14 Neurosis: The view from Behavioral Analysis and Cognitive Psychology
Description
This article is from the Psychology FAQ, by Rolf Marvin Bøe Lindgren roffe@tag.uio.no with numerous contributions by others.
14 Neurosis: The view from Behavioral Analysis and Cognitive Psychology
Behaviorism, which holds that the proper subject of Psychology should
be the study and description of behavior, was initiated by Johns
Hopkins University professor of Psychology, James B. Watson. Following
a scandal involving research on sexual behavior in collaboration with
a graduate student but without the consent of his wife, he left Johns
Hopkins and founded the psychological basis of the commercial
advertisement industry as we know it today.
The definitive statement of the theoretical foundation of behaviorism
was published by B. F. Skinner, possibly the world's most influential
psychologist next to Freud, in 1936[]. Here, he argues that emotions,
thoughts and feelings belong to a different explanatory level than
behavior, and cannot, therefore, be said to account for behavior in a
scientifically valid sense.
Skinner differentiates between operant and respondent behavior.
Operant behavior is behavior where the originating forces are not in
the environment: instinctive or species-specific behavior. Respondent
behavior is behavior which can be accounted for by referring to the
stimuli that initiated it.
Behaviorism covers a vast area of models and theories, and seeks to
establish laws of behavior. The simplest law is this: if an item of
behavior elicits a response that the organism finds rewarding, the
probablity of the same behavior under similar circumstances is
increased. It is interesting to note that behaviorists tend to
maintain that both reward and punishment tend to increase likelihood
of behavior, while no response tends to decrease it.
This is the core of the behaviorist understanding of the neuroses. A
behaviorist description of neurotic behavior would attempt to account
for the rewards that the neurotic behavior gives the client, and, in
therapy, try to substitute the neurotic rewards with more appropriate
rewards.
Aaron T. Beck, in his formulation of cognitive therapy, claims that a
neurosis can be viewed as attempts to avoid the fear of punishment,
rather than the punishment itself. So the neurotic never learns that
his fears are unwarranted because avoiding fear of failure keeps the
neurotic from experiencing both failure and success.
Continue to:
My Books
