[Xmca-l] Re: BBC: Mind Changers

[Greg Thompson]

Francine,
Don't forget that there was also that guy John Dewey that published The
Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology in 1896.
An important critique of behaviorism before it was cool.
I once heard that Vygotsky might have read Dewey, but I've never seen
evidence of this. Anyone?
-greg

On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 12:31 AM, larry smolucha <lsmolucha@hotmail.com>
wrote:

> Message from Francine:
>
> Hi David,
>
> In regard to the BBC's crediting Harlow with making a breakthrough in the
> nature-nuture debate:  XMCAr's who where not educated in American
> psychology departments in the post WWII era don't realize how peculiar the
> intellectual climate was back then.
>
>  B. F. Skinner's Behaviorism dominated American psychology from the 1950's
> through the 1970's as a rigid Stimulus-Response Psychology. So much so,
> that American psychologists were proclaiming a Cognitive Revolution in
> psychology  in the 1980's - not realizing that Vygotsky had already
> pioneered the study of  cognitive processes mediating between stimulus and
> response. In 1924, when Vygotsky first presented his theory, he had then
> credited Pavlov's later writings on the second signal system. Since Mind in
> Society was first published in 1978, American psychologists were only
> beginning to understand Vygotskian theory - and just beginning to think in
> terms of dialectical psychology (such as nature-nurture interactions).
>
> In my pre-Vygotsky days, as a graduate student at the University of
> Chicago during the 1970's
> Skinnerian behaviorism dominated the field, Piaget's theory was the
> hottest new theory
> (imagine cognitive developmental stages !!!), and Humanistic Psychology
> was the third Force
> in psychology as an alternative to Behaviorism and orthodox Freudian
> Psychoanalysis.
> I knew there had to be something more - gradually I discovered books on
> ego psychology
> (neo-Freudians) that the School for Social Work Administration  assigned
> as texts for their courses. Then in 1976, when I was hired full-time as a
> community college professor, I found two books in that library that were
> just awesome - Klaus Reigel's Dialectical Psychology - and Werner and
> Kaplan's Symbol Formation. One of my professor's at U.C. actually told me
> that I did think like an American psychologist (meaning that I don't fit in
> the department) - he said  "you think like a European psychologist." In
> 1984-1985 I translated the three Vygotsky papers on the development of
> imagination and creativity and became a Vygotskian (or neo-Vygotskian,
> whatever).
>
> And now American psychologists are just waking up to the fact that the
> rest of the world
> has never used the American Psychiatric Association's DSM system for
> diagnosis of psychiatric or psychological disorders. Effective this October
> the ICD 10 (International Classification of Diseases) has to be used to be
> in compliance with HIPAA - I wonder what will happen to all
> those Abnormal Psychology textbooks that are based exclusively on the
> DSM's five axes
> categorical system.
>
>
>
>
> > Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2015 12:45:08 +0900
> > From: dkellogg60@gmail.com
> > To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
> > Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: BBC: Mind Changers
> >
> > I've listened to the first two (that is the last two) of them (Arden
> House
> > and Harlow's Monkeys) and I'm always impressed by how very IDEOLOGICAL
> they
> > are. I mean ideological with a capital I, in the sense of reinforcing
> > whatever idea happens to dominate the dominant minds of the dominant
> class,
> > and I also mean that both the experiments themselves and their
> > re-presentations by the BBC are ideological.
> >
> > So for example the in the Arden House experiments two graduate schools
> > devise an experiment that is designed to show how life-affirming and
> > life-enhancing consumer choice is and how life-denying and life-deadening
> > it is to be taken care of by people. Amusingly, the BBC then has to
> > re-present this experiment by gushing that the two graduate students had
> > absolutely no idea of what they would find (because of course even the
> BBC
> > understands that if an experiment simply reinforces our prejudices, it's
> > not very significant in the history of psychology).
> >
> > The programme on Harry Harlow's experiments follows more or less the same
> > model. Harlow designs an experiment to prove that "love" and "attachment"
> > (which are apparently sufficiently represented by a wrapping a
> terry-cloth
> > towel around a wire cylinder) are crucial to parenting. The BBC
> re-presents
> > this as an astonishing experiment by claiming that in the 1950s the big
> > debate in psychology was over whether behavior was entirely innate or
> > entirely learned, something that has not been true of psychology since
> > Pavlov. Then the Beeb includes some criticism of Harlow--but much of it
> > has to do with animal rights! The best critique came from Harlow himself,
> > who assessing his own work, remarked that he had succeeded, through sheer
> > sadism and at no inconsiderable government expense, in convincing
> > psychologists of something everybody else has known for thousands of
> years.
> >
> > David Kellogg
> >
> > On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 11:20 AM, Martin John Packer <
> > mpacker@uniandes.edu.co> wrote:
> >
> > > This week the BBC has a series of interesting radio documentaries on
> > > classical psychological studies:
> > >
> > > <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b008cy1j/episodes/player>
> > >
> > > Martin
> > >
>
>



-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson