The
Zen of Science
Field theory
By MARC RINGEL, MD
I
made it all the way up to a final interview for admission to Harvard
Medical School, where I performed one last time the application
song-and-dance that I'd polished over the course of the long application
season. I said I wanted to be a doctor so I could become a psychiatrist
and continue studying the mind-body problem that had so fascinated
me as an undergraduate philosophy major.
"So," my interviewer—the head of the pathology
department of a large metropolitan hospital—asked, "if
you want to be a psychiatrist, why didn't you major in psychology,
not philosophy?"
I told him that I didn't care for the psychology department
at my university. "It is too behaviorist," I explained.
"Even Skinnerian."
"Yes, B.F. Skinner," responded the doctor. "A brilliant
man. He excelled at everything he tried. He was my roommate at
Harvard." The next fall I enrolled at the University of Illinois
School of Medicine.
When I attended college, behaviorism, whose most visible spokesperson
was B.F. Skinner, dominated American psychological thought. Behaviorists
observed organisms—rats and pigeons and humans and lots
of other creatures down to single-celled ones—from a reductionist
scientific vantage point. The only things that counted, behaviorists
espoused, were the things about the organism that could be viewed
directly—which, for psychologists, were behaviors, ergo
the name of their school.
To study objectively a person's inner reality, a behaviorist
would say, is like trying to draw a graph that conveys an individual's
experience of the taste of truffles. Behaviorists treat the interior
of the individual as a "black box," irrelevant because
it is forever unobservable and unknowable. (I cannot resist repeating
an old joke here. What does one behaviorist say to another after
sex? "I can see it was good for you. But was it good for
me?")
Behaviorists are great at manipulating behavior on the basis of
punishments and rewards. They can train animals to do amazing
things, like run mazes in a flash or peck a lever attached to
a food source at the firing rate of a machine gun. There are some
applications to human psychotherapy too. A behavioral approach
is useful for treating bedwetting and phobias, for example. As
you might imagine, though, a psychology that denies the relevancy
of all internal experience has relatively narrow uses when it
comes to dealing with conscious human beings.
Perceptual psychology is at the opposite end from behaviorism
on the spectrum of psychological systems. The main tenet of perceptual
psychology is that to predict an individual's behavior, you
must look inside that black box to understand her view of the
world (called the perceptual or phenomenal field). For example,
if I know how you perceive dogs, I can predict if you'll
coo and stroke my enthusiastic, friendly, overgrown puppy when
he greets you with his front paws up against your chest or if
you'll holler and back away from him as fast as you can.
My interest in perceptual psychology (also called field theory
or humanistic psychology) comes directly from a great friend and
mentor, Art Combs, who retired in Greeley and lived around the
corner from me. I believe our meeting was fated.
Art was the first graduate student of Carl Rogers, who is credited
with founding humanistic psychology. Many of Art's pioneering
contributions to the body of psychology theory and practice have
to do with applying the principles of humanistic psychology to
education.
Early in our relationship, I read the copy that Art gave me of
his 1976 textbook, Perceptual Psychology, which outlines the science
that fleshes out his theory. It is a fascinating work. Some of
the most interesting studies cited in the text examined the effectiveness
of elementary school teachers. Colleagues were questioned and
student records were evaluated to determine who were the best
and the worst teachers. Then Art and colleagues measured a number
of parameters: teacher education, teacher IQ, variety of teaching
techniques, class size, etc., none of which correlated with teacher
effectiveness. The one factor that consistently predicted how
well a teacher did was how strongly she believed that children
could learn and that her teaching could make a real difference
in their lives.
The phenomenal field has a huge influence on the effectiveness
of teachers and, subsequent studies have shown, on the effectiveness
of other helping professionals. Understanding people's hearts
and minds is what really counts. Changing their hearts and minds
is the best way to change their behavior.
Art's work blew me away. In it I saw compassion, a spiritual
value, operationalized into a testable scientific theory. Perceptual
psychology has changed my career as a physician, having provided
an important bridge between science and spirit.
The hallmark of perceptual psychology is to treat individuals
as people, not as things. What you learn from me if I attempt
to mold your behavior by punishment or reward is not likely to
stick for long, once my scolding or praise is withdrawn. What
you learn from me because I have come to understand what really
motivates you is more liable to last. So, as a perceptual psychology
kinda guy, I spend way more of my day listening to patients, trying
to understand what makes them tick, than I spend telling them
what to do.
There are plenty of scientific studies which show that health
professionals who learn what motivates their patients are much
more successful in getting them to take their medication as prescribed
or to modify their health habits. It's even a scientifically
proven fact that a real relationship with her patients is the
best protection a doctor can have from being sued for malpractice.
Why then are so many doctors stuck in a behaviorist mode? Because
the so-called scientific worldview that has been with us since
Descartes and Newton, that people are merely very complex machines,
is still the dominant metaphor in our culture. (These 17th century
philosophers did posit the existence of a soul, but they never
figured out how an immaterial soul could interact with the stuff
of a body-machine.) I say "so-called scientific" because,
as Art Combs and his collaborators showed in numerous repeatable,
scientifically sound studies, a broader view of human nature is
much closer to the truth than is a black box machine, limited
to receiving stimulus inputs and outputting behaviors.
Art Combs practiced what he preached. Up until the day he died,
in his 88th year, he listened closely to and learned from those
around him. He was a simple guy who held, unshakably, a profound
spiritual and intellectual belief in the value of each person
and of each person's experience. That's how he trained
teachers. That's how he did psychotherapy. That's how
he treated friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and even enemies.
Art's beliefs made him strong, flexible, resilient and, most
of the time, even happy.
Buddhists sometimes describe their core practices of compassion
and meditation as scientific, rather than as spiritual or religious.
"Test them," they insist. "See if these ways work,
if they make your life better and make you feel happier."
Art had learned transcendental meditation in the early 1970s,
during the wave of popularity of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and, for
the rest of his life, began each day with 20 minutes of silently
chanting his mantra. Art's meditation practice no doubt contributed
to the happiness and productivity of his life.
It would appear that there are parts of our being that we can
understand better by scientific means and others better by spiritual
means. For me, perceptual psychology has greatly blurred that
distinction. Both as a practicing physician and as a plain old
perceiving being, I prefer things to be a bit messy, rich, and
ambiguous, because that's how I believe we humans really
are. And, ultimately, isn't that what psychological and spiritual
practice is supposed to do, to help us know who we really are?
Marc Ringel, MD, is a family practitioner and writer based in
Greeley, Colorado.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 FEATURE ARTICLES
