Behavioral psychoanalysis: a new theory

NOTE: I will use “psychoanalysis” and “psychodynamic psychology” interchangeably in this article. This means that when I say “psychoanalysis”, it includes Jung and Adler too.

For the past few months, I have been working on a theory that I’ve decided to (perhaps, temporarily) call “behavioral psychoanalysis”. With a little exaggeration, one may consider it a system, a framework or even a paradigm in psychology. Its name comes from combining aspects of both behaviorism and psychoanalysis while also abandoning a few aspects of each. It is “behavioral psychoanalysis” and not “psychoanalytic behaviorism” because it studies the conclusions that the psychoanalysts arrived at with the methods and terminology of behaviorism, and not the other way around. In this article, I will try to outline the main ideas and assumptions of behavioral psychoanalysis as briefly as possible, and then give some examples of its applications (transference, death drive, defense mechanisms, etc.).

COMPATIBILITY:

Psychoanalysis and behaviorism are two different paradigms with points of intersection (compatibility) and points of conflict (contradictions between them). What psychoanalysis and behaviorism have in common are the following assumptions:

-Current thoughts, feelings, behaviors, symptoms, desires and perceptions have a distant cause in the past, where one or more events in the distant past still have a causal effect upon the subject presently.

-Thoughts and beliefs cannot be trusted at their face value, and may be used by the mind as retroactive justifications for other phenomena, such as behavior.¹

-Both behaviorism and psychoanalysis are at least partially deterministic, assuming that events from the past may control us in ways in which we are not fully aware of, creating the illusion of free will.

 

CONFLICT:

-Psychoanalysis views introspection as valuable, while behaviorism views “mentalism” as a complete waste of time. I will side with the former view, obviously.

-Psychoanalysis views humans and animals as way more different than behaviorism views them. I am agnostic/undecided on this issue so far.

AIM:

The aim of behavioral psychoanalysis is to reframe/reformulate (or in the worst case, slightly modify) many psychoanalytic theories in different terminology such that they become an empirically testable and falsifiable science. I believe that most of psychoanalysis shouldn’t be abandoned, but reformulated. I think that behaviorism is the best tool for this job that I’ve seen so far (to reformulate psychoanalysis in behaviorist language, and not the other way around).

 

FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTIONS:

The fundamental assumption at the base of behavioral psychoanalysis is that any event, or any stimuli, has both a “good” and a “bad” side to it, both a “positive” and a “negative” part, or more precisely, has both advantages and disadvantages, or even more precisely, any stimulus is both reinforcing and punishing at the same time. Therefore, absolutely any human act is inherently a masochistic act, since it incites both pain and pleasure in the subject in some form, regardless of how aware the subject is of this fact. Even something as horrible as being a parent and one of your children dying has a good side to it (you have more free time, more money, less stress, etc.), despite how cynical and offensive it may sound to even suggest something like this. In fact, I suspect that one of the reasons that what I said sounds so cynical in the first place is because humans have developed certain defense mechanisms to hide this dualistic nature of pleasure + pain in anything that happens, but more on this later.

This is why Skinner’s animal models were a very simplified model of humans, since there is no such thing as receiving either a reinforcement or a punishment. Therefore, the important question becomes not “is this stimulus reinforcing or punishing?” but, instead, “is this stimulus more reinforcing than punishing or more punishing than reinforcing?”. In other words, it’s not about whether something is “a good thing” or “a bad thing”, but the actual question is “Does the good outweigh the bad or vice-versa?”. Hence, you being happy after getting a promotion at work is not equivalent to a rat getting a piece of food, but to a rat getting a piece of food and a very small electric shock at the same time, since you also may have to tolerate your annoying coworker, which is a disadvantage. And, you being depressed after your grandparents dying in an accident is not equivalent to a rat getting an electric shock, but equivalent to a rat getting an electric shock and a very small piece of food, since you now also inherit their wealth.

To sum it up, this is the very basic assumption underlying behavioral psychoanalysis: inner conflict is at the very base of human behavior. Any stimulus we’re presented with is both reinforcing and punishing. The object of study in behavioral psychoanalysis is: what are the different ways in which humans deal with this conflict, and what are their consequences?

Hence, this “modified behaviorist” model of operand conditioning, where reinforcement and punishment happen simultaneously, is compatible with the following psychoanalytic concepts (among others):

-ambivalence (from Freud): this is the confrontation with a situation that a person has “mixed feelings” towards. This shall not be confused with “indecisiveness”. Under the framework of behavioral psychoanalysis, the subject is ambivalent, by default, towards all stimuli, despite their level of awareness of this fact.

-compromise formation (from Freud): this is the mechanism by which we resolve ambivalence.

-jouissance (from Lacan): this is a word that is usually left untranslated from French, in context referring to a form of pleasure that is so intense that it becomes painful. For example, think of enjoying how a cake tastes so much that you keep eating even after your stomach hurts.

-the tension of opposites (from Jung): self-explanatory.

 

DEFENSE MECHANISMS TO HIDE THE INNER CONFLICT:

Since the choices we make will involve measuring whether the good outweighs the bad or not, any human decision is, implicitly, a form of sacrifice. For a simple example, if I choose to also work during college, I gain more money I can spend, but I lose most of my free time. If I choose to not work, I have more free time, but also less money compared to what I would have had if I had chosen to work. No matter what you do, you gain something and you lose something. Therefore, your choices always involve losing something, in other words, what you sacrifice. Here, do you sacrifice your time or your money?

From this, we can easily hypothesize that not everyone is fully aware of all the gains and losses of events in their control (choices) or events outside their control. The question of study for behavioral psychoanalysis here is: what are the different ways in which people can be (un)aware of the ways in which stimuli is reinforcing and/or punishing?

For example, perhaps most of the defense mechanisms described by various schools of psychoanalysis (foreclosure, repression, disavowal, reaction formation, projection, splitting, projective identification) are different ways in which our minds try to make us “unaware” of the inherent sacrifice (loss) to our events. Back to our previous example: if I choose to work during college, I could develop certain mechanisms to either distract myself, or completely forget, or even not realize in the first place the fact that I have less free time, and vice-versa if I choose the “more free time but less money” route.

By reformulating each of the psychoanalytic defense mechanisms in terms of reinforcement, punishment, conscious awareness, and modern theories of attention and memory, we can modify them into something that is way closer to a theory that can be tested in a laboratory setting.

For example: the seemingly unfalsifiable Lacanian claim that “obsessional neurotics are marked by a profound sense of symbolic debt” can be combined with the idea that the Lacanian clinical structure of “obsessional neurosis” is likely positively correlated with both OCD and OCPD, and it can now turn into “people diagnosed with OCD and/or OCPD are more focused than the average person on the things they sacrificed/missed out on due to their choices, trying to make up for it in the future”. Notice how the apparent “vague and abstract philosophical-ish pseudoscientific” psychoanalysis quickly turned into something precise and concrete enough to be tested.

 

THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE AND REALITY PRINCIPLE:

The “outdated and unfalsifiable” theories of Freud about the pleasure and reality principles can be reformulated as follows:

The pleasure principle is a mechanism by which we sacrifice long-term gain in favor of short-term gain and/or avoid short-term loss by accepting long-term loss. Here, “gain” and “loss” are related to “reinforcing stimulus” and “punishing stimulus”, respectively. This shall not be confused with “impulsivity”, as it can, in some cases, be a well-thought-out decision.

The reality principle is the opposite: a mechanism by which we sacrifice short-term gain in favor of long-term gain and/or avoid long-term loss by accepting short-term loss.

When a person is more dominated by the pleasure principle rather than by the reality principle, we usually refer to them as “lacking in self-control”.

For example: I am on a diet, seeking to lose weight, and I pass by a bakery, smelling some delicious cake, one of my favorite foods. I have to choose between two options: go and eat cake or don’t go and eat cake. If I go and eat the cake, I am giving in to the pleasure principle, which is a good decision only on the short-term, but not a good one on the long-term. If I choose to control myself and abstain, I will suffer a bit on the short-term in order to suffer less overall on the long-term, and I am now abiding by the reality principle.

When phrased in this more specific and concrete way, we can empirically test various psychoanalytic claims about the pleasure and reality principles by various authors.

NOTE: I did not (yet?) borrow Freud’s connection between these two principles and the biological side of them, as well as Freud’s connection between the pleasure principle and the concept of homeostasis. For these reasons, one could argue that my reformulation of the pleasure and reality principles is not strictly Freudian (which is obviously not necessarily a bad thing), and not exactly what Freud meant by the two principles, although I still think it is very close. For this reason, I may change the names of those two principles in the future if I find out that Freud’s description of the reality and pleasure principles is different enough from mine

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THE DEATH DRIVE, OR THE COMPULSION TO REPEAT:

NOTE: This section of this article (“the death drive, or the compulsion to repeat”), as well as the next one (“what is the unconscious, really?”) will also be a partial reply to this video about “unconsciously seeking abusers”, since it is exactly what prompted me to create this theory in the first place, agreeing with certain parts of his video while disagreeing with others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_I8G1BWdLM

In 1920, Freud published “Beyond the pleasure principle” and challenged his previous view that all human behavior can be explained by the pleasure and reality principles. He added a third “principle”/mechanism: the death drive². The death drive would explain why many of his patients keep getting themselves in “bad” situations. Not only that, but many of them kept getting themselves into the same bad situations again and again, by “coincidence”: the same toxic relationship again and again, stabbed in the back by your friends in the same way again and again, losing your money in the same way again and again, rejected by employers with the same excuse again and again, scammed by phone calls in the same way again and again, etc.

This led Freud to formulate a third principle guiding human behavior: a drive towards self-destruction: the death drive.

The way I view the problem of “getting yourself in the same trashy situation again and again until it looks like a spooky coincidence” through behavioral psychoanalysis is that a person has certain behaviors that increase or decrease their probability of getting themselves into such situations, and that those behaviors are either reinforced now or were reinforced in the past. The general formula is this: a certain behavior/personality trait increases your probability of getting in that negative situation. However, some time earlier in life, that situation was more rewarding than punishing. Hence, whatever you were doing right before you got in those situations got both reinforced and punished, but more reinforced than punished, which will cause you to keep doing it. Now you’re doomed to repeat the same traumatic event again and again (as Freud suggested in “Beyond the pleasure principle”).

For example, it has been shown that psychopathic inmates are more likely to accurately judge how vulnerable a potential victim is to abuse, strictly using body language.³ A hypothetical example (although a bit exaggerated/over-simplified, since it’s for the sake of example) of what could happen to one of those women is this: she happens to use this body language some time for some reason, and while using this body language in a social situation, a psychopath abuser sees her and hits on her. They get into a relationship and it turns out to be a toxic relationship in which he abuser her. But, only in some cases, this abusive relationship will be more rewarding than punishing to a woman (for example, she’d rather be in a toxic relationship than lonely, so the overall relationship is “more pleasurable than painful, while still both pleasurable and painful”). Hence, her behavior right before getting into the relationship is more reinforced than punished and whatever she did right before getting into it (including body language and facial expressions) will be crystalized into personality traits. This only makes her more vulnerable to other psychopathic abusers, and another abuser notices her body language and hits on her, and the same situation happens again, but if this relationship is also more reinforcing than punishing, then the body language will get even more crystalized, and so on the cycle continues.

Another hypothetical example: a child is raised by a mother who does not usually like to cook his favorite food. On the special occasions that she does, she humiliatingly insults him for having her do all this work for him (“you little ungrateful brat, look at how much I’m doing for you!”). Each time the child receives his favorite food, he’s both rewarded (delicious food) and punished (humiliated, insulted); but let’s say that the benefit of having the food outweighs the cost of being humiliated (“both pleasure and pain but more pleasure than pain”). Then, everything that he does right before he convinces his mother to cook his favorite food is more reinforced than punished, and the behavior crystalizes into him each time to the point of becoming a habit or unconscious automatism. In the specific cases in which the behavior is something that would provoke not only his mother, but more people in general, to humiliate him (similar to the victim-psychopath abuser example from before); he might end up later in life asking “why does this always happen to me?” – maybe he will get into the same humiliating situation again and again (into “the closed circuit of the death drive”, to paraphrase Lacan).

Hence, the idea of “unconsciously seeking abusers” is only a metaphor for the process of engaging in a behavior that increases your chances of, say, meeting an abuser, with the subject either being unaware (i.e. unconscious) of the causal relation between the behavior and the event, or even unaware of both the initial behavior and its causal effect upon the even that repeats itself. But, the basic psychoanalytic principle of “making the unconscious conscious” still remains, since you are trying to make the subject aware of what they were previously unaware about. Here, the famous Jung quote that “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate” is the most applicable. More on this in the next section.

As a final note about this, it should be pointed out how much Skinner and Freud agree/converge on this issue. For example, if you asked Freud why people with psychosomatic disorder “cling to their illness”, he’d say that there’s a secondary benefit to their illness, like social or financial gains. If you’d ask Skinner why pretty much anything happens, he’d say that it’s because a behavior associated with it was reinforced in the past (so there is a secondary benefit to it right now, or there was a secondary benefit to it in the past even when there is not anymore). Hence, both Freud and Skinner would have thought almost the same thing about why self-destructive behavior happens (because it is/was reinforced, or because there is/was a secondary ‘gain’ to it, pretty much the same thing).

However, unlike Skinner, I acknowledge the importance of introspection and the so-called “mentalism” in making the subject aware of these behaviors. I acknowledge that some subjects may be consciously aware of “hidden reinforcing benefits” to certain symptoms or situations while others aren’t, so it is still important to talk about the unconscious and how to make it conscious.

My explanation for the death drive is analogous to the concept of “mismatch theory” or “evolutionary trap” in evolutionary biology: the idea that evolved traits in an organism were once advantageous but became maladaptive due to changes in environment. For example, we have evolved to become more likely to vomit whenever the liquid in our ears detects movement while our eyes detect stillness. This was advantageous in the past, since whenever humans got themselves in such a situation, they were poisoned. Nowadays, it is an annoying relic of evolution, since usually when humans get themselves in that situation, they are experiencing “car sickness”, but evolution didn’t adapt to the existence of cars yet. We could say, with a little exaggeration, that evolution suffers from a certain “inertia”.

Similarly enough, self-destructive behavior such as not being able to say no, or even something subtle such as facial expressions and body language, can be the best (or better said, “least bad”) strategy in childhood, but due to a certain ‘adaptive inertia’, these mechanisms will carry on into adulthood, being maladaptive, potentially getting a person into “the same situation again and again”.

 

WHAT IS THE UNCONSCIOUS HERE, REALLY?

For the moment, I define “the unconscious”, in behavioral psychoanalysis, as “the unknown connection between cause and effect, where the cause is inherently subjective, that is, where the cause is directly related to the subject’s own behaviors, emotions, thoughts, perceptions or past life experiences”. This definition might change in the future if I find that it is too broad or too specific. This definition is inspired by the beginning of Lacan’s eleventh seminar, where he also postulates that the unconscious is “the gap between cause and effect”, after making a clear distinction between law and causality⁴.

Here, I reject the idea of the unconscious as a “depth”, or as a “thing”, as if there is a “thing” somewhere deep in your mind that is controlling your behavior. No, I suggest instead that the unconscious is simply the sum of all information that you do not know, but of a specific kind. We could say then, with a little exaggeration, that “the unconscious is outside your brain”. For example, on a school test you did not prepare for, you do not know the answers to some of the questions. That unknown information is not “in your brain somewhere”, but it is affecting you. However, I don’t consider it part of the unconscious, since the unconscious is the sum of a more specific kind of unknown information, in order to not make the definition absurdly broad.

I found only two theories that come relatively close to describing the unconscious this way:

The first theory is Mark Solms' neuropsychoanalysis. He suggests that the unconscious cannot be localized in a specific part of the brain, and thus borrows Luria's neuroscientific method of describing psychic functions as the result of multiple parts of the brain interacting together. This is why we can't ask "where" the unconscious is. For example, "where" is the digestive function of the body? The mouth, the esophagus, the stomach, the intensities all take part in the digestive function, but we don't call the sum of those the digestive function, we call it the digestive tract. The digestive function is an abstract concept, not something that literally "exists" in physical reality, not something you can touch, but simply an idea, a propriety, or more precisely, a function of the body. Similarly enough, Solms identifies the unconscious not as "existing" in a specific region of the brain, but being an effect of multiple parts of the brain interacting together. He then studies patients with brain damage in order to localize what parts of the brain are necessary and/or sufficient conditions for specific functions of the unconscious (ego, super-ego, dreams, etc.).

The second theory is the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. For Lacan, the unconscious is also not a specific concrete "thing" that "exists", but also an effect, it is the effect that the language has on the subject. Lacan says that the unconscious is not somewhere in your brain, but it is "outside" of your mind, in language and society. He describes "everything else that is not me" as "the big Other", which includes society, culture and language - anything involved in social interaction. He says that the unconscious is "the discourse of the big Other" - it is not something that "exists" in your mind, but the effects that living in society has upon you. He also suggests that "the unconscious is structured like a language". In the beginning of his eleventh seminar, he suggests that the unconscious is "the gap between cause and effect" - which would also suggest that the unconscious is not a localizable "thing that exists", but closer to something more like "the sum of all weird, unexplainable things that you do, or that happen to you". 

For Lacan, "the big Other" was the sum of all nonsense and all contradictions - something that is supposed to exist and simultaneously defies the definition of existence itself (what some religious people call "God" and what Freud called "the unconscious", and I add to this: what physics calls "dark matter"⁵). However, sometimes it seems to me that Lacan didn't go far enough in this direction, because he also always talks about "unconscious desire" as if the unconscious was "a thing" that desires, potentially causing some misunderstandings.

It is here that I must abandon a few concepts from psychoanalysis. I mainly reject two things that can be seen across most schools of psychoanalysis, to various extents:

1. The formulation of “unconscious wishes” (Freud) or “unconscious desire” (Lacan)

2. The identification of a person with their unconscious

On the first point, we must first ask ourselves: what does it mean to “unconsciously want” something? The deeper you think about it, the less it makes literal sense, despite the fact that it can make a lot of metaphorical sense. Is the definition of “what you want/desire”, what you are consciously striving to achieve? That would contradict the idea that it is unconscious. It is the definition of “what you want/desire”, then, what you like, despite being unaware of it? That would contradict the idea that people can unconsciously wish for self-destructive things that they do not enjoy, and that they go to therapy for in order to remove them.

Considering all this, within behavioral psychoanalysis I seek to remove the formulation of “unconscious wish/desire” as much as possible, because it is too vague and imprecise, while still acknowledging that it can be a very good metaphor for what actually goes on.

The way to reformulate most theories about unconscious wishes and desires would be, and this is where I again turn to behaviorism, to formulate them in terms of reinforcement. Thus, when Freud says, in “Totem and taboo”, that (paraphrasing) “obsessional neurotics unconsciously wish for their intrusive thoughts to turn into reality, despite the fact that they think that they do not want it, and we must make them aware of this wish”, it should be reformulated as “people with OCD are not aware of the ways in which it would be reinforcing for their intrusive thoughts to come true, and we must make them aware”. Now we are getting closer to a testable hypothesis.

Freud did not always formulate his theories in terms of unconscious wishes. For example, when talking about psychosomatic symptoms, he did not talk about “unconscious wishes”, but “secondary benefits”, and “secondary benefit” is almost the same thing as “hidden reinforcement”. I prefer this Freud, who talks about secondary benefits/gains, instead of unconscious wishes.

Now let us talk about the second point, the identification of a person with their unconscious. What does it mean when we tell a person: “the reason you are always abused is because you unconsciously want to be abused, but you don’t even realize you want it”? I reject this formulation (if interpreted literally, and not metaphorically) as worse than unfalsifiable, as nonsense, I don’t even know what it’s supposed to mean. Instead, a slightly better way to phrase it would be “There is something inside of yourself that wants to be abused, pulling the strings, going against your conscious wishes”. Here, the unconscious is placed as something “other” than you, or should I better say, ”Other” than you, with a capital “O”, to use Lacan’s theory: it’s not you who wants to be abused, it’s something inside of yourself that is not you that wants to be abused. This is a bit closer to something that is precise and also less likely to offend the client and make them never come back to the therapist again. However, it is still not precise enough, and also somewhat nonsense, just a more acceptable metaphor. How about we formulate it even better: “You are not aware of the ways in which being abused is and/or was reinforcing now and/or in the past” (similarly to Freud’s theory of secondary gains from symptoms). This is precise, exact, concrete, falsifiable, and even less likely to offend the patient. If psychoanalysts formulated their theories this way, they would be taken more seriously by both their analysands and the scientific community.

To understand why “unconscious wish/desire” is still an accurate metaphor for the actual process, consider again the example of “evolutionary mismatch”: we often say that when we get car sickness, the liquid in our ears detects movement, while our eyes detect stillness, so the body ”thinks” it’s poisoned. However, what does it mean for the body to “think” it’s poisoned? In fact, the body doesn’t think anything. We don’t consciously think we’re poisoned either. So what is going on? Clearly, a metaphor: the literal explanation is that the body evolved to respond to a certain stimulus (ear liquid detecting movement + eyes detecting stillness) with a certain response (vomit), and the reason it evolved this way is in order to avoid being poisoned, but no one was really aware (“conscious”) of the connection between this evolutionary mechanism and its cause until the evolutionary biologists pointed it out. However, we can metaphorically think that there is a minion inside your brain, like in that “Inside Out” movie, that sees the liquid in your ears, and then sees what your eyes detect, and ‘thinks’: “Time to press the vomit button”.

Similarly enough, if a victim of abuse keeps getting into the same kind of toxic relationship again and again, we can metaphorically think that there’s a minion inside their head “pulling the strings”, as if there was something inside their head which wanted them to be abused, with a big emphasis on the “as if”. But, in reality, there is no literal “unconscious wish”, there are simply stimuli and conditioned responses.

In the TheraminTrees Youtube video named “unconsciously seeking abusers | bogus therapy”, he correctly identified a big problem in psychoanalysis that no one talks about (the identification of the analysand with their unconscious, as if the subject “is” their unconscious, which makes no sense in my definition of the unconscious as ‘unknown knowledge’), but came to the absurd conclusions that psychoanalysis should be abandoned entirely because it is an abusive gaslighting practice, or that any claims about the unconscious are unfalsifiable. In fact, we can make falsifiable hypotheses about unknown knowledge regarding causality. If you look at the alternative that TheraminTrees proposes to “the peddlers of the unconscious”, it is also about changing the client’s behavior, so he also started, just like me, from the assumption that if a person gets themselves into the same situation again and again, then they must be doing a behavior again and again that increases their probability of getting into that situation, and that they may be unaware (read: UNCONSCIOUS) of that behavior. There, we agree.

 

TRANSFERENCE AND THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX:

Transference, in psychoanalysis, is the process of “transferring” your feelings about one object/entity/person onto another, like if your emotions were “copy-pasted” from one object to another, to make an analogy with computers. The most classic examples of transference are “repeating the relationship you had with one or both of your parents while you are with a romantic partner” or “having the same feelings towards your therapist(s) as you had towards one or both of your parents”, but transference is not limited to this.

The way in which my proposed theory of behavioral analysis suggests understanding transference is by a mix of classical and operand conditioning, and specific proprieties of each. Classical conditioning would explain the more common definition of transference, that in which feelings/emotions/affects are “copy-pasted” from one person/object to another. Operand conditioning should be added when behaviors are also repeated (the events in my relationships repeat themselves).

Transference, in behavioral psychoanalysis, can be explained by the generalization of classically conditioned responses. For example, if I have a negative experience with cockroaches, I might develop a phobia of cockroaches, and this phobia might generalize upon a phobia of spiders just because spiders and cockroaches look similar, despite the fact that I did not have a similar negative experience with spiders. We can say, in psychoanalytic terms, that the phobia of cockroaches transferred onto spiders.

Now let us look at the Oedipus complex. Freud says that men unconsciously wish to have sex with their mother, despite the fact that they don’t even realize they want it. Combining our explanation of transference with our explanation of “unconscious wishes” in the previous section, we can translate it into this:

Firstly, the baby is usually breastfed by their mother. Breastfeeding is inherently an act of physical intimacy. Certain classically conditioned responses (aversion, jealousy, possessiveness, fear, anger, resentment, disgust, hatred, attraction, or a complex mix of the above) develop towards the mother during breastfeeding, or even outside of the act of breastfeeding. These classically conditioned responses may generalize upon the larger category of “people I was physically intimate with”, since breastfeeding is an act of physical intimacy. Later in life, a man’s girlfriends will also fall into the larger category of “people I am/was physically intimate with”, so the conditioned responses towards his mother will transfer onto his girlfriends. This is a metaphorical explanation of the Oedipus complex.

When it comes to repeating a situation from childhood with other people (in terms of its events), behavior becomes involved, although this is less often referred to as “transference” in psychoanalysis. Here, operand conditioning is also involved. An explanation of this is already offered in the section about the death drive and the compulsion to repeat (“why do I get myself into the same relationships again and again?”).

 

ARCHETYPES AND GENERAL CATEGORIES:

Behaviorism teaches us that conditioned responses can generalize upon larger, “general categories”, for example a response towards spiders can generalize upon “insects”, or not. When such a general category is so general and inclusive that we see recurring stories (that follow a pattern) across mythology, religious texts and fairy tales, Jung called it an “archetype”. Lacan also had certain terms that he did not call “archetypes” but that pretty neatly fall into this definition of ‘archetype’: the big Other, the imaginary/symbolic phallus, the ego-ideal and the ideal-ego, objet petit a, the imaginary/symbolic father, etc. For example, what Jung calls “the archetype of The Great Mother” is equivalent to Lacan’s “big Other”: the general category of “things/people that give me a suffocating sense of being surrounded, without escape”. Or, what Jung called “the anima” is a subset of what Lacan called objet petit a, the general category of “things that do not exist, but that I erroneously think/hope they exist, and that I consciously wish to obtain, that I will obviously never obtain because they do not exist, but through the process of trying to obtain them I will produce other valuable things”. For example, “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho is a novel about objet petit a: “the treasure did not exist, but by trying to obtain it you made a lot of friends along the way”.

Now, the apparent “mystical gnostic pseudoscientific philosophy” of Jung about archetypes can be reformulated into scientific terms as “very broad, general categories that result from the generalization of classical conditioning”. His seemingly “unfalsifiable” speculations about how a person’s “subjective relationship to the archetype of the great mother” is modelled by the person’s relationship to their own real mother; or Lacan’s “unfalsifiable” speculations from Seminar XVII about how the mother is like ‘a huge crocodile in whose jaws you are’, can be reformulated into: A person during breastfeeding feels surrounded and as if they have no escape from their mother’s embraces, which is both a pleasurable and a painful experience, and conditioned responses to their mother during breastfeeding will generalize upon the larger category of ‘entities that make me feel surrounded and as if I have no escape’. Then, perhaps, we can come at a scientific understanding as to how, for example, claustrophobia and panic attacks can be metaphors for one’s “devouring mother”, despite the fact that they seem like witchcraft on the surface-level.

 

IS TALKING ABOUT YOUR PAST AND YOUR CHILDHOOD ‘UNFALSIFIABLE SPECULATION’?

Behaviorism gave us the tools to understand that the extinguishment of classically conditioned responses also generalizes. For example, if I confront one of my fears through exposure therapy, not only will I become less afraid of that thing, but I will become a bit less afraid of other things that I did not even confront. If we combine this with the previous idea that transference is the result of the generalization of conditioned responses, then this will lead to the conclusion that you can, for example, “re-wire” your romantic relationships by re-wiring your relationship to your parents. For instance: if you get into the same abusive relationship again and again because you’re afraid of saying no to a specific kind of people (making you easily manipulated), and if we assume that “fear of saying no” is a conditioned response where the conditioned stimulus is a larger category encompassing both your romantic partners and your parents, then learning to say no to your parents will make you less afraid of saying no to other people in general from that category, including your future partners.

Questions about the mechanisms of the generalization of extinguishment can be studied in a lab. For example: if I have more than one fear, and I want to become less afraid of all of them, but I can only confront one, which one should I expose myself to: my oldest fear? My biggest fear? The fear that appears in my life most often? This can be easily tested in a lab by studying people with two or more specific phobias. Then we can infer from this: if I want to be able to say no to everyone, is it more efficient to confront my parents or to confront my current partners, considering that my parents are an “older” fear while my partners may be a “bigger” fear?

 

THE ROLE OF PARENTS IN CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT:

Behavioral psychoanalysis should obviously be combined with the latest scientifically validated theories of childhood development. When it comes to the role of parents in childhood development, I reject gender essentialist assumptions of either Freud and Jung that state that a child’s real mother and real father will affect them in this or that way. Those theories don’t even make sense for children raised by homosexual couples, single parents or orphans. Lacan is closer to me, however, in that he separates the real mother/father, the symbolic mother/father and the imaginary mother/father. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the “symbolic father” is usually modelled by the real father, but may be modelled by their mother, by some grandfather, by an older brother, by older kids on the playground bigger than the child, by teachers, by bosses, etc.

Combining this assumption with the way in which behavioral psychoanalysis treats archetypes (“great mother”, “symbolic father”, etc.) as general categories that result from the generalization of conditioned stimuli, we can more precisely define such archetypes of “symbolic mother” and “symbolic father”, that should in theory correspond to the real mother and real father in most, but not all cases, and then also empirically study the exceptions. For example, are your conditioned responses to what Lacan called “the big Other/the symbolic mother” modelled by the person/people that breastfed you for the longest period of time? Does bottle-feeding count? If your biological father bottle-feeds you more than your biological mother, do they take the “role” of the symbolic mother when it comes to generalization of stimulus? Or is it not about feeding, but simply physical intimacy (holding the baby in your arms)? What happens in children raised by single parents? Hence, we can translate Jungian and Lacanian archetypes like “imaginary father” or “the great mother archetype” into “people who breastfeed you”, “people who you had physical intimacy with”, “people who responded to your cries”, etc. and it becomes more scientific.

 

CONCLUSIONS/SUMMARY:

The main aspects of behaviorism that this system/framework rejects are: strict/radical behaviorism (that classical and operand conditioning are the only mechanisms affecting us), the idea that introspection is useless (where I think that introspection can make us aware of the unknown causal relationships between stimuli, responses, behaviors, etc.), that changing behavior is the only way to affect change, that stimuli is either reinforcing or punishing but never both, and that we do not need to talk about the unconscious.

The main aspects of (certain schools of) psychoanalysis that this system/framework rejects are: the identification of a person with their own unconscious, the literal interpretation of unconscious wishes and desires, the idea of the unconscious as “depth” or “a thing in of itself”, and the wording itself of various theories.

The main aspects of behaviorism that this system/framework accepts are the idea that thoughts, emotions, perceptions and symptoms can be, sometimes, a function of behavior, and that the mechanisms of classical and operand conditioning are useful constructs that can help us understand the human.

The main aspects of (certain schools of) psychoanalysis that this system/framework accepts are the idea that the unconscious exists, that the unconscious shall be made conscious, and that, depending on how exactly you define the word “force”, we are indeed controlled by forces outside of our awareness, and becoming aware of those forces and of the causal effect they have upon us has positive effects.

 

FOOTNOTES:

1: For example, Skinner, in “About Behaviorism” would often suggest that emotions as a function of behavior and not vice-versa, that we may consciously think/say: “I want to see a movie, therefore I will see a movie”, when in reality, Skinner suggests, the causality is reversed: you want to see a movie because you were about to see a movie, and the real reason that you want to see a movie, that you are unaware of, is that this action or a similar action was reinforced some time(s) in the distant past. This idea that the conscious mind can retroactively reverse causality and, therefore, should not be trusted at face value, is quite compatible with psychoanalysis, in my opinion.

2: Sometimes “death drive” is translated as “death instinct” into English, but Lacanians reject this translation, preferring the word “drive”, as they want to avoid any biological connotation to the concept, insisting that it is not an inborn biological instinct (“nature”), but “nurture”.

3: Book, Angela & Costello, Kimberly & Camilleri, Joseph. (2013). Psychopathy and Victim Selection: The Use of Gait as a Cue to Vulnerability. Journal of interpersonal violence. 28. 10.1177/0886260512475315.

4: For a good distinction between law and causality, I recommend this VSauce video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WHRWLnVm_M

5: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lastrevio/comments/w35b7k/the_psychoanalytic_unconscious_is_equivalent_to/