D2

II. PSYCHOLOGY'S ORIGINS

By Stephen Palmquist (stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk)

4. Religion and the Spirit

Both the nature and the history of psychology can be divided into three overlapping types or periods: "presystematic" psychology is as old as human history and consists of relatively unorganized reflections based on mythical and religious ideas; "systematic" psychology began around 400 B.C. (with Plato) and consists of the rationally ordered reflections of philosophers or theologians; and "scientific" psychology began toward the end of the 19th Century and consists of factual conclusions that can be drawn from empirical observations and/or experiments (cf. EOP 7.1). This week I shall devote one hour to each of these three topics, beginning today with what might be called "psychology in religion".

The holy texts and traditions of every world religion, as well as the myths of every major culture, include numerous ideas that can be called "psychological" in a broad sense. In this lecture we'll look at three examples: Greek mythology, biblical religion and Buddhism. For our present purposes, "psychology" will refer to any reflections about the soul (since psyche is the Greek word for "soul") or any other essential aspect of human personhood.

Before philosophy became a dominant force in ancient Greek society, myths served as the people's principal guide for understanding human life. These myths (as explained briefly in Chapter 2 of The Tree) were not merely clever stories about imaginary beings; they were profound reflections on the nature of human life, regarded by the whole society as unquestionably true. As such, they were an essential component of Greek religion. The psychology contained in these myths is haphazard and not always self-consistent. It does not provide a single, unified picture of human nature. Each narrative focuses on the power-struggle between gods and human beings (or other gods). The gods often have characteristics that we would associate with human beings. So when reading myths, we should treat all characters (gods and humans alike) as representing different aspects of ourselves. This is the key to drawing psychological insight from ancient myths-just as it is for dreams. If you do this seriously (a possibility we shall explore in detail later in the course, with myths as well as with dreams), you will soon find out why modern psychologists such as Freud have found deep and highly relevant psychological truths in many ancient myths, despite their unsystematic and highly symbolic character. They are like cultural dreams that reveal the psychological make-up of a whole people.

An example we shall examine further in Lecture 20 is the myth of Eros and Psyche. "Eros" is the Greek name for the god of love-better known by his Latin name, Cupid. In the myth, Psyche ("soul") is a young princess whose beauty is so striking that people begin to worship her instead of Venus (goddess of beauty). Venus becomes jealous and sends her son, Cupid, to get revenge. But Cupid tricks his mother and marries Psyche instead. When Venus discovers their secret love, she locks Cupid in her house and refuses to allow them to see each other. Finally, after a long series of hardships, Psyche is made immortal and reunites with Cupid. When reflecting on this myth, think not only about its obvious implications for a theory of "love and the soul" (our topic for Week X), but also ask yourself how you are like Cupid, Psyche, and the other characters.

Ancient Greeks saw a clear connection between myths and dreams. Sometimes gods or their messengers would appear in people's dreams to guide them (e.g., with a future prediction). And in temples and other places of worship, dreams were used to induce special communication with one or more gods, to promote physical or psychological healing, etc. MacKenzie gives a good description of some typical examples, not only from the Greeks (see DD 41-47), but also from the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians (26-35). Although some attempts were made to distinguish between "true" and "false" dreams (41), or to classify dreams into various types (37), their understanding remained unsystematic.

Passing from ancient mythology to world religions that have survived up to the present day takes us closer to a systematic psychology, though without quite escaping the mythological mind-set. Of all religious scriptures, the Bible presents one of the clearest and most consistent pictures of the human psyche, though without describing or defending it in any theoretically sophisticated (systematic) way. The biblical view of the human psyche is thoroughly religious in the sense that it assumes psychological health is determined by a person's relationship to God. The two most essential features of the human situation are that human beings were created by a good God for a good purpose and that we have all fallen into a sinful way of life that not only obstructs our relationship with God, but also hinders our spiritual growth. The Bible is filled with stories about people who struggled with evil forces that threatened to divide and/or destroy their personalities, who regained spiritual wholeness through the (God-given) power of love. As we shall see in Weeks IX and X, these themes (evil and love) are as closely related to psychological wholeness as they are to its spiritual counterpart, "salvation".

Although the Bible presents a variety of positions on some of the detailed issues relating to human nature (e.g., on the question of what happens after we die), a fairly accurate general picture can be discerned. Biblical writers tend to assume human beings have both a physical and a mental (or psychological) side and to distinguish between these and the "spirit". Both the Hebrew and Greek words for "spirit" (ruah and pneuma) also mean "breath" or "wind", suggesting the fundamentally mysterious and intangible nature of the spirit (in contrast to the body and the mind). As Jesus explains to Nicodemus in John 3:8: "The wind [pneuma] blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit [pneumatos]." The purpose of the breath/wind/spirit that enlivens our physical/mental existence is to keep us in communion (i.e., wordless communication) with God. However, when God breathes "the spirit of life" into the body (Gen. 2:7), a person's mind also begins to develop, producing desires that can eventually prevent us from enjoying the basic God-relationship. As depicted in Figure II.1, this blockage is what the Bible

Figure II.1:

Sin as a Blockage

to Spiritual Growth

calls "sin". By obstructing the natural pathway from our minds and bodies to the spirit that unifies and transcends them both, sin impairs our spiritual growth, cutting us off from part of our true self.

The biblical solution to this problem is multifaceted. Essentially, sinners must come to recognize and accept that God's loving grace provides a way of salvation that alone can restore wholeness to human life. In the Old Testament this "way" is associated at times with the Law of Moses, at other times with the earthly King-

dom of Israel, and later with the hope for a coming Messiah (savior). The New Testament depicts Jesus as the fulfillment of the Law of Moses, as the founder of a new, spiritual Kingdom, and as the promised Messiah in the form of a suffering servant. Throughout the Bible, though, there is a consistent emphasis on love as the basic ingredient of salvation and on the responsibility human beings have to be open to the gift of love offered by God. Those who accept this gift are restored to spiritual wholeness in such a way that they can receive the direct guidance from God that enables them to overcome the damaging effects of sin.

One of the Bible's most commonly cited ways of hearing God's voice is dreams. Oddly enough, Christians who regard the Bible as words dictated straight from God are sometimes very reluctant to treat dreams as a legitimate form of communication with God-presumably because this seems to threaten the Bible's authority as the sole means of receiving God's guidance. Yet time and again the Bible itself confirms the amazing power of dreams to convey a deep spiritual message to the dreamer. The book of Genesis alone describes ten different dreams, occupying at least 62 (over 4%) of the verses in the book. Through these dreams God warns Abimelech not to fall for Abraham's deception (20:3-7), shows Jacob a glimpse of heaven and of his future inheritance (28:12-15), encourages Jacob and tells him when to return to his homeland (31:10-13), tells Laban to let Jacob go peacefully (31:24,29), gives Joseph two symbolic pictures of his future position as ruler over his brothers (Gen. 37:5-10), and, through Joseph's divinely inspired interpretations (41:16), gives two prisoners (40:4-19) and Egypt's Pharaoh (41:1-32) a symbolic foretaste of their impending fate and of the fate of the entire nation.

Elsewhere in the Bible, dreams are also viewed as messages from God (e.g., Num. 12:6; Jud. 7:13-15; 1 Kings 3:5-15), though they are not always viewed in this way (e.g., Deut. 13:1-5; Jer. 23:25-32; Zech. 10:2; Jude 8). Some texts indicate that dreams may be nothing but despicable "fantasies" (Ps. 73:20) or meaningless effects of having too many cares in waking life (Eccl. 5:3,7; Is. 29:7,8). Yet in the right hands, such as the prophet Daniel (Dan. 1:17), dreams and visions can be interpreted in such a powerful way as to influence the minds of kings (Dan. 2:1-45; 4:1-33) and foretell major events in human history (Dan. 7:1-8:27). And of course, some of the key events surrounding Jesus' birth were also announced to the key participants in dreams (Matt. 1:20-21; 2:12-13,19-23). Clearly, then, the Bible views dreams as at least a potential means God can use to bridge the "gap" created by sin.

Rather than examining the biblical view of dreams in any further detail, I'd like to quote a passage from Nikos Kazantzakis' novel about the life of Jesus, called The Last Temptation. In Chapter XXXII Mary (Martha's sister), after having a bad dream, asks Jesus about the nature and origin of dreams. Kazantzakis has Jesus respond as follows (LT 478):

"They [dreams] are neither angels nor devils ... When Lucifer started his revolt against God, dreams could not make up their minds which side to take. They remained between devils and angels, and God hurled them down into the inferno of sleep....

... "As long as you keep [your dream] within you, Mary, it will eat away your insides. Bring it out into the light so that you can be rid of it."

This points up two aspects of dreams that I believe are not only consistent with the way dreams are portrayed in the Bible, but also closely related to the way we shall be treating dreams in this course. First, sharing a troublesome dream is one of the best ways to neutralize the negative influence it might otherwise have on your emotions. And second, not all dreams are good or even meaningful: they share in the basically paradoxical nature of the human spirit.

When I was a college student I was very interested in this paradox, especially in how it relates to the biblical view of human nature. One evening I had a very interesting conversation with a close friend (who later became my wife); together we came up with the diagram in Figure II.2 as a symbolic representation of biblical psychology. In this diagram

Figure II.2:

The Spiritual Boundaries of Mind and Body

the mind and body fill an area (i.e., the space inside the circle) in order to represent the fact that they are bound by space-time limitations. The body obviously requires both space and time to function, whereas the mind requires at least time and possibly space as well (for functions such as imagination and other forms of inner "seeing"). The spirit, by contrast, is the aspect of human nature that transcends such space-time limitations; hence it is depict-

ed here as a one-dimensional line, occupying no actual area of the map (in the geometrical sense). That God's spiritual nature transcends the human spiritual nature is represented by the fact that the Holy Spirit does occupy an area, though as we shall see in Lecture 34, the nature of this "higher-level" of space-time remains a mystery to human beings.

One of the unique features of this map of the "biblical psyche" is its distinction between two aspects of the human spirit, based on the paradoxical nature of all spirituality. When the Bible says "God is Spirit" (John 4:24), many people think this refers only to a good or "holy" spiritual force (e.g., Ps. 51:11; Luke 11:13); yet other texts affirm that God is the source of evil spiritual forces as well. All seven references to an "evil spirit" in the Old Testament clearly state that it came or was sent "from God" or "from the Lord" (Jud. 9:23; 1 Sam. 16:14-16,23; 18:10; 19:9); and although the New Testament does not say much about where evil spirits come from, it does clearly and repeatedly depict Jesus as having authority over them (e.g., Matt. 10:1; Mark 1:27; Luke 4:36)-a fact that serves as evidence of his divine nature.

Just as God (the Holy Spirit), somehow (mysteriously) assimilates evil (see e.g., Josh. 23:15), so also the human spirit has a dual nature that makes both good and evil possible. The "negative spirit" is the source of human evil inasmuch as it separates us from God (cf. Figure II.1); yet this separation is paradoxically what makes us individuals (free and independent persons). The "positive spirit" is the source of human goodness inasmuch as it has the power to break through the negative spirit so that we can reestablish communion with God's Spirit; yet this unifying aspect of our nature paradoxically separates our "inner" (mental/psychological) and "outer" (physical) natures, making us psychologically divided and self-alienated beings. Nowhere is this paradox more clearly stated than in Romans 7:21, where Paul describes the "law" he finds "at work" in himself: "When I want to do good, evil is right there with me."

The theory of human nature depicted in Figure II.2 is technically an example of systematic (philosophical or theological) psychology, since it could be defended completely apart from any reference to biblical texts. I have included it in today's lecture because it first came to me as the mythical-religious expression of a speculative insight. Rather than defending it here, however, I shall conclude by reflecting briefly on one of its implications and showing how it might fit in with another religious tradition. Just as this diagram implies that becoming a person necessarily involves the presence of what I have called the "negative spirit", so also we shall find in working with our dreams that becoming a whole person requires us to face the "dark side" of our personality. This "dark side" refers to the negative aspects of ourselves that we try to keep hidden from view (often even from our own view), but which nevertheless seem to jump out and take control of us at all the wrong moments. As we have seen, Christianity refers to this darkness as "sin"; but it is acknowledged in one form or another by virtually every religious tradition.

The dark side of human nature is clearly portrayed, for instance, in Buddhism, which develops what might be called an anti-psychological view of human nature-one that is often expressed in highly systematic (philosophical) terms. Buddhism describes our dark side in terms of the desires that keep us "attached" to things in this world. This ego-attachment (rooted in what I have called the "negative spirit") is responsible for all human suffering. The Buddhist response to this problem is to point out that the whole notion of an individual person, or "subject", distinct from all other things, as "objects", is a fundamental "illusion" (samsara) of human existence. What prevents people from realizing their true potential is ignorance of the illusory nature of their own ego. By acknowledging our ignorance and releasing ourselves from all attachments, we can come to know our true "Buddha nature" (rooted in the "positive spirit"). The ultimate goal is to experience our own nothingness (the "void"), thus achieving the inner peace of "enlightenment" (nirvana).

Obviously, the Christian and Buddhist views of human nature are in one sense diametrically opposed. Christianity (especially in the example of Jesus) encourages us to believe that God, who is Everything, created a good world and will save us from the consequences of evil, whereas Buddhism (especially in the example of Buddha) encourages us to believe the world is Nothing and our suffering is an illusion we must escape from. But despite this difference, I believe that in another sense these two religious standpoints share a common form. The function of sin in Christianity corresponds directly to the function of ignorance in Buddhism: a psychological wall that blocks our potential for personal/ spiritual growth. And the solution in both cases involves facing up to this dark side of our nature, by confessing our sin in one case or by releasing ourselves from ignorant attachments in the other.

When the dark side of our personality begins to come into the light of consciousness, we tend to respond in one of two ways: we either flee from the negative spiritual attribute, or we face it. Some religious people (whether Christian or Buddhist) believe the former option (i.e., running away) is the best response to evil. But as we shall see in Week IX, this is based on a gross misconception of how evil actually works. For now it is enough to say that from a psychological perspective, true evil occurs not when we focus on the negative spirit (i.e., on apparent evil), but when we refuse to face up to its presence. Evil is like a mad dog: it will only bite you if you turn around and run away from it. Although difficult, your dream diary project will require you to have the courage to face some rather uncomfortable new insights about yourself-insights that might fall under the category of "sin" in Christianity or "ignorance" in Buddhism. (This exemplifies, by the way, my general strategy throughout this course: to use psychological theories to provide non-religious explanations of what are basically religious truths regarding personal growth.) The goal of facing up to the dark, "negative spirit" side of ourselves is not to destroy it, but to bring it to light so that we can integrate it into our personality, thus taking away its power to have an evil influence over us.

5. Philosophy and the Soul

Although mythical and religious ways of understanding the human psyche, focusing on the human spirit (i.e., relationship with God), still persist up to the present day, they have been seriously challenged for the past 2400 years by numerous more systematic theories advanced by philosophers. As explained in Part One of The Tree, philosophers tend to focus their psychological insights on the soul much more than on the spirit or body. ("Soul" is normally a synonym for "mind", often including aspects of the spirit as well.) For the benefit of those who have not studied philosophy before, I shall present in this hour an overview of the theories of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and Kant, paying special attention to their theories of human nature. In addition, I'll make some brief comments about what these (and other) philosophers have said about the nature and origin of dreams.

Plato (427-347 B.C.) wrote at a time when philosophy was just beginning to establish itself as a viable alternative to the ancient Greek myths. By adapting many of the ideas he learned from Socrates, Plato developed a theory that is now called "idealism". In metaphysics, idealism is the view that ideas are the true or "ultimate" reality, whereas material objects are just their illusory "appearances". This relates directly to human nature inasmuch as the soul can be regarded as our true essence, while the body is merely its accidental appearance. When the body dies, the soul will return to the world of "eternal forms", where it was before it descended into the body at a person's birth. Human psychology for Plato is bound up in the soul's struggle to rediscover its true, rational nature. The body's three-part structure (belly, heart and head) reflects the soul's threefold hierarchy: "appetite" tempts us with desires that tend to keep us tied down to the body, giving us only a glimpse of eternity; "spirit" fills us with the power of love, which mediates between the temporal body and the eternal soul; and "reason", the highest and most authentic aspect of the soul, casts the body aside, putting us into direct contact with this real world of eternal ideas (see TP, Figure 4.4). The three primary virtues (beauty, goodness and truth) correspond, respectively, to these three levels of the human soul.

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), despite being Plato's best student and for many years a teacher at his Academy, developed a philosophical system that opposed Plato's in many ways. His metaphysics is typically called "realism", because he regards the objects of our ordinary experience (called "substances", provided they combine matter with a specific form or purpose) as the ultimate reality. This more "scientific" position views ideas on their own as, at best, only potentially real. When applied to human nature, this means the individual soul (the body's "form") stops being "real" and hence ceases to exist when the body (the soul's "matter") dies. For Aristotle, the soul is essentially the principle of life imbedded in matter: plants have soul only at the level of appetite; animals add to appetite the spirit level of soul; and human beings alone participate not only in these two but also in the life (soul) of reason. Notwithstanding their differences, Plato and Aristotle agree that the soul is a necessary component of what it means to be a human person, that it has a three-fold structure, and that reason is its highest expression.

Plato and Aristotle also had some interesting things to say about dreams. Plato believed the rational part of the soul (the part that resides in the head) withdraws its influence when we fall asleep, leaving the lower parts to exercise more control than usual. Anticipating a modern theory that we shall examine next week, he suggests that most dreams reflect suppressed desires that can be expressed only because reason loses its controlling influence while we are asleep. Those who are able to master such desires, both while awake and while asleep, will be able to draw genuine rational insights from their dreams (see e.g., PR 571d). However, Plato did not develop any detailed theory of dream interpretation.

Aristotle's approach to dreams is more thorough and empirically-oriented than Plato's. He examines the phenomenon from a variety of angles in three short essays about sleep and dreaming. He argues that dreams are rooted in the same mental power as sense-perceptions (the "faculty of presentation"), the difference being that a dream is "a presentation which occurs in sleep" (OD 459a). Just as a hot coal retains its heat for some time after it is removed from the fire, so also our mind retains its inner tendency to produce mental images even after genuine perception has ceased (459b). Casting doubt on the view that dreams can be a form of communication with God, Aristotle devotes considerable attention to comparing dreams with sensory illusions and hallucinations (459b-462b). He discerns three ways dreams may affect the dreamer: they may show traces of an illness that is just beginning to manifest itself, they may give rise to an idea or feeling that is then considered more fully in waking life, and they may show coincidental similarities to subsequent events (cf. DD 49-50).

Once Christianity became a major cultural influence in the western world, the philosophical positions of the ancient Greeks were synthesized with biblical revelation in such a way as to produce numerous theological versions of systematic psychology. St. Augustine (354-430) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) are the two most influential representatives of the many Christian scholars who adapted the ideas of Plato and Aristotle (respectively) to the Christian message. Augustine is especially noteworthy for the emphasis he put on introspection (in books such as Confessions) as a means to self-understanding under the guidance of God. This emphasis on a private life of personal (spiritual) growth was largely absent for the ancient Greeks. Moreover, Augustine took one of the basic features of the biblical view of human psychology-namely, that human beings are radically mortal (destined for extinction) until God chooses to resurrect the body in a new, spiritual form-and identified it with the Platonic idea of the immortality of the soul. Aquinas' preference for Aristotle over Plato allowed for a more authentically biblical view of bodily resurrection, though he preserved Augustine's emphasis on the private, intuitive certainties provided by introspection.

After nearly two millennia of debate between idealists and realists, Renè Descartes (1596-1650) developed a philosophy intended to bridge this gap by treating the soul and body as equally real. Using his famous "I think, therefore I am" argument, he concluded that the soul, defined now simply as the "thinking substance" (i.e., the mind), certainly exists independently of all extended substances (e.g., the body). Significantly, he reached this "dualist" conclusion after engaging in a series of "meditations" that involved introspecting in a very private way in search of something absolutely certain. As explained in The Tree (Ch.6), Descartes' dualism gave rise to two new problems: (1) How can we be sure that the body is as real as the mind? and (2) How does the mind interact with the body? The first problem is created by the possibility that our whole bodily life could be nothing but a big dream. In response to this hypothesis, Descartes appealed to our innate idea of perfection as a proof that a perfect Being (i.e., God) exists; and God, being good, would not deceive us into believing our bodies are real unless this were really true.

Once we accept the body as an independent substance, equal and opposite to the mind in its reality, the second problem (typically called the "mind-body problem") arises. Descartes attempted to provide an empirical solution to the question of how the mind and body interact. A small part of the brain, called the pineal gland, supposedly transforms mental "motion" (i.e., thoughts) into physical motion (i.e., nerve impulses) in some unknown way. This provides a mechanism through which the two kinds of substance can engage in direct, causal interaction. Naturally, this highly speculative claim did not satisfy Descartes' critics; instead a whole range of possible solutions began to be explored, with the search continuing among some philosophers even today.

One of the most influential responses to Descartes was put forward by David Hume (1711-1776), whose epistemology-as examined briefly in The Tree (Ch.17)-also contains an implicit psychology. Hume refined a view of the mind that had been proposed by John Locke (1632-1704) and developed by George Berkeley (1685-1753), according to which knowledge arises entirely out of sense impressions that strike our mind like a "blank tablet" (tabula rasa). There are no "innate ideas". All ideas develop out of the connections our minds make between such impressions. Carrying this position to its logical conclusion, Hume called into question the legitimacy of the very idea of a mental substance (the mind or "self") as the foundation for human personhood. All that really exists is a "bundle of perceptions" (mental and physical); what we call "knowledge" is nothing but patterns of "association" that develop when our imagination habitually links certain impressions of our senses with specific ideas, desires and feelings that arise out of those impressions.

Hume's theory of the human mind influenced subsequent developments in several ways. First, positivists and other empiricist philosophers began a long search for the basic "sense data". This tradition can be traced through philosophers such as Wittgenstein down to the present day (see TP, Ch.13). Second, Hume's introspection-based approach to psychology had a Newtonian flavor that directly influenced many empirical psychologists as they attempted to classify and analyze various functions and components of the human mind. Subsequent philosophers such as James Mill (1773-1836), in his book The Analysis of the Human Mind (1829), developed principles of association in a more thoroughgoing attempt to explain how complex ideas can arise out of simple sensible impressions. As we shall see in the next lecture, such studies eventually led to psychology establishing itself as an independent science. For now, however, let us concentrate on a third important influence: namely, the philosopher whose reaction against Hume was primarily responsible for what many would regard as western philosophy's most radical revolution since Aristotle turned Plato upside-down.

In The Tree our discussion of the metaphysics and epistemology of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) did not include much information about his theories of human nature or psychology. The extreme complexity of the former left us no time to consider the latter; but this was not a problem because, as we noted, Kant himself largely ignored the traditional problem of mind-body dualism in his main, "Critical" writings. Many scholars believe Kant merely assumed some version of Cartesian dualism. That this was true in the early part of his career is quite evident, for the question of how the soul relates to the body is one of several themes that repeatedly appear in the books and essays he wrote before the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Unlike Descartes, though, Kant did not believe the soul is located in only one specific part of the body. Rather, he thought the entire soul permeates every part of the human body. Moreover, in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Illustrated by Dreams of Metaphysics (1766), one of the last books Kant wrote before the "silent decade" that preceded the writing of his Critical philosophy, Kant expresses profound disillusionment with the entire tradition of Cartesian metaphysics. One of the purposes of Kant's mature philosophy was, in fact, to develop a metaphysics that could pave the way for an entirely new philosophy of the human soul.

In order to understand the view of the human soul defended in Kant's Critical philosophy, we must first take a closer look at his Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. This book is based on a comparison between the spiritual visions of the Swedish mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1771), and the metaphysical speculations of contemporary philosophers who were proposing various theories of the human soul. If you're interested in a more detailed discussion of this book and its influence on Kant's mature philosophy, you might want to read Chapter II of my book, Kant's Critical Religion. For our purposes, though, it will suffice to point out that Kant's conclusion is surprisingly moderate: in spite of the fact that he ridicules Swedenborg at certain points, he insists that the existence of a spiritual realm cannot be ruled out but also cannot be proven. The philosophical lesson to be learned from Kant's study of mystical visions is that a purely speculative philosophy of the soul, like Swedenborg's visions, can be neither confirmed nor denied by human reason, and that philosophers should therefore wake up to the fact that everything we can positively know about the human soul must be drawn from our experience, not from abstract metaphysical "dreams".

Kant develops the implications of this lesson in the Critique of Pure Reason. The fact that this entire book is an exploration of the "faculties" (i.e., the powers) of the human "mind" is what gives many readers the impression that he is merely assuming Descartes' mind-body dualism. Kant's phenomenal-noumenal distinction seems at first to back up this interpretation. However, such an interpretation proves to be inadequate once we recognize that Kant treats these two terms not as names for two distinct "worlds" (the world of the body and the world of the mind, respectively), but rather as two perspectives on one and the same world (the world of the human person). Kant's real interest is never with the "mind" or "soul" as an independently existing substance, but rather with "reason" as an organic unity that expresses what it means to be a person. The Critical philosophy ignores the mind-body problem not because Kant uncritically assumes its truth, but rather because he transcends it, replacing it with what he calls an "architectonic" (i.e., systematically constructed) view of the rational capacities inherent in human personhood.

Of the many implications of this radical new approach to the philosophy of human nature, we have time to consider only two. The first is that the old "rational psychology" loses its status as the highest science of human self-understanding. In a lengthy section of the Transcendental Dialectic, called "The Paralogisms of Pure Reason", Kant demonstrates with devastating arguments that the rationalist doctrine of the soul completely fails to establish any genuine knowledge (i.e., "science"). At the same time, however, he argues that the limits of human reason also protect our speculations from being proven false by skeptics who doubt the existence of the soul altogether. Kant himself develops a rather sophisticated, fourfold conception of the nature of the human soul, as follows:

Figure II.3: Four Hypothetical Features of the Soul

But this conception is intended to be viewed only as a hypothetical "idea", a useful guideline for organizing our empirical knowledge of human nature (KCR V.2). In other words, philosophers can no longer claim to establish any special, rational knowledge of the human soul; they must rest content with proposing analytic a posteriori hypotheses that may or may not arouse our faith.

This shocking conclusion serves as a "wake up call" to all those interested in developing self-knowledge, for the second implication of Kant's perspectival approach to philosophy is that psychology can produce genuine knowledge only if it is empirical. Kant himself expressed strong doubts as to the possibility of empirical psychology ever establishing itself as a science, because its object (the soul) remains by definition beyond the limits of our sensible perception. Nevertheless, his Anthropology lectures reflect in a more hypothetical way on numerous themes relating to empirical psychology. Most of these are now too outdated to be of much relevance to this course. But one small section of his book does make several observations about dreams that might interest you, especially as you begin working on your dream diary this week.

Kant says dreams are essential to normal sleep (APPV 37); he assures us "that anyone who thinks he has not dreamed has only forgotten his dream." He also suggests it would be "inhuman" to blame people for what happens in their dreams, because each person's dream world is entirely private. To back this up, he proposes a rather amusing physiological explanation of the purpose of dreams: they stimulate our vital organs so that the body does not die while we sleep. Along these lines, he relates a story of how he believes a dream may have saved his life when he was a young boy. Unfortunately, Kant is skeptical about the possibility of anyone ever explaining the content of dreams in a meaningful way.

Philosophers reacted to Kant's radical critique of psychology in two rather different ways. The first was to explore the possibility that, if psychological knowledge could not be based in rational arguments, then it may have some irrational basis. This was the origin of what came to be called "the unconscious". Kant's own theory of "transcendental knowledge" (i.e., knowledge that everyone must assume in order to gain empirical knowledge, yet which everyone except Critical philosophers remains unaware of even as they make use of it) bears some similarity to the unconscious. But it was the German romantic idealist, Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854), who first developed an explicit philosophy of the unconscious. His book, System of Transcendental Idealism, deals not with psychology, but with how the unconscious makes itself manifest in history. For that reason we need not discuss it here.

The second reaction to Kant's demonstration that psychology must be empirical in order to convey genuine knowledge was an attempt to base philosophical reflections on empirical data about the soul. Of the many philosophers who did this, we have time to look at only one. Carl Du Prel was a philosopher and (philosophical) psychologist who lived and wrote just as modern psychology was beginning to establish itself as a science. He argues that dreams originate in the "solar plexus". The solar plexus is located at the top of a person's abdomen, near the pancreas, just above the navel and well below the heart. As the largest bundle of nerves, it controls the functions of the abdominal organs; being one of the seven "chakras" in Indian religious symbolism, it has traditionally been regarded as the emotional center of the body.

Du Prel claims that when we fall asleep, the brain rests and the solar plexus takes over. In other words, the solar plexus is the physical basis of the unconscious. Dreams that awaken us out of a deep sleep seem to come particularly from this location, according to Du Prel, whereas those that occur in shallow sleep are more closely related to the brain, and hence more likely to be cluttered with relatively insignificant details from conscious life. This, of course, is largely speculative and may have little more scientific basis than Descartes' belief that the conscious mind is located in the pineal gland (see TP, Ch.6). Interestingly, however, I have had students with no knowledge of Du Prel's theory tell me that their dreams do seem to originate from this area of their body. The significance of Du Prel's theory may be more symbolic than scientific. For the solar plexus is the central point of our body, the point from which "heaven" can be regarded as symbolically descending into the space-time world of our everyday experience. (We'll talk more about this in Week XII.) If the soul is to be associated with any one part of the body more than all others, this symbolism suggests that the solar plexus would be as likely a candidate as the brain.

6. Science and the Body

So far this week we have discussed two of the three periods or types of psychology: the presystematic psychology found in myths and religious texts tends to emphasize the spirit; the systematic psychology found in philosophy and theology tends to emphasize the soul (understood primarily as the conscious mind). In the final hour this week we shall look at the third type, the scientific psychology that tends to emphasize the body. Psychology, in the wake of Kant's critique, came to be viewed more and more as an empirical science, with introspection being the tool typically employed for collecting psychological data. As long as psychology was still regarded as "the study of the soul", and as long as "soul" was more or less identified with a person's conscious thoughts and feelings, no other alternative seemed viable.

Empirical psychology developed gradually over a period of well over a century, but without clearly distinguishing itself from philosophy. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution accelerated this development- especially his psychological reflections in Descent of Man (1871). But the date traditionally cited as the year when psychology was established as a separate science is 1879. In that year, Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) set up the first laboratory specifically designed for performing psychological experiments-a momentous event indicating that a clean break had finally been made between empirical psychology and the "mother tree" of philosophy. Taking as its philosophical foundation the associationist theory of the mind (originated by Hume), Wundt used introspective methods to study how sensation and perception operate. His students later expanded the scope of experimentation to include the areas of memory, judging and willing. With such experiments psychology was certainly beginning to imitate science; but its fundamental character, as the study of the soul (i.e., of human consciousness in all its manifestations), was still identical to that of systematic (philosophical) psychology.

What soon became apparent to many scientifically-minded psychologists is that as long as they used introspection-the cornerstone of psychological reflection at least since Augustine-to study the contents of consciousness, they would never be able to attain the goal of establishing genuine scientific knowledge. For first-hand objective knowledge of another person's inner thoughts and opinions cannot be obtained. Too much hinges on a person's ability to report accurately on his or her own inner experiences. The main developments in scientific psychology over the past 100 years have been to a large extent a series of responses to this problem: What method can be put in place of introspection as the primary tool for obtaining psychological data?

Scientific psychology in the 20th century can be divided into four types, though of course, each type has numerous variations, and some approaches fit into more than one category. Contemporary schools of psychology can be logically distinguished as arising out of the following two distinctions: a focus on therapy (+) vs. a focus on experimentation (-); and a focus on external behavior (+) vs. a focus on internal thought/feeling processes (-). Combining these two distinctions into a second-level analytic relation (according to the method described in The Tree, Ch.11) gives us the makings of a fourfold summary of how the science of psychology has developed during the first century of its existence. Today's lecture will briefly examine each of the options listed in Figure II.4, beginning with the schools whose primary (though not exclusive) focus is on experimentation.

Figure II.4: Four Types of Scientific Psychology

The horizontal line in Figure II.4 represents the spectrum of approaches to experimental psychology, with observation of the internal workings of the human mind at one extreme and observation of external behavior at the other. The former approach, commonly called "cognitive science", is the only type of scientific psychology that retains close links with philosophy. With the goal of establishing scientific knowledge of the cognitive operations of the normal human mind, cognitive scientists (both philosophers and psychologists) do research in a wide variety of areas, ranging from brain science and "artificial intelligence" (the study of the relationship between computers and human thinking) to the science of perceptual mechanisms and speech patterns (i.e., linguistics). These areas have been explored by far too many influential scholars to mention here, though Karl Popper (1902-1994), John Eccles (1903-), Noam Chomsky (1928-), and Douglas Hofstadter (1945-) are particularly noteworthy because of their relevance to and influence on both psychology and philosophy. The studies of these and many other cognitive scientists, though interesting and valuable in their own right, are less relevant to our goals in this course than are other types of psychology.

At the opposite extreme to cognitive science is behaviorism. In his ground-breaking book, Behavior (1914), John B. Watson (1878-1958) proposes that psychology cannot become a science as long as it continues to be concerned with the "soul" (or with any other "inner" activity of the mind, for that matter). Science, as Kant had shown, requires sensible input from the external world, and the only input of this sort that is available to psychologists for observation is behavior. Watson and his younger contemporary, B.F. Skinner (who is primarily responsible for popularizing Watson's ideas) totally reject the use of introspection as a method of psychological data collection. Introspection only matters to the psychologist when it causes a person's behavior to change. The act of reporting on one's own introspections can therefore be included as part of the scientist's data only if it is regarded merely as "verbal behavior". But if a person introspects without letting his or her thoughts "show" in any way, then such introspection is entirely irrelevant to psychology.

Behaviorism is based on the fundamental (indeed, metaphysical) principle of "stimulus and response" as the basic mechanism for interpreting behavior. For human beings, just as much as for any other animals, behavior is entirely determined by stimuli from the environment. This assumption makes it possible to expand the scope of experimentation far beyond what was possible when psychologists limited themselves to assessing introspective reports from human beings. For psychologists are now free to study how behavior in general operates. In principle, a stimulus that evokes a certain response in a dog ought to function in more or less the same way for a human being. Skinner was so convinced of the power of stimulus and response that he believed intelligent psychologists could some day design a world wherein all stimuli would be controlled in such a way that everyone could live a happy life. His novel, Walden Two, provides an imaginative example of how such a psychologically-manipulated utopia might work.

Some cognitive and behavioral psychologists do attempt to apply the results of their scientific experiments to therapeutic issues, through various types of "behavior modification" techniques. But this is very much a secondary issue for most psychologists in these traditions. In the same way, psychologists who fall onto the vertical line (on Figure II.4) tend to treat therapeutic issues as the main emphasis of their psychological research; the discovery of objective truths through laboratory experimentation is, at best, a secondary concern. The spectrum of therapeutic approaches is just as diverse as in experimental psychology, ranging here from the heights of an existential emphasis on the radically free and immediate character of a person's activity to the depths of an analytic emphasis on the hidden, unconscious causes that determine a person's behavior.

Depth psychology, as founded by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), will be the focus of our attention for much of this course, starting next week. For now I shall therefore merely state that this approach is characterized by the conviction that dreams are the key to discovering the unconscious roots of all psychological problems. Freud called his form of depth psychology "psychoanalysis" when applied in a therapeutic context. As we shall see, Freud's approach was based on the mechanistic, deterministic assumptions that were almost universally taken for granted by the medical profession in his day.

Two other influential depth psychologists were Alfred Adler (1870-1937), who developed an approach called "individual psychology", based on power issues, and Carl Jung (1875-1961), who synthesized Freud and Adler in an approach he called "analytic psychology". We shall not examine Adler's views in this course, because they have been much less influential than Freud's and Jung's. Jung's approach, by contrast, will occupy much of our attention later on, especially in Stages Two and Three.

At the other extreme to depth psychology lies "humanistic" or "existential" psychology. The former is the name given by Carl Rogers (1902-1987) to his method of "person-centered therapy". Rogers trained therapists to treat "clients" (a term that implies a business relationship, unlike "patients", which implies the person is sick) as free and independent human beings who are responsible for making their own decisions in life. Therapists are not to bring any preconceived theories into the therapeutic relationship; rather, they are merely to act like mirrors, reflecting the client's own words and attitudes back in a form that enables the person to view them more objectively and hence, make more intelligent decisions. Giving advice, or imposing some preconceived theory onto the client, is the unforgivable sin of this form of therapy.

Quite a different form of humanistic/existential psychology is the "gestalt" approach, originated by Fritz and Laura Perls. Gestalt psychology aims to see a person's life as a whole. In order to understand any given experience, we must not view it in isolation, but place it against the background of our entire life story. The web of interrelationships in the background of an event (i.e., the "context") is what gives definition and meaning to the main event in the foreground (i.e., the "figure"-"Gestalt" being the German word for "figure" or "shape"). To help clients become aware of the background, gestalt therapists use a "phenomenological" method, encouraging them to distinguish clearly between their basic awareness of perceptions (i.e., experience as such) and the judgments they make about their experiences. The goal is to encourage the client to become a self-supporting problem-solver, by gaining insight into his or her own life experiences, where "insight" is defined as seeing the pattern of the whole. In contrast to an "atomistic" approach to psychotherapy (i.e., one that divides experience into its constituent parts in order to analyze each one on its own), gestalt therapists view this "whole" as always being "more than the sum of the parts." In order to achieve their goal, therapists are more directive than in the client-centered approach: they actively engage with the client in a mutual search for meaningful interpretations of life experiences. Experimentation and new discovery are encouraged (within limits), and therapists are expected to be familiar with all other approaches to psychotherapy, making use of whichever method best fits each particular situation.

Of the many other types of psychotherapy (at least 250 types, according to Raymond Corsini [CPT 7]), most share the goal of helping people realize their own potential for personal growth. The "psychology of being" developed by Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) makes use of existentialist philosophy to study and interpret the function of "peak experiences" in the development of human creativity and personal growth. William Glasser's "reality therapy", Eric Berne's "transactional analysis", and Albert Ellis' "rational-emotive therapy" are just a few of the many examples that could be cited of recent approaches to psychotherapy that emphasize self-actualization and personal growth through increased awareness of human potential. That these approaches are not as obviously "scientific" as the experimental approaches is a criticism many of the more influential therapists have had to defend themselves against.

Corsini expresses the belief that some day all psychotherapies will be united into one all-encompassing system (CPT ix,10). This "dream of wholeness" in psychotherapy may prove to be an "impossible dream"; but it is nevertheless a dream worth dreaming. In Lectures 27 and 30, I shall offer some serious objections to the very idea of psychotherapy. Yet I am convinced that a prerequisite for constructing a better alternative is to come to a clear awareness of the logical patterns that determine the relationships between the therapies that have proven to be most influential over the past century. (The many other, minor therapies can then be regarded as off-shoots of these, combinations of several, etc.) Corsini himself has made a first step in this direction by presenting clear summaries of the twelve most influential 20th-Century psychotherapies.

By using the geometry of logic (see TP, Ch.12) as a basis for organizing Corsini's twelve choices, we can add a missing element of systematic coherence to Corsini's list. A complete, twelvefold map can be constructed on the basis of three levels of distinction between therapies focusing on: (1) nonrational (unconscious/emotional) [-] vs. rational (thinking/behaving) [+] aspects; (2) individual [-] vs. collective [+] interactions; and (3) directive [-], nondirective [+], or dialogical (directive and nondirective) [x] methods. Though slightly different from the distinction used for Figure II.4, this enables us to see clear connections between twelve major therapists:

Figure II.5: 12 Major Forms of Psychotherapy

Though somewhat speculative and in need of much further discussion in order to confirm this assignment of correlations, this diagram gives us a much needed map for navigating our way around the increasingly complex domain of psychotherapy.

Today I shall conclude by noting several serious problems suffered by experimental psychology. The first is that experimental psychologists often neglect the important difference between human behavior and the behavior of other animals. Experiments performed on animals are assumed to be more or less transferable into the human realm. Yet the behavior of animals is governed by instinct to a much larger degree than in the human species. This is a crucial point, because a scientist can obtain a more or less definite knowledge of how instinct operates for a given species and can then use this as a reliable means of interpreting the behavior of any particular specimen. In humans, by contrast, animal instinct is replaced by our reasoning power (including both logical thinking and emotive valuing). This makes our behavior virtually impossible to predict in any universally reliable way.

Experimental psychologists' conclusions can suffer from certain defects even when supported by research done on humans. Before mentioning two such difficulties, I'd like to tell you a little story. When I took an Introduction to Psychology class in college, my professor offered to give extra credit to anyone who participated in an experiment being done by some senior psychology majors. I volunteered and was asked to meet an older student at a specific time and place on campus. At the appointed time, he met me in a hallway outside a pair of small empty rooms, explaining that I would need to read a short article and then answer a simple questionnaire. We passed through the first room, where a workman was standing on a ladder painting the ceiling, and entered the second room. It was furnished only with a desk, a chair and a buzzer on the desk. After apologizing that we had to use these rooms where renovation was being done, asking me just to ignore the workman, the student told me to press the buzzer once when I finished reading the article and again when I finished answering the questionnaire.

The article was about a woman living in New York during the 1960s who was stabbed by a man in broad daylight and left wounded in an empty lot where many people could see her from their apartment windows. She screamed for help, but nobody came. Instead, her attacker returned, stabbed her again and ran away. Many people saw what was happening, but did nothing. This happened repeatedly over a period of about an hour, until the woman finally died, without any of the people nearby coming to her assistance. After reading about this sad case, I pressed the buzzer and began reading the questionnaire. The questions were based on this story, but I do not remember their exact content, because I never had a chance to finish answering them.

Not long after I started the questionnaire, there was a loud noise and a shout from the little room next door. The workman had apparently fallen off his ladder and seemed to be hurt. Immediately, I realized what was happening. The students had set this up as a "stimulus" to test whether or not I would "respond" with an offer to help. Realizing this, I asked myself whether I would rather have their statistics indicate that people are generally helpful or generally unhelpful. At the time, I was probably not the sort of person who would actually go out of my way to help a stranger; but not wanting their statistics to reflect this fact, I decided to go along with their ploy. I opened the door, saw the man (actually another student, in disguise) lying on the ground, and said in a concerned voice "Are you okay? Can I help?" The man stood up and assured me he was not badly hurt. I went back to the desk, but before I could continue working on the questionnaire, the student returned and told me the experiment was over.

This story typifies a deceptive double standard that plagues much experimental psychology: the stimulus-response principle was being applied to me, but apparently not to the experimenters. I was made to believe the questionnaire was the true focus of the students' experiment, when in fact they were observing my response to the "accident"; nobody ever asked why I responded the way I did. This illustrates two important (but questionable) assumptions made by many experimental psychologists (especially behaviorists): (1) in order to become truly scientific, psychology must look only at what the body does, ignoring the "soul" altogether; and (2) the psychologist knows more about what motivates our actions than we ourselves do. For a behaviorist, questions about my introspections (e.g., my mental rationale for offering to "help" the workman) would be irrelevant; the only important statistic is the fact that I responded to the stimulus in a specific way.

I never found out what conclusions were drawn from that experiment; but I'm confident that they would not have been very accurate as an assessment of people's real helpfulness. For a quality such as helpfulness must be rooted in the soul. Such an experiment could accurately report on the bare (and meaningless) fact of how many participants responded and how many did not. As long as experimental psychology limits itself to such statistical data, it can legitimately claim to be a full-fledged science. The problem is that many behaviorists attempt to go well beyond this limit and interpret the data in ways that are highly problematic, given their neglect of the soulfulness of all human activity. Such interpretations are where the double-standard of experimental psychology is most obvious and potentially very dangerous.

Throughout the remainder of this course, we shall have ample evidence that not all 20th-Century psychology has been so bleak. Depth psychologists have provided a much-needed balance for the extremes of behaviorism. They tend to go to the opposite extreme of focusing so much attention on the soul (regarded as the unconscious) that the scientific validity of their findings can be called into question. Moreover, they too sometimes fall for the fallacy of believing the therapist knows more about who the client is than the client does. Our examination of Freud's psychology next week will reveal how he believed it is possible to maintain a genuine scientific outlook, while still paying close attention to the "inner" life of those who came to him for help.

QUESTIONS/TOPICS FOR GROUP DISCUSSION

1. Make a list of the psychological benefits and dangers of religion.

2. Should we be blamed (i.e., are we responsible) for what happens in our dreams?

3. Discuss difficulties you are having (if any) in starting the dream diary project.

4. Share a strange experience you have had while sleeping (e.g., talking in your sleep, sleepwalking, seeing a ghost).