Totem and Taboo

B.F. SKINNER wanted to write his autobiography. So, true to form, he set out to manipulate his external circumstances so as to maximize the productivity of his pen hand. He established a daily regiment: two hours of work in a room maintained at optimal temperature and humidity, at precisely the same time each morning, immediately followed by lunch, his reward. He carried a pen and pad with him at all times, and kept a tape recorder at bedside, as crutches for his fallible human memory, which might miss stray bits of "verbal behavior" that popped out at inconvenient times. He also probably made use of his "spare mind"--catalogued files of index cards which contain each idea he has had about psychology, and the date it occurred to him.

What results from this greenhouse approach to writing is not so much an interpretive autobiography as the most comprehensive lab report in the history of science. In exhaustive--and exhausting--detail, we follow Skinner through a curious childhood and a lonely, almost morose, adolescence in a drab Pennsylvania town. Skinner recounts Kollege Kid pranks and personality molding teachers at Hamilton College, a year as a struggling writer, and a bohemian period in Greenwich Village.

Particulars of My Life is not a no-one-understood-me confessional, as one-might expect from one who has been an intellectual bull's-eye for both the political right and left for so long. In fact, the traditional autobiographer's tools of the trade are completely lacking from this book. There are no crucial turning points, guiding-light ideals, or thematic "periods" of his life, and certainly no emotional traumas to scar the boy for life. (Skinner's only apparent reference to psychoanalysis is a dig at Freud while he describes an after school pastime--crawling into an old enclosed bookcase. "Both the isolation and the miniaturization appealed to me, but the almost fetal position was not consoling; on the contrary it was uncomfortably cramped.)

Instead, Skinner constructs a meticulous chronological listing of his life's events. (A short section at the end which backtracks to follow the thread of psychological curiosity through his life is an exception.) But Skinner has a purpose for the resulting "and then" paratactical tedium of his style. Even his detractors laud his achievements in the development of teaching machines and in animal training, and grudgingly admit the success of behavior modification with autistic children and the mentally ill. But the concept of a genetically-and environmentally-programmed existence, of an a-responsible, un-free person rebounding from punishment to reward, has stuck in the craw of humanists from George Bernard Shaw to William F. Buckley, Jr. Metaphysics aside, they have argued, the sheer complexity of our experiences would preclude a valid forecast of future action.

SKINNER'S PURPOSE is to prove the humanists wrong. This most intimate of case studies documents almost every behavioral influence in his life. Vignettes of ancestors three generations back provide the genetic angle. Next comes the history of reinforcements and punishments which channel his growth. As a boy, for instance, he stole a trinket from a store, and felt guilty for a week. Later we learn of family field trips to prisons, and a grandmother's promises of hell "like the inside of a potbellied stove" for sinners. The connection is obvious.

By its nature, such a self-study is liable to lack objectivity. Dr. James Watson, the founder of behavioral psychology, pointed out that none of our knowledge can depend on data in which the observer and the observed are in the same person. The prohibition was lamentable, from the viewpoint of a fuller understanding of human behavior--after all, who but the individual himself is always present, with a front-seat view of everything he does? Freud recognized the risks involved in self-analysis, but rejected the loss to the behavioral sciences imposed by Watson's prohibition and so ignored it. Through exhaustive self-examination, he arrived at the principles of introspective psychology. Skinner overcomes the stricture by stepping outside himself. He considers only those aspects of himself which are publicly observable. The book includes excerpts from high school compositions, letters home, and his early poetry (which would have been better off only privately observable.)

AT THIS POINT I must confess a certain bias in this review. I have long admired Skinner and his philosophy. He holds out to the uninitiated a few reasonable axioms. Once you swallow them--as I did--you are swept along by a dogma as internally consistent and all-encompassing as Marxism. With precision and specificity, Skinner tackles the philosophical dilemmas of the ages--free will, consciousness, and "the good." But the person Skinner leaves us with is a mere puppet, without purpose and dignity. He speaks of the self as nothing more than "the small part of the universe which is within one's own skin."

What sort of relationship does such a man have with himself? Long before he turned to psychology--which was not until his twenties--he kept careful diaries of interesting occurrences. He hoped to be a writer then and composed poems and short stories by the notebook. Wittingly or not, almost all had a common protagonist--himself. Skinner was preoccupied with himself throughout his youth, but only as an alien object, a specimen. (In his first experiment with behavior modification, he invented a Rube Goldberg contraption to raise a "Hang Your Pajamas" sign in his doorway when he stepped out of bed.)

Particulars of My Life, the opening volume of Skinner's autobiography, ends as he packs his bags to leave for graduate study in psychology at Harvard. Still to come are his years of pioneering research, his prolific writing career, and his eventual rise to the position of spokesman for the school of behavioristic psychology. The book does have its personable side, for Skinner doesn't balk at recounting more commonplace exploits that we can sympathize with: for example, his bumbling adolescent sexual adventures, reminiscent of those of Holden Cauldfield and Woody Allen. But although ordered, it is not cohesive, and appeals mainly to a circle of dedicated admirers curious about this "queer bird's" personal history and feelings about himself. The episodic sit-on-my-knee-grandson-and-I'll-tell-you-a-story style might well put the general reader to sleep before grandpa.