Storming the Tower of Psychobabble ❧ 95Despite some dazzling insights into the human condition, psycho-
analysis didn’t work very well. Analysts were often more adept at explaining
symptoms than alleviating them. When analysis did work, it took forever,
cost a fortune, and required a college education to appreciate its benefits.
Meanwhile, back at the lab, more scientific psychologists were hatch-
ing a plot to overthrow analysis and make psychotherapy more effective
and available. Until the 1960s, behaviorists were more concerned with
running rats through mazes than with treating mental illness. Their goal
was prediction and control of observable behavior. They prided them-
selves on complete disinterest in any sort of internal process that might
fall between stimulus and response. Behavior, to them, was shaped solely
by its results.
When behaviorists did talk about mental illness, it was in terms of
conditioning. There was classical conditioning,first discovered by Pavlov
with bells and dog drool, which explained how physiological processes
could be connected to unrelated environmental stimuli. If salivation
could be arbitrarily connected to bells, why couldn’t fear be connected to
snakes?
Then there was operant conditioning, championed most famously by
B. F. Skinner. The basic idea was that any behavior that is rewarded will be
more likely to occur again. Very early in the game behaviorists discovered
that punishment was not a useful tool for shaping behavior, because its
effects were too unpredictable. Positive reinforcementand the many ways
it can be administered stands at the center of behavioral theory. There is
such a thing as negative reinforcement, butit is not punishment! Any
behaviorist worth his salt would punch you in the nose for saying it is.
Negative reinforcement is a stimulus that rewards by being taken away. Its
effects are far more powerful than mere punishment. Anything that turns
off a painful stimulus will be repeated, even long after the pain has passed.
This is the reason it is so difficult to get people with fear disorders to face
what they’re afraid of if they’ve already learned a means of avoidance.
In the 1960s a few radical behaviorists came up with the idea that
mental illnesses had nothing to do with psychoanalytic gobbledegook,
that they were merely conditioned responses. Armed with techniques from
the laboratory, radical behaviorists set out to topple the mental health