The Biological Approach to Psychology

Lashley's rejection of behaviorism involved not only a disavowal of the reflex theory, but also an equally strong denial of the importance of environmental influences on behavior. The anti-environmentalist emphasis of his argument is especially clear in his exchange of views with Walter S. Hunter in the Journal of General Psychology.

In 1930, Hunter published a criticism of Lashley's concept of cerebral equipotentiality, in which he claimed that Lashley's data did not demand a new theory of neural activity but rather conformed to the reflex arc theory. The central issue was whether behavior was peripherally or centrally controlled; with the behaviorists, Hunter argued that environmental stimuli, acting through the senses, determined behavior, while Lashley claimed that the central nervous system acted independently of the environment. Citing a great deal of evidence to prove that sensory stimulation controlled the various habits that Lashley's rats displayed, Hunter wrote:

In 1940, Chauncey McKinley Louttit (1901–1956), a clinical psychologist from Indiana University, sought and received a commission from the U.S. Navy. As the navy's first psychologist, he hoped that war work would provide a way out of his professional frustrations. Louttit had done much to advance the cause of clinical psychology during the 1930s and was eager to broaden his already extensive networks. The author of a standard textbook in the field, published in 1936, he was involved in the founding of the American Association for Applied Psychology in 1937 and was serving as executive secretary of the group.

Louttit, trained as a comparative psychologist under Robert Yerkes in the late 1920s, was ambivalent about making a career in clinical psychology and entered the field reluctantly after graduate school as a temporary employment expedient. His career illustrates the marginal status of clinical psychology before World War II.

Louttit's first paid employment in psychology prefigured his later career. After receiving his bachelor's degree from Hobart College in 1925, he became an assistant to Stanley D. Porteus, director of research at the Vineland Training School for the Feebleminded, in New Jersey. Earlier, under Henry H. Goddard, Vineland had become one of the first sites for the use of psychological tests for the diagnosis and treatment of mental problems. After several months, Porteus recommended Louttit to Robert Yerkes for a graduate assistantship at Yale. The timing was fortunate.

When Lashley arrived at the University of Chicago in 1929, he associated himself with a group of scientists whose work was permeated with the hope for human betterment. He had been recruited to the department of psychology at Chicago in order to help advance the program in “psycho-neurology,” the integration of psychology and biology envisioned by Herrick and his colleagues. While Lashley supported the American school's goal of unifying the sciences of brain and behavior, he became deeply opposed to their Progressive social ideals. He adopted their general embryological perspective, and Child's gradient theory in particular, but consistently rejected the implications of progress that were supposed to go along with it.

Lashley and Embryology

Lashley's use of the embryological model in his own work correlating brain function and behavior did not spring up instantaneously upon his arrival in Chicago. As early as 1917 he had been self-consciously borrowing terms from that field. References to Child's gradient theory, however, began to appear in Lashley's work only in 1926 and continued until 1935, when Lashley left Chicago for Harvard.

In the summer of 1943 a paperback book entitled Psychology for the Fighting Man appeared in U.S. bookstores and Allied post exchanges around the world. The pocket-sized Penguin edition, costing twenty-five cents, joined a list of books aimed at the wartime mass market, both military and civilian. Directed to “the fighting man himself,” the volume adopted a conversational tone in explaining “what you should know about yourself and others.”

From its bright red cover to its snappy chapter titles, Psychology for the Fighting Man was designed to capture the attention of the average reader. The twenty short chapters were written to stand individually and could be read in any order. The topics ranged across the entire spectrum of contemporary psychology, from motivation (“Morale”) to sensation and perception (“Sight as a Weapon”), from personnel selection (“The Right Soldier in the Right Job”) to social and cultural psychology (“Differences among Races and Peoples”).

Psychology for the Fighting Man became a bestseller, with nearly 400,000 copies in circulation by the end of the war. The book was reviewed widely upon publication. The press was positive, if somewhat bland, in its evaluations. The New York Times Book Review called it “a why-you-behave-as-you-do sort of a book, scientifically accurate, militarily correct and keyed to interest men of action whether colonels or corporals or anyone literate enough to read a newspaper.” Psychologists gave it high praise and tended to find their own prejudices confirmed in its pages.

As psychology boomed in America during the 1950s Edwin Boring was flourishing. He continued working his usual schedule after reaching normal retirement age at the beginning of the decade and finally achieved some measure of personal satisfaction in his professional accomplishments. He had found an important role for himself as psychology's great communicator.

Within the profession, Boring continued to add his voice to discussions about psychology's past, present, and future. He was called upon to provide counsel and advice to the American Psychological Association on important matters of policy and procedure. For instance, in 1954, at the height of the hysteria over Communist subversion whipped up by Senator Joseph McCarthy, Boring was appointed chair of the APA Committee on Freedom of Enquiry, which was charged with the task of exploring ways to protect academic freedom.

In 1955 the American Psychological Association launched a new journal devoted to book reviews. It was christened Contemporary Psychology and Boring served as editor. He sought a cosmopolitan style modeled after the New Yorker or the Saturday Review. Known as CP (in a sly play on the well-known abbreviation for the Communist Party), the new bimonthly journal provided a platform for its editor to pronounce on all things psychological in a column entitled “CP Speaks.”

The journal was an immediate success. In addition to providing timely and indepth reviews of the burgeoning literature of psychology, it fostered discussion of professional as well as technical issues.

The Rise of the Laboratory

In Lashley's neuropsychology, the laboratory, as opposed to the clinic or the field, was not simply the privileged site of knowledge production; it was the only source of reliable psychological fact. Lashley and his students cared little for the applied aspects of their discipline, not because they lacked interest in social control, but because for them the laboratory served as a substitute for society. Within its walls, they created a place where any social situation that was of concern could be simulated. By subsuming of all other aspects of life, the laboratory achieved preeminence in Lashley's neuropsychology.

The preeminence of the laboratory in Lashley's science had three main consequences for the production of psychological knowledge. First, anything that could not be investigated in a laboratory was effectively stricken from the scientific record. What couldn't be studied within the laboratory walls wasn't science. Much of human psychology, consequently, was either excluded or redefined to fit inside a laboratory. Second, because experimentation with humans was strictly limited, the analogy between human beings and animals – particularly rats – took on a heightened significance and validity. Humans and the “lower” organisms were entirely comparable; any suggestion of a qualitative leap, of progress in evolution, was denied.

Prologue

Since Lashley's death in 1958, historians of psychology have done little to modify his own assessment of the history of psychology and his role in it. They imply that in so highly technical a field as neuropsychology, the aim of which is to describe the neural basis of consciousness, there is room only for the most disinterested of truth-seekers. That is certainly what Lashley considered himself, and historians have not challenged his portrayal. Lashley has become a symbol to psychologists of a perfectly neutral scientist. He was, according to himself and others, led to his conclusions purely by induction from his experimental results; free of preconceptions, he never hesitated to tear down any theory, including his own. Indeed, after his brief early endorsement of behaviorism, he never became an ardent follower of any psychological movement, preferring to point out their weaknesses and their conflicts with what he considered the facts. From the mid-1920s onward, Lashley rejected a collection of theories, and by the 1950s he was rejecting the notion that any theory could ever explain the complexities of psychology.

Lashley's opposition to theory has become legendary among psychologists. He himself stressed it in his papers and addresses – writing, for example, that “[a]lways the question, How? punctures the bubble of theory, and the answer is to be sought in analysis and ever more analysis.”

Whether by choice or by chance, psychologists at Harvard University have been making headlines for more than a century. Beginning with William James, author of The Principles of Psychology (1890), America's oldest academic institution has harbored a succession of prominent and controversial figures. James, credited with starting the first psychological laboratory in the country, lost faith in the emerging discipline as it became preoccupied with the experimental method in the production of new knowledge. Before abandoning psychology for philosophy, however, he arranged for a major expansion of the Harvard laboratory, including the importation of experimental Hugo Münsterberg from Germany to direct it. Münsterberg, who was hired in 1892 as a representative of the pure research ideal, proved to have equally strong convictions about the importance of applied psychology and became a highly visible proponent of the social utility of psychological knowledge. During the First World War, Münsterberg's outspoken views on the superiority of German culture made him a lightning rod for criticism, and his loyalty was called into question. In 1916, a few months before the United States entered the war, a stroke killed him while he was delivering a public lecture.

Münsterberg's eventual successor was Edwin G. Boring, who became director of the laboratory in 1924 and set out to restore the primacy of experimental work in psychology, at Harvard and elsewhere. Like his predecessors, he became one of America's best-known psychologists.

Intelligence Testing and the Machine Analogy

Hull's conflict with Lashley took place on three levels. On the most obvious level, theirs was a dispute about the structure and function of the nervous system. Lashley believed the brain functioned as an equipotential system, as a whole, and that a certain amount of brain tissue was necessary, regardless of its location, for proper functioning. For Hull, the nervous system was a mosaic of discrete connections between stimulus and response, each particular connection activated by an impinging stimulus.

On a disciplinary level, they clashed about the proper relationship of psychology to the other sciences: for Lashley, psychology was completely reducible to the biology of the brain and closely connected to neurology and embryology. But Hull believed that psychology was the most basic of the social sciences and should work toward their unification, without reference to the “molecular” sciences. And on the most basic level, they were divided on the issue of the relative importance of heredity and environment in determining behavior.

In May 1945, as the war was entering its final stages, Harvard president James Bryant Conant appointed a blue-ribbon panel to advise him on how to cope with the chaotic situation in psychology at the university. Like a set of competing fiefdoms, Harvard psychology was divided among several powerful figures and scattered across a number of administrative units. Christened the University Commission to Advise on the Future of Psychology at Harvard, the twelve-member group was headed by Rockefeller Foundation executive Alan Gregg, a physician, and included a number of prominent educators and psychologists. Rather than focus exclusively on the Harvard case, however, the group was charged with the broader task of determining “the place of psychology in an ideal university.” That Harvard might approximate the ideal and thereby provide a blueprint for the rest of the academic world was an unspoken assumption.

The commission labored for two years before publishing its report, The Place of Psychology in an Ideal University. The report contained few surprises, as it endorsed most of the changes that were already occurring in the postwar expansion of psychology. The group affirmed the notion that psychology was valuable for a wide variety of other fields and should be incorporated into professional training for education, medicine, business, law, theology, and engineering. It recommended that working contact between all psychologists on a campus be maintained and that training programs for applied psychologists be developed further.

“Enfin! Enfin en Amérique!” exclaimed Edouard Claparède at the opening session of the Ninth International Congress of Psychology in early September 1929. The French psychologist was welcoming more than eight hundred colleagues from around the world who had gathered at Yale University to participate in the first such international meeting ever held in the United States. From the time of the First International Congress of Psychology that took place in 1889 in Paris, proposals had been made to hold a meeting in America, but political and economic circumstances had intervened. Finally, on the fortieth anniversary of the first congress, delegates from twenty-one foreign countries convened in New Haven, Connecticut. Although most hailed from Europe and the Soviet Union, there were also representatives from China, Japan, India, Australia, New Zealand, Egypt, and Brazil. Outnumbering their foreign guests nearly seven to one, American psychologists were proudly demonstrating the growth and prosperity of the discipline in their country.

The Ninth International Congress signaled that American psychology had come of age. Scientific psychology had begun in Europe during the latter part of the nineteenth century and was soon imported to North America, where it flourished with remarkable vigor. According to the 1929 Psychological Register, an international directory, there were more professional psychologists in the United States than in the rest of the world combined. The United States also led the world in producing knowledge in psychology, outstripping Germany in the 1920s and contributing over one-third of the total number of published papers in the field by the end of the decade.

Prologue

In The Triumph of Evolution, the historian Hamilton Cravens argued that by 1941 many natural and social scientists working in the United States had managed to resolve their ancient dispute over the relative values of nature and nurture in development. Heredity and environment were interdependent, cooperating factors, they concluded; their effects were not separable, nor was one more important than the other.

Earlier in the century, according to Cravens, most biologists, psychologists and sociologists had tended to come down on one side or the other, stressing the role either of innate constitution or of learned behavior. But by 1941 they had “recognized the complexity of human nature and behavior” and declared the nature-nurture dichotomy “artificial, unproductive and perhaps unscientific.” Eager to take up new questions, life scientists formulated a new interactionist model: on the basis of this new synthesis they forged a science of man, a truly interdisciplinary study of humanity that took into account both biological and cultural evolution. This triumph of evolution and resolution of the controversy ushered in an era of interdisciplinary scholarship.

The resolution of this longstanding controversy, however, was far from a universal conclusion. While many prominent life scientists did indeed pronounce a harmonious end to the dispute, in less visible or less public arenas the old debate continued to rage unabated, and continued to exert a powerful influence on the sciences of life and mind.

In September 1939, just after the war in Europe broke out, Gordon Allport delivered his presidential address at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, held at Stanford and Berkeley, California. Reflecting on the historical symbolism of meeting for the first time on the shores of the Pacific, he noted that events across the Atlantic had placed “the burden of scientific progress in psychology” on the profession. Faced “with the responsibility for the preservation and eventual rehabilitation of world psychology,” the Harvard professor asked, “Are we American psychologists equipped for the versatile leadership demanded by our comprehensive discipline?” He proposed to answer his rhetorical question through an analysis of “the psychologist's frame of reference” as it was reflected in the pages of the psychological literature over the preceding fifty years.

Among the trends he observed was a rapid rise in the use of statistics, to the point that nearly half of the published literature relied on them. There was also a noteworthy increase in the use of animals as subjects and a concomitant growth in the proportion of methodological studies of all kinds. His data suggested “the development of a notable schism between the psychology constructed in a laboratory and the psychology constructed on the field of life.” In a footnote, Allport went on to call attention to the unwitting hypocrisy of some academic purists when they criticized applied psychology: “Outside the laboratory he lives a cultured and varied life of a free agent and useful citizen.

Prologue

To this point, I have maintained that the distinguishing features of Lashley's science were his opposition to theory and applications and his rhetoric of neutrality, and that these were accompanied by his increasing conviction that intelligence was biologically based and hereditarily determined. These last two chapters will demonstrate that Lashley's trademarks were more than simply coincidental aspects of his neuropsychology. Taken together and placed in their historical context, these characteristic features of Lashley's science comprised a powerful political statement: they made an argument for the social status quo, and against political change, progressive reform, and particularly against racial integration.

How can this be, though, when statements on race, or political views of whatever sort, are nowhere to be found in Lashley's work; when, in fact, his deliberate neutrality precluded any reference of the kind? Why would a scientist cultivate such a studied political neutrality, if his purpose were to address the political problems of his age that troubled him? And how can a historian presume to know what those political problems were, and whether or not the scientist's work meant to address them, if there is no mention of politics of any kind anywhere in the body of that work?

It is true, as we have seen, that there are no explicit political references in Lashley's scientific papers: his public persona seems entirely apolitical.