Psychology and War - Research Paper Example

? ­ Psychology and War A Re-categorization of the Schools of Modern Psychology Submitted by: During the of the 20th century, psychology has been applied in a wide variety of practical situations in society, in both institutions and personal life, with each school of psychology implementing different goals. In discussing the social aspects of war both domestically and internationally, it is important to note the means through which psychology is used by the State to make its conduct of war more efficient, and also how psychology can be used as a means of resistance and social education against war. In this context, it is also possible to look at the schools of psychology individually, and how they relate to the question of war in society. This discussion will review the alliance of Behaviorism and the State, represented by Skinner in America and Pavlov in USSR, as indicative of “war psychologies” and contrast this with “peace psychologies” such as the Humanistic, Gestalt, and Transpersonal schools of the 1960’s that were involved with the counter culture & anti-war movements of the Vietnam era. This essay will also discuss the Marxist alliance with Freudianism and Psychoanalysis as aspects of dialectical materialism, anti-colonialism, and Critical Theory. The application of “medical psychologies” in shellshock treatments and PTSD after it was developed as a diagnosis and disorder in modern psychiatry is seen as related to developments in neuroscience, neurochemical and neurophysiological understandings of the brain. In summary, these three categorizations of psychological schools will be related to the moral questions of war as they relate to the ethics of professional practice. Introduction The centrality of the issue of war is evident across both American and world history during the 20th Century, and era that also saw the development of modern psychology. Considering the resources that war consumes through military production and the effects in death and destruction, modern psychology can inevitably be seen as divided, like the greater society in which it is developed, into schools of thought that are critical or resistant to war historically and oppose it as a social practice and government policy, as well as those schools which make war more efficient and profitable by enabling the smooth functioning of the war machine, its economy, and State bureaucracies. In reviewing the range of applications of psychology in society over the course of the 20th Century, some schools of psychology were integrated with the operations of the State and its military machine in Nazi Germany, the USSR, China, and other regimes viewed totalitarian, as well as the liberal-democratic States of NATO and the West. At the same time, some schools of psychology aligned with Marxism against capitalism, and generated critical responses to the State that integrated aspects of both ideologies. In reviewing the schools of psychology within this framework, it is possible to re-categorize the schools in terms of “war psychologies” and “peace psychologies” with reference to whether or not the school’s practitioners enabled or opposed war fundamentally, as well as to identify “medical psychology” as a third type of non-aligned functioning of treatment and healing of mental illness that may circumvent the requirement to make a moral choice about the ethical basis of war. In referencing the professional conduct of psychology, the fundamental moral identity of the individual is expressed in the view on war and this may require the psychologist to make difficult ethical choices when contemplating a career path within institutions or the State. As such, some schools of psychology associated with “peace psychologies” may become marginalized or repressed by the hegemonic aspects of the war machine which dominate both academic and public discourse. In conducting the research for this thesis, a war psychology is defined as a school of psychology that is directly integrated with the war machine of the State as it operates during the major conflicts of the 20th Century. In dating modern psychology to the rise of the theories of William James, Sigmund Freud, B.F. Skinner, and Ivan Pavlov, psychology has generally been understood according to schools of thought related to the philosophy of the leading teacher of the theory. In application within society, psychology is related to both the public and private spheres with differing goals and methods. War psychologies are historically active and present within the State and military apparatus of the 20th Century around the world, and thus operate on shared goals and values. Psychology is related in evolution to religion, though what distinguishes it is the application of scientific methodologies to the study of mind and consciousness. Science is seen as a force morally unrelated to war or peace, for these are human goals where science can be applied to each equally. Yet, in modernism the State raises militarism and the production of war to new heights while simultaneously dedicating resources to peace through aspects of education, healthcare, and other fundamentals of the standard of living. Peace psychologies can be defined as those schools of psychology that oppose war on a moral basis or promote peace through aspects of self-realization. If science does not make a moral judgment on war, then it remains the role of professional ethics to govern conduct. Ethics must be applied by the individual according to his or her personal moral beliefs, whether they are informed by a religion, humanism, or other ideological viewpoints. Medical psychology is defined as a school of practice where the emphasis is on physiological, pharmaceutical, or neurological approaches to psychology. Where medical psychology is presented as a “neutral” form of psychological practice that is not required to make a moral choice fundamentally on war because it is concerned primarily with the care of the individual, these assumptions should be also closely differentiated from war psychologies that serve militaristic ends. This re-categorization of the schools of psychology based upon their relation to the war machine is related to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book “Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus”. They write: “The State is perpetually producing and reproducing ideal circles, but a war machine is necessary to make something round. Thus the specific characteristics of nomad science are what need to be determined in order to understand both the repression it encounters and the interaction ‘containing’ it. Nomad science does not have the same relation to work as royal science... The State does not give power (pouvoir) to the intellectuals or conceptual innovators; on the contrary, it makes them a strictly dependent organ with an autonomy that is only imagined yet is sufficient to divest those whose job it becomes to simply reproduce or implement all of their power (puissance)... In any case, if the State always finds it necessary to repress the nomad and minor sciences, if it opposes vague essences and the operative geometry of the trait, it does so not because the content of these sciences is inexact or imperfect, or because of their magic and initiatory character, but because they imply a division of labor opposed to the norms of the State.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 367-8) This essay re-conceptualizes the division between “nomad science” and “State science” as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari through the use of the terms “peace psychologies” and “war psychologies,” but the fundamental critique is the as in “A Thousand Plateaus”. As they write: “The difference is not extrinsic: the way in which a science, or a conception of a science, participates in the organization of the social field, and in particular induces a division of labor, is part of that science itself.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 368-9) This point is very important because the moral question of war has predated both psychology and modernism, as has the fundamentals of both religion and humanism which inform the decision-making process. If, as Deleuze and Guattari note, some intellectuals find affinity with one school of thought and its application over another path and its consequences, this is a very integral part of the psychology itself as a characteristic. Deleuze and Guattari also highlight the manner in which schools of psychology that go against the militaristic goals of the State have been marginalized historically, as part of the hegemonic aspects of the State that seek to define the very nature of the human being through authority. The psychologist in this manner functions as the priest of the State but in the realm of ontology, and completes a hegemonic stifling of psychologies that posit a higher or multi-dimensional view of reality in order to promote what Marcuse called the “One Dimensional Man”. “Contemporary analytic philosophy is out to exorcize such ‘myths’ or metaphysical ‘ghosts’ as Mind, Consciousness, Will, Soul, Self, by dissolving the intent of these concepts into statements on particular identifiable operations, performances, powers, dispositions, propensities, skills, etc. The result shows, in a strange way, the impotence of the destruction - the ghost continues to haunt. While every interpretation or translation may describe adequately a particular mental process, an act of imagining what I mean when I say ‘I,’ or what the priest means when he says that Mary is a ‘good girl,’ not a single one of these reformulations, nor their sum-total, seems to capture or even circumscribe the full meaning of such terms as Mind, Will, Self, Good... To be sure, such universals cannot be validated by the assertion that they denote a whole which is more and other than its parts. They apparently do, but this ‘whole’ requires an analysis of the unmutilated experiential context.” (Marcuse, 1964) Marcuse highlights the way that the State uses psychology in ontology through setting the parameters of what is accepted as “reality” in psychic experience and through authority by limiting the discourse to terms which deny the transcendental and spiritual in favor of the material and physical. The relationship of psychology to Marxism is seen in Deleuze, Guattari, and Marcuse as an aspect of Critical Theory which challenges the State bias present in authority-based systems of thought and their validations. While the critique posited by these theorists is constructive when applied to late-capitalist societies and the war machine, more recent scholarship published since 2000 in academia have built a solid framework for the conception of a “peace psychology”. Three of these textbooks and publications include: “Peace, conflict, and violence: peace psychology for the 21st century,” by Daniel J. Christie, Richard V. Wagner, and Deborah Du Nann Winter “Peace psychology: a comprehensive introduction” by Herbert H. Blumberg, Alexander Paul Hare, and Anna Costin “Nonviolence and peace psychology: Intrapersonal, interpersonal, societal and world peace” by Daniel M. Mayton What these publications and others show is that there is a growing basis of academic scholarship recognizing the importance of the issues of war and peace in psychology and its social application. War Psychologies War psychologies can be seen to be represented primarily as the schools related to Behaviorism internationally, which includes the theory promoted by Watson, Skinner, Pavlov, and others. It can be argued the reduction of the human being to the sum of its observable behaviors and the elimination of higher dimensions of consciousness or transcendence from the model of human nature, both represented an attractive philosophy for the State in the early 20th Century in that it also matched with the ideals of Ford, Turner, and others related to the assembly line and mass production. Yet, what follows is that the universities of the great nation-states like the USA, the USSR, and other superpowers become dominated by the Behaviorist strain of psychology and it provides no resistance whatsoever to the war policies of the States themselves. Instead, behaviorism was broadly implemented in public institutions and used as a basis for military training during this era, and its leaders receive the highest support from the governments as ideology. Thus, it must be seen that behaviorism represents the institutional psychology of the era that is favored by factories, industry, and their managers for making operations more efficient, and the school of behaviorism functions in society on the same basis, making the government of mass-populations more efficient. As John B. Watson wrote in “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views” (1913) “Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist's total scheme of investigation.” (Watson, 1913) Introspection is no part of humanity’s fundamental identity, humans are automatons, machines, and there is no difference between animals and humans. What is ironic is that this is a perfect expression of how the modern State views its citizens, and behaviorism was triumphed around the world, its advocates given the positions of power during the WWI-WWII era in most Soviet and U.S. universities, conditions that have continued to the present day as other schools of psychology are marginalized historically. In “Robots, Men and Minds,” Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1967) writes: “Psychology, in the first half of the twentieth century, was dominated by a positivistic-mechanistic-reductionistic approach which can be epitomized as the robot model of man. Notwithstanding the great differences in theories such as psychoanalysis, classical and neobehaviorism, learning theory, `thinking machines' and the simulation of behavior by computers, they all shared a basic conception which served as an a priori framework for experimental and clinical research, theory, psychopathology, psychotherapy, etc. It is important to identify this predominant ideology.” (Bertalanffy, 1967) While detailing the interrelationship between behaviorism and the State historically would take more attention than is possible in this essay, it is important to note that behaviorism was reductionist and it was chosen by the State on both sides of the Cold War as the perfect expression of the modern view of man, and as such it will also be held accountable historically for its complicity as a school of thought that supported and made the atrocities of war in the 20th century more efficient. It can be further argues that the view of humanity posited by behaviorism actually enables the wars themselves as it is taught popularly. In a debate in 1929 on the subject, Watson states: “I think an examination of the psychological history of people will show that their behavior is much more easily controlled by fear stimuli than by love. If the fear element were dropped out of any religion, that religion would not survive a year.” (Watson, 1929) Peace Psychologies In Watson’s debate with William MacDougall, he states that “introspective psychology,” as promoted by William James, Freud, and others is simply a substitution of the term consciousness for the religious view of the soul. (Watson, 1929) However, this debate shows that there also was a debate from the earliest days of psychology over the actual fundamentals of the science. As William MacDougall states in “FUNDAMENTALS OF PSYCHOLOGY - BEHAVIORISM EXAMINED” (1929), “There is the true or original Watsonian Behaviorism. There is no ‘metaphysical nonsense’ about this. In fact, it is its principal distinction, the principal virtue claimed for it, that it extradites from the province of psychology every question that may be suspected of being metaphysical, and so purges the fold of the true believers, leaving them in intellectual peace forevermore. The essence of this form of Behaviorism is that it refuses to have any dealings with introspectively observable facts, resolutely refuses to attempt to state them, describe them, interpret them, make use of them, or take account of them in any way. All such facts as feelings, feelings of pleasure and pain or distress; emotional experiences, those we denote by such terms as anger, fear, disgust, pity, disappointment, sorrow, and so forth; all experiences of desiring, longing, striving, making an effort, choosing; all experiences of recollecting, imagining, dreaming, of fantasy, of anticipation, of planning or foreseeing; all these and all other experiences are to be resolutely ignored by this weird new psychology. The psychologist is to rely upon data of one kind only, the data or facts of observation obtainable by observing the movements and other bodily changes exhibited by human and other organisms.” (MacDougall, 1929) In this debate between Watson and McDougal, much of what William James had advocated in “The Moral Equivalent of War” (1906) was upheld contra behaviorism. In modern analytics, this debate shows the foundations of “peace psychologies” in society. The peace psychology schools actively oppose the reduction of human nature in behaviorism, and attempt to posit in contradiction to its fundamentals a view of the human being that is more indicative of the individual’s value and worth. Indeed, to state that there is little difference in humanity from the animal or machine is a behaviorist tenet that must be resisted ideologically, as it seeks to limit humanity and make its social control more efficient, rather than liberating individuals and making them more free. Another formative event in the development of peace psychology is the founding of “The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI)” in 1936. “In 1944, while the war was still raging, conversations among 25 psychologists led to the issuance of a statement: ‘Human Nature and Peace: A Statement by Psychologists.’ ... The statement (Murphy, 1945) had ten principles, which are summarized: 1. War can be avoided, and is not inevitable. 2. The coming generation (children) should be a focus of attention. 3. Group hatreds can be controlled through education and experience. 4. All branches of the human family – all races – need to be allowed equal participation in collective security. 5. Peoples must participate in planning their own destiny. 6. Rewards and punishments in defeated peoples should be clear and consistent. 7. Relief and rehabilitation done well can increase self-respect and self-reliance; done poorly, dollar imperialism can bring resentment. 8. The root desires of common people are the safest guide for framing peace. 9. The trend of human relationships is toward ever wider units of collective security. 10. Commitments now may prevent post-war apathy.” (MacNair, 2011) This statement of the of “The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI)” in 1936 and the McDougall-Watson debates can be seen as the time historically when peace psychology was conceived and developed against behaviorism in psychological discourse in the 20th Century. While there are a great number of smaller schools of psychology such as Gestalt, the Esalen groups, Humanistic Psychology, Jungianism, and others who posit a transcendent and spiritually focused type of teaching that can assist the individual in self-realization, these schools never receive the institutional support and financing that behaviorism does within the State structures, institutions, and educational facilities of modernism. Medical Psychologies While behaviorism makes claims to be a purely medical science, the philosophical basis of the school is compromised historically through its participation with the State and the advancement of policies driven by behaviorist psychology that demean the human nature and make it more subservient to control. The development of neuropsychology, neuro-chemical studies, and medical inquiry into the nature of the brain represent a more neutral and unbiased view of modern humanity than behaviorism. While neuropsychology can be shown to have a bias for the material nature over the transcendent in analysis, it does not contain the industrial metaphysics of reductionism that reduce the human being to a machine or animal type in its rhetoric. While medical psychologies may also serve the State or industry, they typically do so in a way that is based not in larger overriding ideologies but as patients who need medical assistance and care. Where medical psychologies tend to be materialistic and reductionist in the tradition of behaviorism and do not share the transcendent aspects of the peace psychologies, these psychologies must also be analyzed ethically for the manner through which they serve the individual’s needs or the State, and whether they liberate or make the person more subservient to control. Ethics and Morality Ethics and morality should be maintained consciously by every professional in psychology, and with this comes a definition of the psychologist’s own self-identity where he or she must make a decision whether or not to serve the State and war machine in society or to assist the individual in finding freedom and liberation. While it may be taken for granted that the society was just, many fault German intellectuals and psychologists when they co-operated with the Nazi State in WWII and implemented policies that served this vision. Similarly, psychologists may find themselves historically on the wrong side of the issues as formerly understood socially after a paradigm shift in awareness that changes public values. Peace psychologists fundamentally seek to develop policies that will oppose the social conditions of war, and educate against them on a fundamental basis in society. In doing such, peace psychologies also resist the State and the behaviorist reduction of human nature, in order to promote a liberating view of mind and consciousness in accord with the highest values and experience of man. The willful blindness and the service offered by war psychologies to the State may compromise them historically in a similar manner to those intellectuals and professionals that aligned with Nazi science in the WWII period, and this also represents the greatest threat for the abuse of knowledge and science in society. Thus, the division of the psychological schools into new categories based upon their views on war, human nature, and consciousness can be useful in recognizing the bias in institutions and also preserving the dignity and freedom of humanity against totalitarianism and State policies that lead to the social destruction of war. Sources Cited: AUTCOM (2007). BEHAVIORISM - THE MODERN NOTE IN PSYCHOLOGY, Behaviorism and Developmental Approaches, Autism National Committee, 2007. Retrieved from http://www.autcom.org/articles/BehaviorismApproaches.html Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari , Felix (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, Trans. Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Graham, George (2010). Behaviorism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2010. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/ James, William (1906). The Moral Equivalent of War, Constitution.org, 2011. Retrieved from http://www.constitution.org/wj/meow.htm MacDougall, William (1929). FUNDAMENTALS OF PSYCHOLOGY - BEHAVIORISM EXAMINED, Classics in the History of Psychology, 2011. Retrieved from http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/Battle/macdougall.htm MacNair, Rachel M. (2011). The Interweaving Threads of Peace Psychology, Peace Psychology, 2011. Retrieved from http://www.rachelmacnair.com/peace-psych-history Marcuse, Herbert (1964). One-Dimensional Man - Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Marxixts.org, 2011. Retrieved from http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/one-dimensional-man/index.htm Watson, John B. (1929). BEHAVIORISM - THE MODERN NOTE IN PSYCHOLOGY, Classics in the History of Psychology, 2011. Retrieved from http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/Battle/watson.htm Read More