The dominant school of thought was called behaviorism. Its king, B. F. Skinner, had gotten his start during the Second World War, after the U.S. Air Force hired him to train pigeons to guide bombs. Skinner taught his pigeons to peck in the right spot on an aerial map of the target, by rewarding them with food each time they did it. (They did this with less enthusiasm when antiaircraft fire was exploding around them, and so were never used in combat.) Skinner’s success with the pigeons was the start of a spectacularly influential career underpinned by the idea that all animal behavior was driven not by thoughts and feelings but by external rewards and punishments. He locked rats inside what he called “operant conditioning chambers” (they soon became known as “Skinner boxes”) and taught them to pull levers and push buttons. He taught pigeons to dance and play Ping-Pong and bang out “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on a piano.
The behaviorists presumed that whatever they discovered about rats and pigeons applied to people—on whom, for various reasons, it was simply less practical to conduct experiments. “To the reader who is anxious to advance to the human subject a word of caution is in order,” Skinner wrote, in an essay called “How to Teach Animals.” “We must embark upon a program in which we sometimes apply relevant reinforcement and sometimes withhold it. In doing this, we are quite likely [in humans] to generate emotional effects. Unfortunately the science of behavior is not yet as successful in controlling emotion as it is in shaping behavior.” The allure of behaviorism was that the science appeared clean: the stimuli could be observed, the responses could be recorded. It seemed “objective.” It didn’t rely on anyone telling anyone else what he thought or felt. All the important stuff was observable and measurable. There was a joke that captured the antiseptic spirit of behaviorism that Skinner himself liked to tell: A couple makes love. Afterward, one of them turns to the other and says, “It was good for you. How was it for me?”
All the leading behaviorists were WASPs—a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by young people entering psychology in the 1950s. Looking back, a casual observer of the field at that time couldn’t help but wonder if there shouldn’t be two entirely unrelated disciplines: “WASP Psychology” and “Jewish Psychology.” The WASPs marched around in white lab coats carrying clipboards and thinking up new ways to torture rats and all the while avoided the great wet mess of human experience. The Jews embraced the mess—even the Jews who disdained Freud’s methods and longed for “objectivity” and wished to search for the kinds of truth that might be tested according to the rules of science.
Danny, for his part, longed for objectivity. The school of psychological thought that most charmed him was Gestalt? psychology. Led by German Jews—its origins were in early twentieth-century Berlin—it sought to explore, scientifically, the mysteries of the human mind. The Gestalt psychologists had made careers uncovering interesting phenomena and demonstrating them with great flair: a light appeared brighter when it emerged from total darkness; the color gray looked green when it was surrounded by violet and yellow if surrounded by blue; if you said to a person, “Don’t step on that banana eel!,” he’d be sure that you had said not “eel” but “peel.” The Gestalists showed that there was no obvious relationship between any external stimulus and the sensation it created in people, as the mind intervened in many curious ways. Danny was especially struck by the way that the Gestalt psychologists, in their writings, put their readers through an experience, so that they might feel for themselves the mysterious inner workings of their own minds:
If on a clear night we look up at the sky, some stars are immediately seen as belonging together, and as detached from their environment. The constellation Cassiopeia is an example, the Dipper is another. For ages people have seen the same groups as units, and at the present time children need no instruction in order to perceive the same units. Similarly, in figure 1 the reader has before him two groups of patches.
Figure 1. Adapted from Wolfgang K?hler, Gestalt Psychology
(1947; repr., New York: Liveright, 1992), 142.
Why not merely six patches? Or two other groups? Or three groups of two members each? When looking casually at this pattern everyone beholds the two groups of three patches each.
The central question posed by Gestalt psychologists was the question the behaviorists had elected to ignore: How does the brain create meaning? How does it turn the fragments collected by the senses into a coherent picture of reality? Why does that picture so often seem to be imposed by the mind upon the world around it, rather than by the world upon the mind? How does a person turn the shards of memory into a coherent life story? Why does a person’s understanding of what he sees change with the context in which he sees it? Why—to speak a bit loosely—when a regime bent on the destruction of the Jews rises to power in Europe, do some Jews see it for what it is, and flee, and others stay to be slaughtered? These questions, or ones like them, had led Danny into psychology. They weren’t the sort to be answered by even the most gifted rat. Their answers, if they existed, could be found only in the human mind.
Later in his life Danny would say that he thought of science as a conversation. If so, psychology was a noisy dinner party during which the guests talked past one another and changed the subject with bewildering frequency. The Gestalt psychologists and the behaviorists and the psychoanalysts might all be jammed into the same building with a plaque on the front that said Department of Psychology, but they didn’t waste a lot of time listening to one another. Psychology wasn’t like physics, or even economics. It lacked a single persuasive theory to organize itself around, or even an agreed-upon set of rules for discussion. Its leading figures could, and did, say of the work of other psychologists, Basically, what you are doing and saying is total bullshit, without any discernible effect on the behavior of those psychologists.
Part of the problem was the wild diversity of the people who wanted to be psychologists—a rattle-bag of characters with motives that ranged from the urge to rationalize their own unhappiness, to a conviction that they had deep insights into human nature but lacked the literary power to write a decent novel, to a need for a market for their math skills after they’d been found inadequate by the physics department, to a simple desire to help people in pain. The other issue was the grandma’s attic quality of the field: Psychology was a place all sorts of unrelated and seemingly unsolvable problems simply got tossed. “It is possible to find two competent and highly productive academic psychologists who, if they had lunch together, would be forced to discuss the Twins’ chances for the pennant or Ronald the Red Killer’s showmanship talents, because they would have negligible overlap in their knowledge and interests in psychology,” the University of Minnesota psychologist Paul Meehl wrote in a famous 1986 essay, “Psychology: Does Our Heterogeneous Subject Matter Have Any Unity?” “One can inquire as to why this is, whether anything can be done about it, or—a question that should be asked first—does it really matter anyway? Why should a behavior geneticist studying the transmission of schizophrenia be able to converse with an expert on the electrochemical processes in the retina of the walleyed pike?”