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In college, by his own admission, young Fred never fitted into student life, but became a rebel whose lack of self-understanding now amazes him. He wrote an editorial attacking Phi Beta Kappa, helped cover the walls at Class Day exercises with "bitter caricatures of the faculty," and made such a shambles of commencement ceremonies that he was warned by the college president that he would not get his degree unless he quieted down.
But at the same time he had what classmates recall as a brilliant mind, and he made full use of it. For one thing, he wrote short stories, and in his senior year sent three of them to Robert Frost, who praised them warmly.
That encouragement convinced Fred Skinner that he should become a writer. The decision, he says, was "disastrous." Recalling those "dark years," living first at home with his family and then in New York's Greenwich Village, he admits that he frittered away his time, read aimlessly, wrote very little—"and thought about seeing a psychiatrist." In his own words, he "failed as a writer" because he "had nothing important to say."
But that failure allowed Skinner to swing his attention back to one of the pet interests of his youth: animal behavior. As a boy, he had had toads and chipmunks. He also had a vivid memory of watching a troupe of trained pigeons at a county fair play at putting out a fire. Besides, he had read and been excited by some Bertrand Russell articles in the old Dial magazine about Johns Hopkins Psychologist John B. Watson, father of behaviorism. It was with Watson, in 1913, that psychology really emerged from its origins in philosophy to become a full-fledged scientific discipline.
Early Christian thinkers pondering the mystery of man believed that it was the "soul" that set human beings apart from animals. To them, the essence of man was his God-given spirit, immaterial, impalpable, otherworldly, something quite outside the natural world. But with the decline of religion and the rise of materialism, 17th and 18th century philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and Julien de La Mettrie increasingly viewed the soul as an aspect of the body, man as an animal, both men and animals as machines.
It was this kind of thinking that influenced Watson. Drawing, too, on the work of Pavlov, he repudiated the subjective concepts of mind and emotion and described human behavior as a succession of physical reflex responses to stimuli coming from the environment. It was the environment alone, he felt, that determined what a man is: "Give me a dozen healthy infants," he wrote in 1925, "and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities." The goal of this Watsonian behaviorism was the prediction and control of behavior—which suited Skinner to perfection.
Bach Fugues
And so, in 1928, Skinner entered Harvard with a new goal: a doctorate in psychology. His regime was