"I believe that the day has come when we can combine sensory deprivation with drugs, hypnosis and astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain absolute control over an individual's behavior."
—James V. McConnell
A BEHAVIORIST speaking. In the past four decades the heady belief has grown that people can be molded by simply deciding what they should be and then manipulating their behavior, as though the world were a laboratory and man a rat or a pigeon. No one has done more to advance the notion than B.F. Skinner, Harvard psychology professor and author of the bestselling Beyond Freedom and Dignity (TIME cover, Sept. 20, 1971). Those who claim to leave man "free," Skinner believes, are merely abandoning him to uncontrolled forces in his environment. To Skinner, observable behavior is the only reality and belief in an "inner man" is mere superstition. "Something going on inside the individual, states of mind, feelings, purposes, expectancies"—all these, Skinner insists, are no more than fictions.
Freudianism, the other dogma of the era, is very much concerned with what is going on inside the individual. To Freud, man was, in fact, buffeted about by internal, unconscious drives. These frequently caused neuroses, which, to be sure, could be alleviated by psychoanalysis. Repressed sexuality was a major problem in Freud's day, and he was not particularly concerned with other concepts of neurosis, like the feeling of meaninglessness that is so prevalent today. "I have always confined myself to the ground floor and basement of the edifice called man," Freud once wrote to a friend. As for religion, Freud put it in "the category of the neurosis of mankind."
The psychoanalysts and the behaviorists still man the academy. For all their differences, what do they have in common? They share a reductive, limited view of man, according to the humanistic psychologists working today, who consider themselves a "third force" knocking at the academy gates. In sociology and anthropology, other challenges are being made to long-held beliefs. The challenges add up to a new regard for human intractability—and potentiality. There is a sneaking reappearance of the old notion that certain fixed elements in man (once unscientifically known as "human nature") are not susceptible to environmental changes. That notion obviously has major political overtones, since traditionally liberalism has posited that man is almost infinitely changeable, if not perfectible, while conservatives tend to believe that man is man, and that he has an irreducible core of evil (another nonscientific term).
The best-known humanistic psychoanalyst is Rollo May. Although May feels that psychology owes a debt to Freud for his emphasis on the "irrational, repressed, hostile and unacceptable urges" of a man's past, he also believes that Freud's approach leaves out much that is most human. At the same time, May warns that the behaviorists must beware lest they create a totally mechanical society. "My faith is that the human being will be rediscovered," says May. With this rediscovery, he hopes, will come a new emphasis on love, creativity, music and all the other qualitative, introspective experiences.