How the Schools Related to the Eight Trends

Table 9.2 attempts to show in a nutshell how the five schools were related to the five scientific and the three philosophical trends considered in Part I. The entries in the first column of the table are to be read as though each cell raised a question. Thus, in the upper left cell, the question would be, “Did structuralism manifest the physiological trend?” In the fourth cell down in that column, the question would be, “Did structuralism manifest the trend toward quantification?”The answer to the first question, as the table indicates, is a qualified positive in that structuralism did hold that physiological concepts can serve an explanatory end.To the second question the answer is again a qualified yes, because although there was some attempt at quantification there was also much concern with the nonquantified but accurate qualitative description of the mental elements yielded by careful introspection.

Structuralism, then, displayed the physiological and quantitative trends to some degree. It was not strongly biological but was atomistic and associationistic in its interest in mental elements and their compounding. The emphasis on experimental work accounts for the conclusion that the laboratory founding and critical empiricist traditions too were evident in structuralism. Finally, although the structuralists tried empirically to pin down psychological processes, the strongly mentalistic flavor of structuralism precludes the judgment that it was very scientifically materialistic.

Functionalism displayed all eight of the trends. Its evolutionary interest in adaptive processes exemplified its biological and physiological antecedents. It was empirical and laboratory oriented, associationistic, and elementistic. Somewhat more quantitative, perhaps, than structuralism, it was basically materialistic in its concentration on the organism.

Behaviorism too evidenced all eight trends, being most insistent of all the schools in regard to scientific materialism: objectivity was its fetish.Thus, the behaviorists elements were not the mental ones of the structuralist and early functionalist but were the behavioral ones of stimuli and responses; the question of association was recast into the language of conditioning, and neural bonds were assumed to underlie the behavioral ones. Behaviorism had a biological, evolutionary tinge and strongly advocated quantified laboratory investigation.

Gestalt psychology’s very existence as a separate school depended on its objection to two of the eight trends. It was militantly antiatomistic and antiassociationistic; wholes, it held, are not composed of inert elements arbitrarily hooked together. Gestalt notions were also applied to the presumed operation of the brain and other living systems, so in its own somewhat different way the Gestalt movement exemplified the physiological, biological, and scientific materialist interests of preceding times. As dedicated to quantitative, controlled laboratory studies as behaviorism, it therefore also fitted into the traditions of quantification, critical empiricism, and laboratory founding.

As for psychoanalysis, the basic difference between it and the remaining schools shows up in that none of the eight trends really characterized it directly. True, the libidinal drive is viewed in some sense as biological, but psychoanalysis is not physiological or scientifically materialistic although it is fully deterministic. The laboratory atmosphere was essentially alien to it, as was quantification. Possibly one could argue that the traumatic experiences of childhood, considered responsible for later pathology, might in a way be seen as functionally elementary experiences, thus slightly reflecting the atomistic trend. Comparably, one might stretch the associationistic tradition to encompass free association, using it to trace the associational network in an analysand’s mind, but the parallel might be little more than verbal. To the extent that psychoanalysts did try to observe without bias rather than just spinning speculative, deductive webs, psychoanalysis might be interpreted to have been at least tinged with the spirit of critical empiricism.

The Decline of the Schools

During the 1920s all five schools vigorously pursued their respective goals,although structuralism and classical functionalism were already receding into history at the end of that decade. By the middle of the 20th century, the Gestalt movement had lost its identity as a major separate school, structuralism was essentially dead, and functionalism no longer existed as a movement. However, much of U.S. psychology by then was tinged with functionalist thought. Only behaviorism and psychoanalysis continued as powerful schools. All in all, it is primarily the second and third decades of the 20th century that can be considered the age of schools. As was mentioned in the preceding chapter, though, there were vestiges of a “school” tendency in the middle of the century, as in Carl Rogers’s client-centered counseling (a major rallying point among clinical and humanistic psychologists), in the factor analysis of workers such as Raymond B. Cattell and Hans-Jurgen Eysenck, or in the objective behavioristics of the followers of B. F. Skinner.

In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, psychologists became generally somewhat more tolerant of one another perhaps because of the growth and evident success of psychology; they became less insistent about legislating what other psychologists can or cannot do. Unquestioning devotion to and reverence for figures such as Wundt, Titchener, and Watson subsided substantially. There was a growing recognition that maybe the other persons work is not totally useless after all; maybe different viewpoints, each in its own way, do have something valuable to contribute to the understanding of psychological issues. Although the middle of the 20th century still witnessed occasional outbursts of psychologists telling others how they should go about their work, a kind of “live and let live” philosophy seemed gradually to pervade the Zeitgeist. The prevailing attitude became that my road to the truth is, of course, better than yours, but you have a right to follow your (misguided) approach, and, who knows, it might even yield something worthwhile. Nothing is apt to be lost by attacking a problem simultaneously from several different angles and with several different methods or by attacking different problems.

During the second half of the 20th century, psychology was anything but a unified discipline. It fragmented not into a new and different set of schools but into a bewildering mixture of dozens of only modestly interrelated different foci of inquiry, each with its own methods, values, concepts, and issues. This proliferation, evident in the enormous variety of the APA divisions listed in Table 8.1, will be touched on again in the last three chapters.