparation for doing something else.” Bob was telling me that I would never scale the high peaks of philosophy—the peaks that he was ascending even then.
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN. Just as I was finishing this book, fifty-three years after mulling Bob’s words, I made my first visit to Magdalen College as the guest of David Clark, now the most eminent clinical psychologist in Great Britain. Is there an opposite of déjà vu—reexperiencing an alternate life? If so, I had it.
When I entered the gates, with the huge deer park on the left and the greenswarded sixteenth-century quadrangle on my right, my jaw dropped, and I felt that I had finally—after an enormously long and exhausting journey—arrived home. When I plopped down in an over-stuffed easy chair under a Turner waterscape, I thought I might never get up again. At High Table, I engaged the professor of philosophy in a recounting of Wittgenstein’s wielding the poker to threaten Popper for daring to trivialize him, and then over an old Madeira, the professor of English and I discussed whether one could use my big-data methods for measuring happiness (or its lack) in Henry James. The Princeton philosophy department and all the evening dinners at the Wilson Society had groomed me for this. I knew how to be charming at High Table and how to fit right in with Oxford philosophy. In 1964 I had not the slightest idea of how to be housebroken as a student of experimental psychology, and that made all the difference. Given Bob’s advice, I decided not to go to the trouble and expense of crossing the Atlantic that April to scope out Magdalen. Had I visited, I know I would have stayed forever, and the world would have had one more mediocre analytic philosopher, accepting the premises of analytic philosophy, instead of a psychologist eager to overthrow the dogmas of experimental psychology.
I ASKED PETER MADISON what I should do. He said that in me he recognized a natural psychologist. I recognized it in myself when he told me this: the cards often just flew off my hands in psychology. Listening to a lecture or hearing what a colleague was puzzling about, it seemed that I knew—often deeply and right away—the answer long before I could explain how I knew it. This kind of intuition did not sweep over me in philosophy. As in bridge, I had to think headache-hard in philosophy, and I often came up with the wrong answer. I take intuition seriously as a mode of knowing, and being a natural is one theme of this book. For now, suffice it to say that, at the most pivotal moments in my life, I did psychology by epiphany and by intuition.
By the time I graduated from Princeton, the very texture of my mental life had changed. I recognized scientific intuition, and I took my first-blush intuitions seriously. But my daydreaming—the reverie that went through my mind hours a day—had also transmogrified. I paid attention to my daydreams—the routine material that floods the mind of a college student—and their idleness: sexual fantasies, revenge, social and material success, even death. How useless! I decided to tame my reverie. My reverie henceforward would be about problems in psychology and in philosophy. It actually worked, and to this day my daydreams, and even my night dreams, are not idle. In them I constantly turn over issues in science, in the same way someone visual might rotate and examine a complex three-dimensional figure. I work 168 hours per week. I entertain and welcome outlandish and even bizarre perspectives, especially waiting for a feeling of “rightness” to strike me. What goes on in my reverie is “scaffolding,” the construction of shortcuts and of modules about issues I have already visited and revisited. And unlike thinking about bridge or philosophy, this is effortless and headache-free.
Peter Madison, in parting, told me something else on that late April morning in 1964. “There are two reasons people go into psychology. One is not to be wrong. The second is not to be boring. I hope you choose the second.”
With Peter’s and Bob’s advice, I had, by the end of April of my senior year, decided to go to graduate school in experimental psychology. It was between Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, and so I visited both places. My first stop was New Haven and the laboratory of the renowned Neal Miller. Neal, a ruddy-faced bull of a man both in stature and in personal style, was my host. He radiated confidence as befitted the world’s reigning monarch of experimental psychology. His work bridged both the animal laboratory and the analyst’s couch. He was especially famous for his attempt to operationalize Freudian concepts at the more basic level in rats. This was a perfect fit for me—taking clinical insights out of the consulting room and into a setting where they could be tested.
But something bothered me about Neal. He was not at all bewildered. He knew exactly what he wanted to do next and how he and his students were going to do it. There are two basic learning processes, he asserted to me in his nasal twang. There is “instrumental learning,” in which an apparently “voluntary” response like pressing a bar for food is rewarded and so increases in strength. And there is “Pavlovian conditioning,” in which an apparently “involuntary” response, like fear as shown by a high heart rate, is preceded by a conditioned stimulus like a tone, and the tone alone comes to increase the heart rate. But these two processes, he believed, were really one and the same. To find out if this was true, you needed to see if you could increase an involuntary response like heart rate by rewarding it or decrease it by punishing it. Neal had a team of polished postdocs and ambitious graduate students grinding away at this problem. If they succeeded, Neal Miller would go down in history as having discovered the unifying building block of all learning.
Richard L. Solomon (1918–1995) was my Doktorvater and one of the most influential learning theorists of his time. His crowning achievement was his election to the National Academy of Sciences.
He invited me to join the team and offered me a $500 supplement to the National Science Foundation graduate fellowship. I was tempted, since the amount of my fellowship was a mere $200 per month. But I would be a mere yeoman cog in a wheel of a big machine working on an idea that was not my own and about which I had doubts anyway, since neither instrumental learning nor Pavlovian conditioning struck me as “basic.”
My next stop was the University of Pennsylvania, where Richard L. Solomon greeted me in his College Hall office. Well-tanned, bald, dapper, and wearing a brown Harris Tweed jacket, he exuded openness. Dick was one of the young Turks that Penn had rustled away from Harvard. Reputed to be the first Jewish scientist to get tenure at Harvard, Dick was famous for his work on the irreversibility of fear conditioning. In the early 1950s he trained dogs to avoid shock by jumping over a barrier when a tone went on that heralded shock. First the animals escaped the shock by jumping over the barrier, but they soon learned that if they jumped over the barrier earlier—as soon as they heard the tone and before the shock—they would avoid the shock altogether. The memorable result was that even if the shock was never presented again, the dogs just kept jumping. Avoidance never extinguished. Dick argued that the learning of fear might be irreversible. If true, this would have profound clinical implications for curing problems like phobias, and this intersection between rigorous laboratory studies and mental illness made Dick Solomon an attractive mentor.
Unlike Neal Miller, Dick did not talk about himself or his own research program, but he did try to elicit my vision, if any. He did this in a nondirective, bubbly way, chatting about the issues that puzzled him in his laboratory, hoping I would “free associate” creatively from his puzzlement.
I did not say anything particularly creative, and in fact I made the mistake of asking Dick if he would supplement my fellowship by $500. He agreed, but his daughter told me many years later, after Dick’s death, that he never forgave me for such an “unacademic” request. At any rate I was favorably impressed, and one of Dick’s rambles stuck with me permanently.
“I think the dogs in my lab are helpless, and I don’t know why.”