Chapter
One
What’s the problem?
human behaviour was shaped by the history of reinforcements, and he believed
that with the right reinforcement schedules a human utopia could be created
(Skinner, 1948). As for consciousness, he believed it was just an epiphenomenon
and its study should not be the task of psychology. In the words of Watson’s
biographer David Cohen, ‘Behaviourism was a self-conscious revolution against
consciousness’ (1987, p. 72).
Behaviourism was enormously successful in explaining some kinds of behaviour,
particularly in the areas of learning and memory, but it more or less abolished the
psychological study of consciousness, and even the use of the word ‘conscious-
ness’ became unacceptable. Also, though it arguably generated valuable reflec-
tions on the nature of evidence and behaviour and objectivity, behaviourism
threw out the much more even-handed mind-and-body approach of William
James’s ‘science of mental life’. And although thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty
made detailed studies of perception and embodiment that would eventually
help bring phenomenology closer to psychology, in the early twentieth century
phenomenology was increasingly alienated from a mainstream psychology dom-
inated by behaviourism. All this led to half a century of a very restricted kind of
psychology indeed.
By the 1960s, behaviourism was losing its power and influence, and cognitive psy-
chology, with its emphasis on internal representations and information process-
ing, was taking over, but ‘consciousness’ was still something of a dirty word. In his
widely read history Psychology: The Science of Mental Life, George Miller warned:
Consciousness is a word worn smooth by a million tongues. Depending
upon the figure of speech chosen it is a state of being, a substance, a
process, a place, an epiphenomenon, an emergent aspect of matter,
or the only true reality. Maybe we should ban the word for a decade or
two until we can develop more precise terms for the several uses which
‘consciousness’ now obscures.
(1962, p. 40)No one got quite as far as banning its use, but it was certainly more than a decade
before the word ‘consciousness’ became acceptable again in psychology. The
change was due partly to growing interest in big questions about experience
beyond the everyday and the individual: questions about spiritual experience,
about drug-induced states, about mental illness, hypnosis, and the paranormal.
One route these interests took was via William James’s 1902 book The Varieties
of Religious Experience, which later inspired other books like The Varieties of Psy-
chedelic Experience (Masters and Houston, 1967) and The Varieties of Scientific
Experience (Sagan, 2006). In the course of his career James gradually developed a
new form of philosophy, called radical empiricism, which insisted that experience
must always be at the heart of philosophical inquiry, and that experience has to
be understood as fundamentally about meaning, not just physical data. The work
of James, Carl Jung, and others contributed to the explicit focus on spirituality
and transcendence in transpersonal psychology, and this, together with the rise
of the counter-cultures of the 1960s, created other paths for consciousness to
creep back into the academy. During the 1970s, research on mental imagery (see
Chapter 5) and altered states of consciousness such as sleep and drug-induced
states (Section Five), and the beginnings of computer science (Chapter 12),
‘Maybe we should ban
the word for a decade or
two’(Miller, 1962, p. 40)‘genteel avoidance of
consciousness [. . .] feels
much like tiptoeing to
keep from waking the
insane attic-bound Aunt
of a Gothic novel’(Banks, 1993, p. 257)