50 Psychology Classics (44 page)

Pavlov had a special soundproofed building created for his experiments because he found that external stimuli affected the ability to condition reflexes. In the same way, most of us cannot study a book if a movie is showing at the same time; and we find it hard to “get back into things” after a holiday or some
break from routine. As with the dogs, neuroses and psychoses occur as the result of extreme stimulation that cannot be properly incorporated into existing thinking and reactions.

The reactions of the dogs could not be predicted. Pavlov recalled that when one of Petrograd's famous floods swept through the experimental quarters, some dogs grew excited, others frightened, some withdrew. In the same way, he noted, we can never predict how a person will react emotionally to, for instance, a strong insult or the loss of a loved one. These reactions seemed to mirror the two common psychological reactions to shock recognized in both dogs and humans—neurasthenia (fatigue, withdrawing, immobilization) and hysteria (neurotic excitation).

With the last point, Pavlov's implication was that evolution has ensured that we cannot
not
react to a major event—we must take account of it some way. To eventually return to a state of stability, we have to incorporate what we have experienced. The phenomenon of “fight or flight” in the face of a challenge is the nervous system's manner of self-protection in the short term. In the longer term, the fact that we have had a reaction ensures that we can eventually return to a state of equilibrium with our environment.

Pavlov saw the cerebral cortex as a complicated switchboard in which groups of cells were responsible for different reflexes. There was always room for more reflexes to be created, but also capacity for existing ones to be altered. His dogs did have “automatic” characteristics, but at the same time their reflexes and reactions were changeable. The implication for humans? Although we live for the most part through habit or enculturation, we are in a position to change our behavior patterns. We are as susceptible to conditioning as any animal, yet at the same time we also have the ability to break our own patterns if they ultimately prove not to be in our interests. Via feedback from our environment we learn what are effective responses to life and what are not.

Pavlov's research had a major impact on the behavioral school of psychology, which holds that humans are little different to dogs in that we have predictable reactions to stimuli and can be conditioned into certain ways of behavior. For the hard-core behaviorist, the idea of free will is a myth—whatever inputs are made into a person will yield certain outputs in terms of attitudes or behaviors. Yet Pavlov's own observations seem to contradict this. For instance, he noted that that many of the dogs' reactions were
not
predictable. Even when conditioning had occurred, there was still room for canine personalities to be expressed. Given our much larger cerebral cortexes, how much more room for varied expression—or “responses to environment”—must we enjoy?

Conditioned Reflexes
has a very plodding, scientific style. Reflecting his love of empirical fact, order, and discipline, Pavlov did not allow much of his
personality to come through. Yet he was a fascinating figure. Although critical of communism, he flourished after the Bolshevik revolution, with Lenin handing down a decree that Pavlov's work was “of enormous significance to the working classes of the whole world.”

Given his distrust of the claims of the subject, it is ironic that the name Pavlov has come to be associated with psychology. His focus on measurable physiological reaction alone was almost the opposite approach of the Freudian immersion in “inner drives and wishes,” yet that focus enabled psychology to come to rest on harder scientific ground.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born in 1849 in Ryazan in central Russia, the oldest of 11 children, and his father was the village priest. His time at the University of St. Petersburg produced acclaimed work on the pancreatic nerves, and on receiving his degree in 1875 he continued his studies at the Imperial Medical Academy. There he gained a fellowship and later a position as professor of physiology. His doctorate concerned the centrifugal nerves of the heart
.

In 1890 Pavlov set up the physiology department of the Institute of Experimental Sciences in St. Petersburg, where he did most of his work on digestion and conditioned reflexes. He was in charge of a large team of mostly young scientists
.

His many honors included membership of the Russian Academy of Sciences, winning the 1904 Nobel Prize for medicine, and in 1915 being awarded France's Order of the Legion of Honor. His marriage to Seraphima (Sara) Vasilievna Karchevskaya, a teacher, in 1881 produced four children who lived past infancy, one of whom went on to become a physicist
.

Pavlov was still working in his laboratories when he died in 1936, at the age of 87
.

“Much of the constant effort you supposed to hold yourself together is actually unnecessary. You do not fall apart, go to pieces, or ‘act crazy,' if you let up on your deliberate holding back, forcing attention, constant ‘thinking' and active interference with the trends of your behavior. Instead, your experience begins to cohere and to organize into more meaningful wholes.”

“Some of us have no heart or no intuition, some have no legs to stand on, no genitals, no confidence, no eyes or ears.”

In a nutshell

Be alive every minute in your physical world. Listen to your body; don't live in abstractions.

In a similar vein
Milton Erickson
My Voice Will Go With You
(p 78)
Karen Horney
Our Inner Conflicts
(p 156)
R. D. Laing
The Divided Self
(p 186)
Abraham Maslow
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
(p 192)
Carl Rogers
On Becoming a Person
(p 238)

The Esalen Institute on the Californian coast at Big Sur was an epicenter of the 1960s social revolution. Literally “on the edge,” perched on steep hills high above the Pacific ocean, it attracted people who wanted to push the boundaries of the self and break free of society's constraints. Fritz Perls, a psychologist, arrived at Esalen in 1964. Having grown up in avantgarde Berlin and fled from Hitler's Germany to the United States, Esalen must have seemed like a spiritual home, and he spent much time there until his death in 1970.

Charismatic and sometimes cantankerous, Perls was one of the early West Coast personal development gurus. His philosophy was that the modern man or woman thinks too much, when they should be experiencing, feeling, doing; and his slogan “Lose your mind and come to your senses” chimed perfectly with the counter-culture.

Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality
, written with the brilliant radical Paul Goodman and a college professor and patient of Perls, Ralph Hefferline, became the manifesto of a new type of psychotherapy. Though he had trained in Freudian psychoanalysis, Perls had long since dispensed with the couch, instead finding that confrontational group sessions were often the best way of piercing a person's psychological “body armor” and letting their true, vibrant self out.

For a book about excited feeling,
Gestalt Therapy
can be a tedious read requiring a fair amount of concentration. Its purpose, however, was to lay out the theoretical basis for Gestalt therapy ideas. Its theme of shaking off the straitjackets of normal societal roles to live in the “here and now” made it a very confronting work. It is easy to forget how novel it would have seemed in 1950s America.

Have you ever seen those pictures where if you look one way you see a beautiful woman, but then from the same drawing an old hag appears? If so, you have had a gestalt or “aha!” experience. There is no exact English translation, but the German word
Gestalt
roughly means “shape” or “form,” or the wholeness of something. The Gestalt school of psychology (associated with figures such as Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Lewin, Kurt Goldstein, Lancelot Law Whyte, and Alfred Korzybski) showed that in experiments to do with visual perception, the brain always tries to “complete the picture” when
incomplete images are put before it. We are programmed to find a “figure” against a “ground” or background; that is, to give attention to one thing at the expense of another and find meaning amid a chaos of color and shape.

Perls took ideas from Gestalt psychology and fashioned from it his own form of therapy. He wanted to apply the idea of wholeness to personal well- being, and borrowed the notion that a person is always being shaped by a certain dominant need—the figure—and when this need is satisfied it drops back into the background—the ground—making way for another need. In this way all organisms regulate themselves, getting what they require for their survival.

The issue with human beings, however, is that our complexity can muddy the waters of the simple need-satisfaction equation. We can repress some needs and overemphasize others; or our idea of survival can get warped, so we believe we must maintain ourselves in a certain way, even if to an outsider what we are doing is stupid. Our dominant need becomes connected totally with our sense of self, but it is a self that it is no longer fluid or elastic, a neurotic self. It has stopped being aware.

In traditional Freudian analysis, the “doctor” tries to “understand” such a person by trying to delve into their mind, by treating them as an object. The Gestalt therapist, in contrast, appreciates the person as part of their environment. The mind, the body, the environment are all part of one consideration. Instead of psychology's tendency to break things down into pieces, Gestalt therapy apprehends the whole. In Perls' words: “[The] Gestalt outlook is the original, undistorted, natural approach to life; that is, to man's thinking, acting, feeling. The average person, having been raised in an atmosphere full of splits, has lost his Wholeness, his Integrity.”

Smell, touch, taste, hearing, and seeing are our “contact boundary” with the world. When someone has begun to think of themselves as an isolated object, they have ceased to be a sensing, contacting, excited being. Perls recognized how modern life, sitting in air-conditioned offices, anesthetizes us. We purposefully reduce our level of awareness to create a more ordered existence with no surprises. But what do people say on their deathbed? Not “I wish I had sought more security or earned more money,” but “I wish I had taken chances, done more things”—that is, had more contact with life.

Someone in genuine contact with their environment, Perls noted, is in a state of excitement. They are feeling, one way or another, all the time. Neurotics, in contrast, instead of risking real contact with the world, withdraw into the inner world they know, and do not grow. Healthy people engage with life: “eating and food-getting, loving and making love, aggressing, conflicting, communicating, perceiving, learning,” and so on.

The opposite of contact is “confluence,” acting out of what you have been taught to do, out of habit, or seeing things as you “should” be seeing them. Perls gives the example of someone standing in a gallery looking at a work of modern art. He feels he is directly perceiving the work, when in fact “he is actually in contact with the art critic of his favorite journal.” People grow into the world with heavy expectations to change their basic nature into something they are not, and this gap between our biological nature and society leads to holes in the personality: “Some of us have no heart or no intuition, some have no legs to stand on, no genitals, no confidence, no eyes or ears,” Perls would rather shockingly tell his groups. In Gestalt therapy, people claimed their missing parts, and in the process got back lost aggression or sensitivity.