In my first project, I discussed the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud and his philosophy of personality and stages of development. For this project, I will be expanding on that and talking about how the studies of psychology and philosophy have overlapped throughout the years. The two disciplines have a long history together. The term psychology appeared sometime in the 1500s but was not often used until the 1800s. Before that, it was referred to as “philosophy of the mind” or “mental philosophy.” Psychology did not become a science until the late 19th century when Wilhelm Wundt founded the first lab for psychological research. Prior to Wundt’s work what is now psychology was mostly philosophers inventing theories on the mind. One of these philosophers was Rene Descartes.
Rene Descartes
This video explains Rene Descartes’s view on the mind-body problem and some other philosophers' opinions as well. It also introduces some other questions produced as a result of the problem. I’m going to explain the mind-body problem here anyways in case you don’t feel like watching the video. The mind-body problem asks if consciousness/thought is different than the brain/body. Descartes believed that the mind (aka consciousness) and body were two separate things and that they only interacted in a tiny little part of the brain called the pineal gland. This belief is called dualism. Today, psychologists reject dualism because scientific research has shown that thought and the brain are intensely related. Descartes is also famous for saying “I think, therefore I am.” He was a skeptic and thought there was only one thing we could know for certain. Descartes believed that if you can think and perceive things, that you must exist. What you perceive could be false, but just the act of perceiving proves that you are real.
Willam James
More developments came in the shared history of philosophy and psychology in the late 19th century. William James was a philosopher and a psychologist born in 1840. He founded functionalism, which tries to explain the function of consciousness, rather than the structure. James used ideas from Darwin that behaviors that help us adapt to our environment are conserved through evolution. (Personally, I think this represents a great shift for the study of psychology because it made it more scientific.) He created the first psychology lab at Harvard where he studied sensation and perception. This research led to the development of the James-Lange Theory of Emotion. This theory suggests that for someone to experience emotion they must first experience a bodily response (ex. increased heart rate). Once they recognize the response, they feel the emotion. In 1890 William James published a book called Principles of Psychology. It was meant to answer the question of how life gives rise to human consciousness. This work includes a chapter on habit in which he refers to living creatures as “bundles of habit.” In this chapter, James talks about the plasticity of the brain. He states that all our minds can do is “deepen old paths or make new ones.” He goes on to talk about the importance of having good habits and being conscious of how your behavior unintentionally creates habits. Today, plasticity is an important concept in the study of the brain. The importance William James placed on habits holds up well in our knowledge of habitual behavior today.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud was born to Jewish parents in 1856 in what is now the Czech Republic but immigrated to Vienna at the age of 3. Freud is famous for his work in psychology, but his work was not very scientific. He qualifies more as a philosopher therapist than a psychologist for that reason. His most important contribution is his view on the unconscious. Freud thought that our unconscious was made up of things our mind repressed out of our consciousness. He believed that our unconscious drives everything we do. Most of the things Freud believed we repressed were sexual urges from childhood. He also believed in the Oedipus complex (which is when a son is attracted to his mother) as well as the Electra complex (where a daughter is attracted to her father). According to him, this attraction affects a lot of our behavior. Freud also had a theory on personality. He thought personality was made up of 3 elements: the id, ego, and superego. The id is the most primitive part and simply does whatever brings it the most pleasure. The ego is the decision-making part of our personalities. It also wants pleasure and to avoid pain, but uses reason to do so, unlike the id. The superego uses morals and values and contains our conscience. It can punish the ego through guilt if it gives in to the id’s demands. Another major contribution by Freud is psychoanalysis. This is a type of talk therapy where a patient sits and tells the practitioner anything that comes to mind, such as dreams or childhood memories. Psychoanalysis, although practiced by very few people today, was very influential on the study of psychology and talk therapy.
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Ardent was born in 1906 Germany to Jewish parents. She fled Germany in 1933 due to the rise of the Nazi party and moved to Paris where she lived for eight years until she was again forced to leave. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States. When Arendt was working for The New Yorker as a reporter in 1961, she attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann was a high-ranking Nazi officer who was responsible for planning the deportation of over 1.5 million Jews to concentration camps during the Holocaust. What Arendt found during his trial was that he seemed to be an ordinary man. He didn’t act like the evil monster one would expect although he had played a very significant role in millions of deaths. Eichmann did not question what he was doing and the political climate of Germany at the time easily persuaded him that he was doing the right thing, so viewed his job as a pathway to success. At his trial when presented with evidence against him, he still saw no wrongdoing on his part: he had never directly killed anyone and simply did what he was told to do. Eichmann did not seem to hate Jewish people in the way many Nazis do, yet he was still indirectly responsible for many, many of their murders. Arendt called what she saw in him “the banality of evil.” For something to be banal it is lacking in originality, obvious, and boring. Arendt argues that Eichmann not thinking about what he was doing led him to commit atrocities when if placed in a different setting he would have just been a normal man. This lack of thought is the banality of evil. Evil can be so normal and ordinary when one simply does not question what they are doing. This concept brings up many interesting questions in social psychology and the psychology of evil. The banality of evil was echoed in the 1971 Standford Prison Experiment. In this psychological experiment, male college students were randomly assigned the role of prison or guard and a fake prison complete with cells was created in the basement of Stanford’s psychology building. The guards were told to do whatever they saw fit to maintain order in the “prison.” The psychologists in charge sought to discover whether the brutality of guards in American prisons was due to situational or dispositional factors. The results of the study were shocking and disturbing as the experiment showed just how quickly people could fall into the roles assigned to them. The guards were cruel and dehumanized the prisoners. Within hours of the experiments start the prisoners were woken up at 2:30 am for a count. Physical punishments were common, such as pushups while another prisoner sat on the other’s back. Prisoners also fell into their roles quickly and took the “prison’s” rules very seriously. The experiment had to be stopped within just 6 days of the planned 14 because of the emotional breakdown of some of the prisoners. Click here if you want to read more about this study. The psychological concept of deindividuation could partly explain these results. This is when people become so immersed in the norms of a group, they act in ways they never would have on their own. Although deindividuation is not exactly the case with Eichmann, it still could partly explain his behavior as a Nazi. As we can see from these two examples, philosophy and psychology have a lot of potential for teamwork in the study of evil. (Here is the link to a TED Talk given by the lead researcher in the Stanford Prison Experiment on evil and the events at the Abu Ghraib prison. It doesn’t have much to do with Hannah Arendt but it is very interesting nonetheless.)
Conclusion
As a psychology major, the ways philosophy overlaps with psychology is very interesting to me. It seems that many psychologists are philosophers as well. After all, their job is to study the human mind, and to some extent, that is a philosopher's job as well (without the science of course). In the future, I hope the two studies continue to work together to understand humanity.
Works Consulted
"He was a skeptic and thought there was only one thing we could know for certain." No, he pretended to be a skeptic but once he thought he could assert "cogito ergo sum" (I think therefore I am) the floodgates opened, and he thought he had succeeded in defeating skepticism.
ReplyDelete"William James was a philosopher and a psychologist born in 1840." '42
"sexual urges from childhood" - what a strange concept! Or maybe childhood isn't what it used to be... to childhood's loss. Fortunately, talk therapy is not limited to Freudian psychoanalysis.
Philosophy does still have much to offer the psychological study of consciousness...in case you're looking for a minor!