FEST Writing Group

Reading Jim Edd on mind and brain, Victoria on triangles in evolution, and Erik’s thoughts on where science is hobbled, I was stimulated to post what I wrote and presented in Santa Rosa in 1995 which concerns mind, behavior, evolution and the integration of siloed disciplines. I very recently have gone back to looking at this effort towards the value of Bowen theory in integrating the field of Psychology as scientific discipline.

not for distribution

Toward an Integrative Theory of Human Psychology Laura Havstad Ph.D. 

June 11, 1995

For Presentation June 24, Santa Rosa, California

7th Annual Conference on Bowen Family Systems Theory & Psychotherapy

I’ve spent some years on this topic with the idea in mind that it’s a good for science to work at the level of concepts that connect the whole field and relate it to other disciplines. But who cares about science when you’re anxious about the future because all the institutions we depend on don’t seem up to keeping up with the mounting problems that are ever more serious and difficult?

One of the barriers for an anxious clinical family in accepting the idea that the relationships are important in the problem of it’s symptomatic members is the fact that the family has worked so hard to influence and change the patient, . and yet they have failed to impact the problem –it only gets worse.     If the clinician can help the family calm, they can begin to think about the automatic emotional forces that drive them in the relationships more objectively, and then more objectively develop a basis for managing self and quitting the counterproductive effort to change the patient. The role of the clinician is to manage self in the family in a way that stimulates the ability of the potential family leader to separate thinking from automatic emotional reactivity so that a leader can act as a self rather than as a part of the emotional system.

John Calhoun who studied the behavioral impact of overpopulation in his rats of NIMH, documented how the press of social complexity overcame the behavioral differentiation of more and more of the animals until the colony regressed to the point of universal autism and extinction in a environment of physical plenty. Bowen in his concept of societal process defined the process of societal regression and the anxiety that underlies the functional decrease of differentiation and the increase in severe social problems that we now experience. The evidence suggests that the major threat to the viability of homosapiens is the anxious emotional system. The ability of potential leaders to counterbalance the regression will depend on their ability to differentiate as self as the togetherness pressures increase in intensity.

Psychology has become an influential force in society. It affects thinking in all the professions. How the discipline progresses probably is important in the way the whole of society thinks about its problems. With the insurance companies defining clinical practice the press is increasingly towards short term solutions and the more the family uses short term solutions the more chronic the basic problems become. Maybe the importance of objective science to counterbalance the anxious short-term viewpoint is far from being simply academic at this point in history. Maybe objective science is the only way through the problems of a human population that doubles in size twice as quickly as its previous doubling. Using the Von Foerster equation, it is predicted that we will be at the point of instantaneous doubling in the first half of the next century. Many believe that the possibility of maintaining any degree of differentiation of self will be next to nothing at that point.

On the other hand, maybe knowledge will have increased to the point where it will be possible for some to stay above the anxious press and move towards a different but viable future as thinking beings. Calhoun believes this will involve a nodal point in evolution, comparable to the emergence in mammals, that might occur in the crises of the next several hundred years. Will evolution select for differentiation of self if it is there? So far, it’s been one possible path best represented by the human.

The Discipline of Psychology

Psychology as a discipline is very broad and diverse. It is also compartmentalized and the basis of thought in the compartments is different enough that some have argued that psychology is not a single discipline. (Gardner, 1983, Koch, 1985). The traditional subdivisions of psychology are Sensation and Perception, Learning and Memory, Language and Cognition, Emotion and Motivation, Physiological Psychology,

Comparative Psychology and Ethology, Personality, Abnormal, Clinical and Social Psychology. There is no accepted theory of psychology that underlies and exists in common as a basis to all these areas.

The field continues to grapple with the question of what does or should constitute the field of psychology. In honor of the 100-year anniversary of the official founding of psychology as a laboratory science, Sigmund Koch and David Leary put together a volume called A century of

Psychology as Science. Four papers of that volume, by major figures in the field, focus on the problem of what constitutes psychology. Learning researcher George Miller defines the proper domain of psychology as the study of consciousness. Amadeo Georgi says it should be about the study of the relationship of subjectivity to the objective situation. Daniel Robertson makes the case that what is the same about people can be studied scientifically but that individuality is outside the pale of science. Sigmund Koch, who has been an observer of the field for 40 years, arrived at the viewpoint, after 20 of those years, that psychology is not a single or coherent discipline, but rather, ” a collectivity of studies of varied cast, some few of which may qualify as science, while most do not” pp 92. For Koch fields like sensory and biological psychology are part of biology and the natural science, but areas like perception, cognition, motivation, learning, and especially social psychology, psychopathology, personality, and the analysis of creativity are not. This may reflect the polarization between the biotropic and the sociographic poles of the discipline. Koch also seems to have the problem of seeing how science could deal with individuality.

While the old dispute between those believing that psychology should study only behavior and those who would focus their efforts on mind does not have the intensity of the previous generation of psychologists, the problems of relating the social level of psychology to the biological level, and that of dealing with the individual remain.

Nevertheless, new knowledge increasingly creates the possibility of bridging the gap. Since the individual is an integrated organism with sensations, perceptions, motivations, cognitions, feelings, neurophysiology, and social relations, it seems reasonable to expect a science of psychology to account for their functions within the integrated unit of the individual.

Psychology as a Natural System.

Bowen defined his Family Systems Theory as a Natural Systems Theory with basic characteristics in common with the other natural systems that are products of evolution. The position I want to put forward is that conceptualizing psychology as a natural system provides a basis for fitting together the pieces in a science of psychology that has the coherence to match that of the organism it attempts to represent. This coherence is envisioned within Webster’s Dictionary definition of mind as an organic system reaching all parts of the body and serving to adjust the total organism to the needs or demands of the environment. This is of course, the function of the central nervous system and especially the brain.

When did psychology begin in evolution? Probably with the appearance of the central nervous system, which functions to coordinate the life activity of complex organisms with multiple functions that are interdependent and require integration with one another for the viability of the total organism. The psychological system is a product of the brain which, as the central guidance system for the organism, has three primary and interdependent functions. These are regulation of physiological processes fundamental to life support, regulation of behavior in relation to the environment and regulation of behavior in relation to the social unit of which it is a part. Another way of saying this is that there are three adaptive interfaces for the psychological system– the body, the physical environment, and the social unit.

Webster’s Dictionary defines psychology in three ways as l. the science dealing with the mind and mental processes, feelings, desires, etc.

2. the science of human and animal behavior, and 3. the sum of a person’s actions traits attitudes thoughts, etc. or what I call the individual. In fact, I believe the dictionary does a good job of defining what psychology has been. The definition represents three ways– even three paradigms– of the way psychology as a discipline has broadly conceptualized psychological phenomena: That is, psychology as the study of mind; psychology as the study of of behavior; and psychology as the study of the person. I believe all are incorporated in the paradigm of Psychology as a Natural System. .

Going into this review of psychology, I had the idea that one of the major contributions that Bowen Theory might make to psychology would be a conceptual framework to guide thinking in psychology in a way that would extend it’s scientific reach even into areas like personality and social psychology that have unsuccessfully relied on scientific method to move into science. These are the areas of psychology most identified with the paradigm of the person as the object of study, a concern with the individual which found it’s fullest expression in the Humanistic Theories that have contributed much to clinical practice,

In the face of the facts of individual differences, it has been difficult for the field to define the consistent dimensions along which personality develops and varies.        Variation in personality is a product of many different forces of heredity, physiology, and relationships, but underlying all the variation is the constant of differentiation of self in the emotional system. The concept of differentiation of self in the emotional system conceptually links the psychology of the individual with the primary adaptive function of regulating mind and behavior in the relationship system. Bowen Theory makes a unique contribution in being a single theory encompassing the psychology of the individual and the nature of the social unit to which it adapts.

By encompassing the psychology of the individual and the nature of the social unit, Bowen Theory itself provides an integrative framework for all the areas of psychology that deal with the psychological functions regulating adaptation in the social unit and their impact on the other adaptive functions of the psychological system. If the theory is an adequate framework it has to incorporate all the existing factual knowledge in the field. Behaviorist social learning theory and psychoanalysis are the predominant theoretical orientations that attempt to account for how personal development is a product of relationships. Both are dyadic theories. Since the basic unit of the emotional system is the triangle, the characteristics of any dyad and the ability of one individual to influence or condition the other is in large part a function of the triangled position in which it is operating. The parent in the outside position has less influence on the child. The therapist has credibility with the patient because of the society that licenses him. Such interlocking triangles operate in the context of the balance of individuality and togetherness forces in the group which, together with the level of anxiety, regulate the level of differentiation of self the individual is likely to achieve in life.

The level of differentiation of self determines how much the mind and behavior of the individual is conditioned by the group and how much is freely chosen by the person. What a person chooses by free will is not necessarily predictable by science, but the capacity to freely choose can be defined and studied within science. Within the individual this capacity to be an individual separate from the group, is a product of the functional differentiation of the intellectual and emotional systems that make up mind and drive behavior.

The intellectual system is distinctly different than the emotional system. All behavior can be ranked on a continuum from automatic and reflexive to deliberate and thoughtful. One path of evolution has proceeded towards more complex organisms with increasingly large brains comprised of complex brain cell networks that mediate responses to the environment. Sensitization and habituation are primitive forms of learning that result in conditioned, reflexive behavior that is still the emotional system. Whenever brain mediated decision making emerged in evolution, that began the intellectual system as I think of it. Maybe that goes back even to the insects.

The central nervous system regulates behavior of the animal in the physical environment and in the social unit. Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr observed that across many species, the flexibility that is indicative of brain mediated decision making, is more common in the animal’s behavior in the physical environment. Behavior between animals interacting is more rigid and stereotyped because, Mayr suggests, communicative behavior must be stereotyped in order to be understood. This is evidence that the intellectual system which underlies the behavioral flexibility that incorporates learning from new experiences evolved earlier and to a greater extent in the physical environment.

Meanwhile, behavior in the relationship unit retained functioning characteristics of the more reflexive nature associated with the emotional system. Thus we made it into outer space before eliminating war.

      Our relative freedom to act in the environment is based on a sense perception system that automatically provides us with factual knowledge of the environment and our position in it that, for instance, works better for seeing where we are in the visual environment than it does for seeing ourselves in our emotional system. Theoretical knowledge of the emotional system gives us a better chance of seeing it and overriding the automatic emotional reactions in favor of a more objective ability to observe it and ourselves in it. Thus we can modify our functional level of differentiation and maybe improve the functioning of the group, and the basic level of future generations. The better we see, the better we can be.

The potential for behavioral flexibility and differentiation of self increased as the psychological system became elaborated in evolution. Recognizing this advanced potential that is the product of the evolved intellect, Bowen also based his theory on the recognition of how much of humanity is a product of the emotional system we share with the other life forms.

Back to Jack Calhoun. As population and environmental pressures mount they threaten to dissemble the evolutionary pathway of the evolving psychological system that underlies the potential for differentiation of self. Societal anxiety increases the force for togetherness promoting the emotional brain over the intellectual system. The frequency of emotional illness and other failures of adaptation increases. Calhoun suggests one evolutionary pathway will be the reversion to biological man. Another could involve increasing psychological capacity to define a self in the exponentially increasing complexity. The human pathway through evolution could remain on course and move forward.

As I review the field of psychology I am struck by the breadth and diversity of the field. Psychologists have grappled with the contributions of evolution, genetics, instinct, emotion, physiology, relationships, culture, intellect, reflex and thought. In a way it’s all there– the natural system that is psychology– but for the compartmentalization of the knowledge. Ernst Mayr was on a wavelength with Bowen when he wrote that scientific progress is based more on the progress of conceptualization than it is on new knowledge. One expression of this viewpoint was Bowen’s stated belief that schizophrenia would not be understood until psychology, sociology, biology, evolution, behavior, and medicine could all be understood within a single frame of reference and that the key to a comprehensive natural systems theory was in conceptualizing behavior.

I find suggesting that the emotional system and differentiation of self are capable of being presiding variables in a science of human behavior that could contribute to our own evolution through a perilous future. And that like a family member that is motivated to pull self together at a new level when a real crisis threatens, maybe the perilous future is arriving soon enough that the profession will be motivated to pull itself together if a way to do it is known.

I propose this as a potentially inclusive framework or paradigm for the study of psychology as a natural system: The psychological system includes the evolving emotional and intellectual systems that are a product of a central nervous system and the evolving brain. This psychological system coordinates much of physiology and underlies the behavior of the individual in the physical environment, and in the system of fundamental counterbalancing individuality and togetherness life forces that organize the social unit. The emotional system of opposing togetherness and individuality forces in the relationship system in turn regulates the differentiation of the emotional and intellectual systems that comprise the mind and underlies the behavior of the individual.