The Cunning of Geist
074 - Is the Unconscious Mind Real or Fantasy? - B.F. Skinner, Freud, & Hegel
The behaviorism of B.F. Skinner took the psychology world by storm. His 1971 book "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" was hailed as the most important psychological publication of the 20th century. And this was from someone who denied mind and free will.
It was an attempt to dignify psychology as a hard science, based on experiments and what can be observed, rather than what people think or feel, a direct contradiction to the root meaning of word psychology - "a study of mind." He claimed that reason, values, concepts, judgment, and purpose simply do not exist. To him, all actions are based on conditioning.
Hegel laid the groundwork for the unconscious, calling it soul, and saying it is from what consciousness itself comes. Famed psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung built on this with their brilliant conceptions - the reality of the unconscious mind on Freud's part and the collective unconscious from Jung.
This episode discusses all this as well as Novak's personal interactions with Skinnerism in the university setting of the early 1970s.
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