Читать книгу Phobias: Fighting the Fear - Helen Saul - Страница 17

J. B. Watson was an impatient young American. He was irritated by the state of psychology in the early twentieth century, by its lingering obsession with philosophical questions and its fascination with the subconscious. He set out to drag it into the realms of science.

Watson did not claim that mental phenomena do not exist, but rather that they cannot be measured and therefore might as well be ignored. In an unlikely agreement with Kant, he said that the mind, or consciousness, could not be investigated scientifically. Following on from Wundt, mentioned earlier, Watson stressed the importance of collecting data and measuring overt, visible behaviour. Little Albert, an 11-month-old baby, was the unfortunate guinea pig chosen.

Watson’s masterstroke was a direct challenge to Freud. He and his colleague, Rosalie Rayner, allowed Albert to play happily for a while and then showed him a furry white rat, at the same time banging an iron bar on metal just behind his head. The little boy got a terrible fright. A few days later, they showed Albert the rat again, this time without the noise. He was still obviously frightened. In fact, weeks after the experiment, he remained afraid of rats, dogs and anything furry, even fur coats.

A single, frightening event was enough to create a lasting fear in Little Albert. By extension, it suggests that the horse’s fall in front of Little Hans may have been sufficient in itself to cause his subsequent phobia. Analysis of his subconscious was therefore unnecessary.

Russian neurophysiologist Ivan Pavlov, working at the same time, would have agreed. He famously rang a bell every time he fed a group of dogs. Eventually, the dogs started to salivate at the sound of the bell whether or not there was any food. Pavlov said they had come to associate the bell with the food so strongly that either would make them salivate. The dogs were conditioned, to use Pavlov’s term, to salivate when the bell rang.

White rats were a convenient vehicle for studying behaviour because, like dogs, they can be conditioned. Simple experiments with rats produced simple results and fuelled enthusiasm for behaviourism. In variants of Pavlov’s experiments, rats were shown something innocuous, like a coloured light, at the same as they received a mild electric shock. With repetition, the rats came to fear the light alone.

It provided a simple way of thinking about phobias. A single event causes lasting fear. A child is frightened when a big dog snarls and attempts to bite and afterwards fears and avoids all dogs, even small and friendly ones. Behavioural therapy attempts to reverse the process. By gradually reintroducing the child to dogs, the link between the snarling dog and others is broken, the child gains confidence and the fear disappears.

However, behaviourism failed to see off Freud. Its practical shortcomings were, ironically, demonstrated by Watson. Like Freud, he was unable to heal himself. Watson had a lifelong fear of the dark which his behaviourist methods could not banish. It is hard to imagine anyone with a phobia believing as fervently in their treatment or being as determined for it to succeed, but it did not work for Watson.

His personal life may have dealt behaviourism an equally serious blow. He had a scandalous divorce following his affair with Rosalie Rayner. They subsequently married, but he was forced out of his job at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University and left academia for advertising. Behaviourism was robbed of its figurehead, research started to go in many different directions and it never regained its earlier theoretical coherence.

Behavioural learning theory may have foundered but behaviour therapy, a logical extension of the theory, is still a core feature of most treatments for phobias. Just as Watson was only interested in studying behaviour, the task of the modern behaviour therapist is limited to changing behaviour. Watson did not argue that consciousness did not exist, only that it could not be measured. Similarly, therapists acknowledge that phobias mean fear, but they do not tackle the emotion directly. Instead, they work to change behaviour and prevent avoidance of the feared object. The therapy, discussed in chapter 5, may not have helped Watson, but it is routinely successful.