Koch, S. (1969). Psychology cannot be a coherent science. Psychology Today, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 14; 64-68.

Psychology cannot be a coherent science

by Sigmund Koch

Whether as a "science" or any kind of coherent discipline devoted to the empirical study of man, psychology has been misconceived. This is no light matter for me to confess after a 30-year career given to exploration of the prospects and conditions for psychology becoming a significant enterprise.

But the massive 100-year effort to erect a discipline given to the positive study of man can hardly be counted a triumph. Here and there the effort has turned up a germane fact, or thrown off a spark of insight, but these victories have had an accidental relation to the programs believed to inspire them, and their sum total over time is heavily overbalanced by the pseudo-knowledge that has proliferated.

The idolatry of science in our age has insured that this phony knowledge be taken seriously by people everywhere -even by sensitive, creative or sophisticated people. Such "knowledge," when assimilated, is no neutral addition to a person's furniture of confusions. It has an awesome capacity to bias the deepest attitudes of man toward Man, to polarize sensibility.

Indeed, the pooled pseudo-knowledge that is much of psychology can be seen as a congeries of alternate -and exceedingly simple- images, around each of which one finds a dense, scholastic cluster of supportive research, theorizing and methodological rhetoric.

If one is drawn by unassailable scientific argument to the conclusion that man is cockroach, rat or dog, that makes a difference. It also makes a difference when one achieves ultimate certitude that man is a telephone exchange, a servo-mechanism, a binary digital computer, a reward-seeking-vector, a hyphen within a S-R process, a stimulation-maximizer, a food, sex, or libido energy-converter, a utilities-maximizing game player, a status-seeker, a mutual ego-titillator, a mutual emotional (or actual) masturbator. And on and on.

If the violence of my apostasy alarms the reader into thinking that I am about to transfer to the humanities, let me relieve him forthwith. In my jaundiced view, the role of the humanities in the teaching of the humanities has not in our century been especially more hygienic than the role of psychology. This has been due partly to direct contagion from the sciences: too many humanists have contracted anywhere from a creeping to a rabid scientism from their abhorred colleagues in the sciences. In a more fundamental way pervasive circumstances in culture and history have inflicted the same pathology upon all fields of inquiry.

My findings over the years suggest that while symptoms may vary, one syndrome is widely evident in modern scholarship. I call it ameaningful thinking. The prefix has the same force as the a in words like amoral.

Ameaningful thought or inquiry regards knowledge as the result of "processing" rather than discovery. It presumes that knowledge is an almost automatic result of a gimmickry, an assembly line, a methodology. It assumes that inquiring action is so rigidly and fully regulated by rule that in its conception of inquiry it often allows the rules totally to displace their human users. Presuming as it does that knowledge is generated by processing, its conception of knowledge is fictionalistic, conventionalistic. So strongly does it see knowledge under such aspects that at times it seems to suppose the object of inquiry to be an ungainly and annoying irrelevance. Detail, structure, quiddity are obliterated. Objects of knowledge become caricatures, if not faceless, and thus they lose reality. The world, or any given part of it, is not felt fully or passionately and is perceived as devoid of objective value. In extreme forms, ameaningful thought becomes obsessive and magical.

On the other hand, meaningful thinking involves a direct perception of unveiled, vivid relations that seem to spring from the quiddities, particularities of the objects of thought, the (Continued on page 64.) problem situations that form the occasions for thought. There is an organic determination of the form and substance of thought by the properties of the object, the terms of the problem. And these are real in the fullest, most vivid, electric, undeniable way. The mind caresses, flows joyously into, over, around, the relational matrix defined by the problem, the object. There is merging of person and object or problem. It is a fair descriptive generalization to say that meaningful thinking is ontologistic in some primitive, accepting, artless, unselfconscious sense.

For any population, the relative incidence of meaningful or ameaningful thinking will be largely determined by the values that the group places upon either. Such values will of course, be embedded in the ideologies or rationales of knowledge-seeking behavior dominant in the group and will pervade all institutions and agencies that influence intellectual or scholarly style, habit and sensibility.

Throughout the recent history of the sciences, humanities, and (increasingly) the arts, there is lush and harrowing evidence of the play of ameaningful thinking. But nowhere is this syndrome so richly and purely exhibited as in those so-called sciences that were created by fiat towards the end of the 19th Century: psychology and the social sciences.

Back in 1935, shortly after having been appalled and insulted by my first few undergraduate courses in psychology, I came upon a book by Grace Adams, Psychology: Science or Superstition? The idea that psychology was a congeries of weird insularities was already a cliché, but Grace Adams developed this cliché in so sprightly and compelling a fashion that the field came through to me as, in some perverse way, inviting. So massive an absurdity cried out for redress. Moreover, an absurdity so massive could hardly hold its own against a little clear thinking. Or, so I naively thought.

I did not know then that Clark Hull, the most influential of the neobehaviorists, felt much the same. In one of his early (1935) theoretical papers, "The Conflicting Psychologies of Learning -A Way Out," Hull refers to the Adams book in these words:

"... she points out what we all know too well -that among psychologists there is not only a bewilderingly large diversity of opinion, but that we are divided into sects, too many of which show emotional and other signs of religious fervor. This emotionalism and this inability to progress materially toward agreement obviously do not square with the ideals of objectivity and certainty which we associate with scientific investigation; they are on the other hand, more than a little characteristic of metaphysical and theological controversy. Such a situation leads to the suspicion that we have not yet cast off the unfortunate influences of our early associations with metaphysicians. Somehow we have permitted ourselves to fall into essentially unscientific practices."

Hull saw the persisting disagreements among psychologists as centered more on theory than on the results of experiment. His thesis was that there ought not to be such a paradoxical disparity between scientific experiment and scientific theory -that the disparity would not exist if the theory were truly scientific. In this paper, as in others, Hull discussed the "essentials of sound scientific theory" which of course, recapitulated the schema of a hypothetico-deductive system. He invited contending theorists to axiomize their nebulous thoughts and -in the event that derivations diverging from Hull's ensued- that they arbitrate their differences in the laboratory.

It is now 35 years later, and the theory that Hull so diligently contrived as his answer to the massive absurdity of the "psychologies" is becoming a dim memory even to the few who still work within its tradition. And every judgment, every hope, registered in the remarks of Hull just quoted has been cruelly -indeed, extravagantly- thwarted by history. We are still divided into sects, "many of which show emotional and other signs of religious fervor," but perhaps thrice as many.

Prior to the late 19th Century, there are no precedents in the history of ideas for creating great new fields of knowledge by edict. Sciences won their way to independence by achieving enough knowledge to become sciences. By the late 19th century, these justly discriminated fields of science had given such food to man's cognitive and material hungers as to make his appetite insatiable. At the same time, inquiry into the nature and trend of science itself began to focus into an apparently wholesome Victorian vision: that of a totally orderly universe, totally open to the methods of science, and a totally orderly science, totally open to the stratagems -and wants- of man. It was against this background that psychology was stipulated into life.

At the time of its inception, psychology was unique in the extent to which its institutionalization preceded its content and its methods preceded its problem. Never had thinkers been given so sharply specified an invitation to create, or been so harried by social wish, cultural optimism, and extrinsic prescription into the advance scheduling of ways and means.

The 19th Century program for a science of psychology seems rational enough. It asks man to entertain a huge and wholly open hypothesis: Can the methods of natural science be adapted to the backward studies of man and society: to the analysis of man's experiences, his actions, his artifacts, his values, his institutions, his history, his future?

To entertain such a hypothesis responsibly is no light matter. Madhouses have been populated by responses to lighter intellectual burdens.

No wonder that many inheritors of this awesome challenge have protected themselves from its ravages by reinterpreting the hypothesis as an a priori truth. For close to a century now, many psychologists have seemed to suppose that the methods of natural science are totally specifiable and specified; that the applicability of these methods to social and human events is not only an established fact but that no knowledge is worth taking seriously unless it is based on inquiries saturated with the iconology of science. Thus, from the beginning, respectability held more glamor than insight, caution than curiosity, feasibility than fidelity. The stipulation that psychology be adequate to science outweighed the commitment that it be adequate to man.

The 100-year course of "scientific" psychology can now be seen to be a succession of changing doctrines about what to emulate in the natural sciences -especially physics. Each such strategic doctrine was entertained not as conditional upon its (Continued on page 66.) cognitive fruits but functioned rather as a security fetish bringing assurance to the psychologist and hopefully the world, that he was a scientist. The broad role-playing paradigms regulating 19th Century experimental psychology, and the various phases of behaviorism, succeeded each other not by virtue of differential productivity, but rather because of the dawning recognition that significant problems and segments of subject matter were being evaded -or because of boredom with the old paradigm.

As we proceed through eras of "classical" behaviorism, neo-behaviorism, deflated neo-behaviorism, "liberalized" neo-behaviorism, "subjective" neo-behaviorism, we see successive efforts to salvage an epistemological judgment that condemns an entire "science" to evading, or, at best, misphrasing its subject matter in the interest of enforcing an apparent objectivity. Those who argue that the behaviorisms have nevertheless been richly productive of research should be reminded that research is not knowledge.

Consider the problem of "learning," which was the central empirical area of all that effort. Consider the hundreds of theoretical formulations, rational equations, mathematical models of the learning process that have accrued; the thousands of research studies. And now consider that there is still no wide agreement on the empirical conditions under which learning takes place, or even on the definition of learning and its relations to other psychological processes or phenomena. Consider also that after all this scientistic effort our actual insight into the learning process -reflected in every humanly important context to which learning is relevant -has not improved on jot.

The idea that psychology -like the natural sciences on which it is modeled- is a cumulative or progressive discipline is simply not borne out by its history. Indeed, the hard knowledge gained by one generation typically disenfranchises the theoretical fictions of the last. Psychology's larger generalizations are not specified and refined over time and effort. They are merely replaced. Throughout psychology's history as "science," the hard knowledge it has deposited has been uniformly negative. Examples of this are myriad; space will permit me to develop only one.

Karl Lashley in 1920 begins a research program designed to provide the physiological underpinning of Watsonian conditioning theory. To his astonishment, he soon runs into findings utterly at variance with Watsonian or any other then imaginable version of associationism. After 30 years of unrelenting, often brilliant pursuit of the problems suggested by these early findings, we see him concluding:

"This series has yielded a good bit of information about what and where the memory trace is not. It has discovered nothing of the real nature of the engram. I sometimes feel, in reviewing the evidence on the localization of the memory trace, that the necessary conclusion is that learning just is not possible." Symposium of the Society for Experimental Biology, 1950, 4, pp. 454-482.

Subsequent developments in biological psychology, made possible in the last 20 years by powerful electrophysiological and other techniques, have had a similar force. As a result of dense piling up of particulate evidence on such matters as graded excitation processes, central feedback to the receptors, "vertical" organization of brain process, etc., the entire earlier history of psycho-physiological theorizing can be seen as hopelessly simplistic. But again, the main general contribution is negative knowledge. Indeed, one reading of this knowledge is that the established complexity of the central nervous system is such as to make biological explanation of psychological process an even more remote prospect than Lashley tended to suggest.

Other examples could be derived from the history of Gestalt psychology in its bearing on the critique of Wundtian experimental psychology, structuralism, and, later on, behaviorism; the import of ethological research as a corrective to the unbridled environmentalism of pre-1950 behavior theory and "comparative" psychology; the twists and turns in the allegiances commanded by the diverse behavioristic theories of learning; the complex history of conceptual realignments among general personality theories, and their subdoctrines concerning psychotherapy.

In some of the foregoing cases -especially biological psychology, the Gestalt contribution to perception, and ethology- there are at least grounds for believing that particular findings are of permanent value. But even these findings give us no purchase on any truly science-like general analysis of the events in their domain. They give us mainly a means for destroying older and misconceived analyses.

A century and a quarter ago, John Stuart Mill argued that the backward state of the social sciences could be remedied only by applying to them the methods of physical science, "duly extended, and generalized." His strategy has now been applied in billions of man-hours of research, ardent theoretical thinking, scholarship, writing, planning and administration in hundreds of laboratories by thousands of investigators. (There are over 25,000 members of the American Psychological Association alone.) It has generated a vast literature and attracted generous support. Federal sources alone provided $326 million for "social science" research in 1967.

The test of the Millian hypothesis has not been a sleazy one. In my estimation, the hypothesis has been fulsomely disconfirmed. I think it by this time utterly and finally clear that psychology cannot be a coherent science, or indeed a coherent field of scholarship, in any specifiable sense of coherence that can bear upon a field of inquiry. It can certainly not expect to become theoretically coherent; in fact, it is now clear that no large subdivision of inquiry, including physics, can be.

As for the subject matter of psychology, it is difficult to see how it could ever have been thought to be a coherent one under any definition of the presumptive "science" -whether in terms of mind, consciousness, experience, behavior, or, indeed, molecule aggregates or transistor circuits. Anything so awesome as the total domain comprised by the functioning of all organisms can hardly be thought the subject matter of a coherent discipline.

But what about "science"? Are the bits and pieces into which psychology falls, in this account, science or something else? The core meaning of the word "science" has become connected with a special analytical pattern emerging first in classical modern astronomy, achieving more distinct fruition in Newtonian mechanics and undergoing further differentiation in post-classical physics. [p. 67] Though this analytic pattern has yet to be successfully explicated, no one doubts that it has been implicit in the skills of great physicists. And there is reason to believe the pattern is applicable in aspects of the biological sciences. Whatever the many details that resist specification, this pattern involves the disembedding from a domain of phenomena of a small family of variables that demarcate important aspects of the domain's structure -when the domain is considered as an idealized, monetary static system. Moreover, these variables, by virtue of appropriate internal relations, can be ordered to a mathematical or formal system of correctly describing changes in selected aspects of the system as a function of time and/or system changes, describable as alterations of the "values" of specified variables. To disembed a family of variables having such properties is no mean feat, even in rather simple natural systems (those, for example, constitutive of pressure-volume relations of a gas), having a highly "closed" character.

There is currently much appreciation of some such dimension as "closed-openness" or "weakness-strength" of their boundary conditions (thus, experimental isolability). Nevertheless, insufficient concern has been given to the strong chance that at some critical point of system-openness, boundary-weakness, or mere internal complexity, the definitive analytic pattern may no longer apply. While Ludwig von Bertalanffy and other "systems theorists" have spelled out certain implications for biology that stem from the openness of animate systems, they tend to assume that the empyrean must contain mathematical or logical methods suitable for the analysis of systems of any degree of openness or complexity. I do not think even the empyrean to be that well stocked. Nevertheless, biological psychology is perhaps the one area in which some approximation of the analytic pattern of science can be fruitfully applied.

The 100-year history of "scientific psychology" has proved that most other domains that psychologists have sought to order in the name of "science," and through simulations of the analytic pattern definitive of science, simply do not and can not meet the conditions for the meaningful application of this analytic pattern.

When I say that designation as "science" only vitiates and distorts many legitimate and important domains of psychological study, it is well to understand what I am not saying. I am not saying that psychological studies should not be empirical, should not strive towards the rational classification of observed events, should not essay shrewd, though-minded, and differentiated analyses of the interdependence among significant events. I am not saying that statistical and mathematical methods are inapplicable everywhere. I am not saying that no subfields of psychology can be regarded as parts of science.

I am saying that in many fields close to the heart of the psychological studies, such concepts as "law," "experiment," "measurement," "variable," "control," and "theory" do not behave as their homonyms do in the established sciences. Thus the term "science" cannot properly be applied to perception, cognition, motivation, learning, social psychology, psychopathology, personology, esthetics, the study of creativity or the empirical study of phenomena relevant to domains of the extant humanities. To persist in applying this highly charged metaphor is to shackle these fields with highly unrealistic expectations; the inevitable heuristic effect is the enaction of imitation science.

As the beginning of a therapeutic humility, we might re-christen psychology and speak instead of the psychological studies. The current Departments of Psychology should be called Departments of Psychological Studies. Students should no longer be tricked by a terminological rhetoric into belief that they are studying a single discipline or any set of specialties that can be rendered coherent, even in principle.

There are stronger proposals. William McDougall firmly believed that psychological study was inappropriate for undergraduates. As early as 1942, Heinrich Klüver was cheerfully anticipating "the impending dismembering of psychology."

The psychological studies already range, as they must, over an immense and disorderly spectrum of human activity and experience. We might well benefit from spin-offs to other disciplines. Much of what is solid, I tend to think, could best be pursued in association with the germane scientific and humanistic disciplines. Biological psychology could only profit by incorporation within biology. Psycholinguistics should certainly be happening within linguistics. Even now, broad ranges of the psychological studies, as I conceive them -the empirical analysis of art, psychological aspects of history and philosophy, empirical analysis of inquiry- are almost completely bypassed by the psychological studies as they currently exist, and are pursued, when at all, only in the humanities.

Some will think that my analysis of the condition of psychology has focused on behavioral science, and neglected trends in psychology that have fed the humanities. They will think of the psychoanalytic or "depth" psychologies, the return of some to forms of experientialism, the embracement by others of existential alternatives to a behaviorist epistemology, the emergence even of a large grouping called "humanistic psychology."

The depth psychologies, though they arose from a different tradition than did academic psychology, still were a response to a similar configuration of forces in 19th Century culture, and they contain in their very conception assumptions as ameaningful as those at the roots of academic psychology. And humanists characteristically turn to the depth psychologies when they are in search of psychological guidance.

Appreciable numbers of psychologists -clinical psychologists and others involved in a human subject matter- began to flee from behaviorism in the mid '50s. The bases of their protests were varied, and there was at least some diversity in their search for a more significant professional commitment. It was at about this time that Abraham Maslow, who had long complained about the "means-centeredness" and scientism of psychology, was discovering the apparent promise of existentialism and calling for a "third force" in psychology. Such a group -calling themselves "humanistic psychologists"- soon emerged.

However, I caught up with the "humanistic psychologists" last fall at the annual American Psychological Association meeting in San Francisco. Here scholarly exposition must give way to reportage. On my arrival at the Fairmont Hotel, I found in its Victorian lobby a pullulating mass of [p. 68] character, mainly young, dressed in the assorted output of the Carnaby Streets, the sari sweat-shops, the micro-mini makers and the love-bead stringers of the world. A bit of investigation established that these were members of the Society For Humanistic Psychology, which had been holding its own pre-convention for two days. I learned further that the Society now has some 1,500 members and that there are no professional requirements for membership. The humanistic fervor of the group has been channeled into one activity, variously designated as group therapy, T-group therapy, sensitivity group therapy, syntectics, etc. I had known of the proliferation of forms of group therapy, but had not known that the whole energy of formal "humanistic psychology" is now given to its pursuit.

Before the humanists' own convention disbanded, I did wander into one of their sessions of group-therapy training films. It was confusing. For some reason, about 70 young humanists, mainly ladies were lying on the floor in an intertwined and palpating mass, quite oblivious of the film (which demonstrated role-playing by two middle-aged and somewhat nasal therapists; they were acting out a conflict between a husband who wanted to go to the movies and a wife who claimed esthetic anaesthesia on account of a runny nose). With curiosity thus reinforced, I attended all the humanists' activities that I could at the APA Convention proper. It was not easy because every humanistic audience spilled over into the corridors, unlike the sullen, spare audiences at the non-humanistic events.

By far the largest audience showed up at a symposium in which Paul Bindrim, the originator of "nude-marathon group therapy," spoke and showed a film. Reprints of a magazine report on Bindrim's "break-through" were made available. Bindrim had wondered whether what he calls a man's "tower of clothes" is not only a safeguard for privacy but a self-imposed constraint to keep out people he fears. If so, a man who disrobed physically might be better able to disrobe emotionally. The modest Mr. Bindrim refuses to take sole credit for this hypothesis and wishes to share it with Abraham Maslow. Dr. Maslow had speculated that with nudity in groups, "people would go away more spontaneous, less guarded, less defensive, not only about the shape of their behinds, but freer and more innocent about their minds as well."

Bindrim's methods, for the most part, are the standard devices of group theory. He was enthusiastic at the symposium, however, about a therapeutic intervention of his own inspired coinage that he calls "crotch-eyeballing." The crotch, he notes, is the focus of many hang-ups. In particular, three classes: (1) aftermath difficulties of toilet training; (2) masturbation guilts; (3) stresses of adult sexuality. Why not blast all this pathology at once! Thus two group members aid in (as Bindrim says) the "spread-eagling" of a third member and the entire company is instructed to stare unrelentingly and for a good long interval at the offending target area. Each group member is given an opportunity to benefit from this refreshing psychic boost. Scientist that he is, Bindrim is unwilling to make a decisive assessment of the benefits until more data are in. But he is encouraged.

Admittedly, Bindrim's is only one of many approaches in group therapy. But all these methods are based on one fundamental assumption: that total psychic transparency - total self-exposure - has therapeutic and growth-releasing potential. More generally, they presuppose an ultimate theory of man as socius: man as an undifferentiated and diffused region in a social space inhabited concurrently by all other men thus diffused. Every technique, manipulative gimmick, cherished and wielded by the lovable, shaggy workers in this field is selected for its efficacy for such an end.

This entire, far-flung "human potential" movement is a threat to human dignity. It challenges any conception of the person that would make life worth living, in a degree far in excess of behaviorism. Yet its message is surprisingly akin to that of behaviorism. The "human potential" movement obliterates the content and boundary of the self by transporting it out of the organism -not merely to its periphery, but right out into public, social space. The force of behaviorism is merely to legislate the inner life out of existence for science, while allowing the citizen to entertain the illusion, perhaps even the reality, of having one. Even Skinner gallantly acknowledges a world of "private stimulation."

The "human potentialists," however, are saying in effect that a world of private stimulations is unhealthy. They generate a militant rhetoric of anti-rigor and are derisive about the "up-tight," whether in scholarship or life. But as fix it men to the up-hung, they have a passion for the unending collection and elaboration of group engineering methods. They have a barrel of them for every type of hang-up. Have hope!

The moral and logic of the foregoing vignette are too obvious. "Humanistic psychology" started as a revolt against ameaning -against nearly a century of constraint by a prejudged Millian hypothesis and 50 years of reductive behaviorism. In no time at all it achieved a conception of human nature so gross as to make behaviorism seem a form of Victorian sentimentality -which perhaps it was. We have come farther than full circle. The resources of ameaning are formidable!

I wish I could offer a constructive and merry coda. I cannot. I am boxed by my own version of the truth. We are, I think, at a grave impasse in the history of scholarship -indeed the history of intelligence. I am sanguine enough to believe it a temporary one. But I have no recipe for its removal.

Students everywhere sense this impasse. Their dissidence is their response to the entrenched ameaning about them. Their dissidence is our hope. But they, who know not what they do, cannot tell us what to do.

We must do what we can. We who are psychologists or humanists must become for a while not psychologists or humanists, but men. Let the teaching of the psychological studies and the humanities be a matter of men exploring the meanings of human experience, actions, and artifacts at their most value-charged reaches, among men. Let the teacher be wiser, more able than the student to discriminate finely and value precisely within important segments of human reality. Let him be admirable in that sense.

As for the relations between the psychological studies and the humanities, it should be more like an identity than any other type of connection. The central psychological task is to disembed subtle relational unities within the flux of experience. That, too, is the central task of the humanist. Let each psychologist reconstruct his own humanity.