H.L. Mencken : Psychologists in a Fog

Henry Louis Mencken

A Mencken Chrestomathy

Psychologists in a Fog

From the American Mercury, July, 1927, pp. 382–83.

THE SO-CALLED science of psychology is now in chaos, with no sign that order is soon to be restored. It is hard to find two of its professors who agree, and when the phenomenon is encountered it usually turns out that one of them is not a psychologist at all, but simply a teacher of psychology. Even the Freudians, whose barbaric raid first demoralized and scattered the placid experts of the old school, now quarrel among themselves. Worse, the

same psychologist frequently turns upon and devours himself.

The case of Dr. William McDougall, late of Harvard, comes to mind at once. Every time he prints a new book, which is very frequently, he changes his list of instincts. Some of the others go much further: Dr. McDougall, indeed, is a conservative. These gay boys, at short intervals, throw overboard their whole baggage. There are psychologists in America who started out with the classical introspective psychology, abandoned two-thirds of it in order

to embrace Freudism, then took headers into Behaviorism, and now incline toward the Gestalt revelation of Köhler and Koffka. Some say one thing and some another. It is hard for the layman to keep his head in this whirl. Not even anthropology offers a larger assortment of conflicting theories, or a more gaudy band of steaming and blood-sweating professors.

Nevertheless, certain general tendencies show themselves, and in the long run they may lay the foundation of a genuinely rational and scientific psychology. The chief of them is the tendency to examine the phenomena of the mind objectively, and with some approach to a scientific method. The old-time psychologist did not bother with such inquiries, some of which are very laborious. He simply locked himself in his study, pondered on the processes of his own pondering, and then wrote his book. If, as an aid to his speculations, he went to the length of mastering the elements of physiology, he regarded himself as very advanced, and was so regarded by his customers. Basically, he was a metaphysician, not a scientist. His concepts of the true were constantly mellowed and ameliorated by concepts of the what ought to be true. These old-time psychologists, like the metaphysicians, had a great gift for inventing terminology, and their masterpieces still harass the students in the more backward seminaries of learning. Most of them, again like the metaphysicians, believed that they had sufficiently described a thing when they had given it a name.

But the psychology of today is mainly experimental. Its professors do not attempt to account for the thought process by introspection, but by observation. Their learning is not on philosophy, but on physiology. So far, it must be confessed, they have failed to solve any of the fundamental problems of psychology — for example, the problem of consciousness — but they have swept away a great mass of futile speculation, and unearthed a large number of interesting, if often embarrassing facts.

Here the Behaviorists, who are relatively recent comers in the field, have done some good work. Being psychologists, they are of course inclined to nonsense, and so one finds them plunging into doctrines that war upon common observation — for example, the doctrine that the qualities of the mind are never inherited, but spring wholly out of environmental causes –, but they have at least cleared off the old view of the mental machine as a mechanism working in a sort of vacuum, with no relation to the other organs of the body.

These Behaviorists have proved, what should have been obvious long ago: that a man thinks with his liver as well as with his brain — in brief, that the organism is an actual organism, and not a mere congeries of discordant units. In their studies of children, in particular, they have got at some simple and useful facts, and so disposed of a formidable accumulation of idle speculations. But their formula is too simple to be wholly true, and they seem very likely to ruin it by trying to get more work out of it than it is capable of.

So with the Freudians. So with the Gestalt enthusiasts. So with the endocrine psychologists. So with all the rest. Why don’t they get together as the pathologists, physiologists and other scientists get together, pool their facts, scrap their theories, and so lay the foundations of a rational psychology ? Messrs. Coleman and Commins hint at the reason. No professional kudos is to be got by pooling facts. The one way to make a splash in psychology is to come out with a new and revolutionary theory. In other words, public opinion among psychologists is not yet genuinely enlightened. They paddle around in what ought to be a science, but they are not quite scientists. Some day, perhaps, they will make the grade, and so become brothers to the pathologists. But at this moment they are nearer the osteopaths.

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