Authors: Frank Tallis
Although Freud was happy to slam the door in Sam Goldwyn’s face, Freud’s acolyte Karl Abraham wasn’t. Subsequently Abraham collaborated with Goldwyn’s studio and the result was a silent film called
The Secret History of a Soul.
The links between film and psychoanalysis were strengthened in the 1930s when many emigre analysts – fleeing Austria and Germany – settled on the west coast. Entering analysis became very fashionable among the studio elite, and Hollywood soon acquired the apposite sobriquet ‘couch canyon’. Inevitably, with so many directors, producers, and actors in analysis, films began to show the signs of Freudian influence. Scriptwriters were urged to think very carefully about the unconscious motivation of their characters, and pipe-smoking psychiatrists with earnest expressions began to appear as a stock addition to the dramatis personae of many films.
Among the many Hollywood directors to succumb to Freud’s influence was Alfred Hitchcock. Almost of all of his work exhibits a high degree of psychological sophistication; however, in some of his films – such as
Psycho
(1960) and
Spellbound
(1945) – recognition of the mind’s darker complexities is made even more explicit. The producer of
Spellbound,
David 0. Selznick, was himself in psychoanalysis (as were most of his family). So enthusiastic was he about Freud’s ideas that he recruited his own analyst to help him write and vet the script, which, for better or worse, certainly shows.
Spellbound
includes surreal dream sequences and the appearance of an old Viennese doctor -complete with beard and glasses – as a homage to the master. Although
Spellbound
can be criticised for being unsubtle, it nevertheless deserves the accolade of being the first psychoanalytic thriller, and therefore the first cinematic thriller to make significant use of the unconscious as a central concept.
Having influenced art, opera, poetry, the novel, and film, psychoanalysis even managed to inspire a hit broadway musical –
Lady in the Dark.
This extraordinary work was based on a play by Moss Hart, which in turn was based on the writings of his psychoanalyst, Dr Lawrence S. Kubie; lyrics were provided by Ira Gershwin and music by Kurt Weill. As with all psychoanalytically inspired works, dream sequences are its defining feature.
Only in America could the unconscious be represented with so much razzmatazz. Back in old Vienna, Schoenberg’s depiction of the unconscious in
Erwartung
had required a cast of one; however, such meagre resources would never satisfy a Broadway audience.
Lady in the Dark
opened in 1941 with a cast of 20 characters, a chorus of 13 singers, 10 dancers, 11 children, and a 20-piece orchestra. Although a Freudian musical sounds like a recipe for disaster,
Lady in the Dark
proved to be a tremendous success. Gershwin and Weill’s musical played two seasons on Broadway, toured ten cities, and was then re-engaged on Broadway for a third season. The demand for seats was so great that
Lady in the Dark
established the practice of advanced booking on Broadway.
By the 1950s and 1960s psychoanalysis had scored a remarkable cultural victory. Like a great behemoth, it had stomped over the capitals of Europe and then crossed the Atlantic to conquer the New World. Freud had become a colossus – ranking in stature with the world’s greatest thinkers. And the unconscious, the most fundamental feature of psychoanalysis, had become an everyday concept. People were not only discussing the unconscious, they were reading about it in novels, looking at it in paintings, and listening to music – of both serious and popular origin – supposed to evoke the unconscious.
In the first half of the twentieth century Freud’s ideas were completely assimilated into American culture. Thus, as America became the dominant world culture – so it was that Freud’s ideas were propagated far and wide. Freudian ideas are now totally integrated into the products of American art. But this integration extends well beyond the acceptance of psychotherapy and the appearance of psychoanalysts in the films of Woody Allen. The degree of integration is far more subtle. It works at the level of numerous implicit assumptions made about the mind and human behaviour – sexual desire is profoundly important; all actions can ultimately be explained; secrets can be buried in the mind; and so on.
Although Freud thought America a gigantic mistake, it was a mistake that served him very well.
T
wo years before joining Project Ultra and the code breakers of Bletchley Park, Alan Mathison Turing – a rather dishevelled young don from Cambridge – had published an unusual article in a relatively obscure mathematics journal. In this article he had described a device that could read instructions, undertake step-by-step mathematical operations, and store information in a kind of rudimentary memory. It did not escape Turing’s notice that he was describing a machine that could ultimately simulate the kind of mental operations performed by human beings when problem solving. Today we would of course immediately recognise Turing’s device as a computer.
When Turing wrote his article no one had given the idea of building such a device serious consideration for a hundred years (Charles Babbage being the last). Turing’s article did not specify how to build a computer; however, it presented a mathematical model which established the basic elements necessary for a computer to function – should anyone attempt to build one. The pressing needs of war made such an attempt a matter of urgency, and by December 1943 Colossus (widely though incorrectly described as the first electric computer – the Bletchley team were in fact beaten by an American, John V. Atanasoff) had begun to decipher the coded messages of the Nazi war machine with awesome rapidity.
Although few people realised it at the time, Project Ultra would have ramifications that extended beyond the exigencies of war. Indeed, Project Ultra would precipitate a technological and cultural revolution of such outstanding magnitude that no area of human life would be beyond its reach. Even models of the human mind and the unconscious would be utterly transformed.
Turing continued to develop his ideas after the war, but the British failed to exploit Turing’s gifts. Moreover, they were slow – or disinclined – to recognise the vast potential of’electronic brains’. Their transatlantic counterparts, on the other hand, demonstrated a more enlightened view. Funding was made more readily available for men with Turing’s vision, and the first general purpose electronic digital computer, EN1AC, was operational at the University of Pennsylvania by February 1946.
Although computer science was destined to become a predominantly American discipline, Turing retained a prophetic role. In 1950 he published an article in the philosophical journal
Mind
called ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’. The article begins dramatically: ‘1 propose to consider the question “Can machines think?’” In attempting to answer this question, Turing managed to prepare the ground for all later work on artificial intelligence.
The suggestion that a machine (composed of insensible components) might generate something like human consciousness had many disconcerting implications. Did the brain function in a similar way? After all, the brain too is composed of insensible components – nerve cells. There were obvious parallels. In the late nineteenth century theorists such as Laycock, Carpenter, and T. H. Huxley had proposed that unconscious mental reflexes might underlie all aspects of human behaviour (including thought); however, this idea, and ideas like it, lost currency after the rise of psychoanalysis. Freud’s unconscious seemed far more plausible. In essence, Freud’s unconscious was a mind within the mind – a hidden intelligence. It seemed an altogether more reasonable proposition to ascribe intelligent behaviour to an intelligent agency. The appearance of computers, however, reversed the trend. Computers provided a powerful demonstration of how mechanical processes could be organised to produce behaviour that had hitherto been considered exclusively human – such as problem solving and mathematical calculation.
Sadly, Turing did not live to see his ideas on machine intelligence endorsed by the wider scientific community. He died at a tragically young age – committing suicide after his homosexuality resulted in a conviction for gross indecency. His distinguished role in Project Ultra could not be cited in mitigation, as Project Ultra was still classified as top-secret.
For thousands of years contemporary technology has been recruited to help explain the mind. In many respects the history of psychology has been shaped by the selection of metaphors. Wax tablets, clocks, looms, pipes and valves, engines, hydraulic systems, telegraphs, and the telephone exchange have all been employed to represent the mind and mental processes. From ancient times to the middle of the twentieth century the mind was transformed from a marionette (neuron is Greek for ‘string’) to an electrical maze; however, Turing gave psychology the ultimate metaphor, it was so good, in only a few decades psychologists and neuroscientists were not saying that the brain was
like
a computer, they were saying that the brain
was
a computer.
Brains represent and manipulate information. So, of course, do computers. Thus, when viewed purely as information-processing vehicles, brains and computers appear to be very close cousins. The fact that one is made of organic material and the other inorganic is of less importance than their functional similarity. From the standpoint of an information theorist, they both do the same thing.
Computer technology demanded a new and precise vocabulary. Step-by-step manipulation of information was described as ‘serial processing’; the limited amount of information that could enter a system was described as its ‘channel capacity’; memory became ‘storage capacity’ – and so on. This new vocabulary was soon appropriated by psychologists to describe the brain and mental processes.
The sub-discipline of psychology devoted to the study of basic mental processes (such as memory and perception) is called cognitive psychology. Prior to the advent of computer technology, cognitive psychology was somewhat incohesive. Apart from a general commitment to experimental investigations in laboratory settings, early cognitive psychologists did not share a common framework. This situation was immediately rectified by the computer. After the 1950s virtually everyone with an interest in basic mental processes subscribed to the computer model.
One of the publications that helped to launch contemporary cognitive psychology was a 195G journal article on the size of short-term memory (i.e. the kind of memory used to rehearse an unfamiliar telephone number for the time it takes to make a call). It was written by George A. Miller and tellingly titled: ‘The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information’. Miller demonstrated that human beings can keep roughly seven units of information (words, names, numbers) in awareness, but rarely more. As such, consciousness can be described as a limited-capacity channel. This simple fact raises some interesting issues.
Given the richness of the human sensory apparatus, the representational capacity of consciousness appears not just limited, but severely limited. At any single moment a human being is registering a considerable amount of sensory information (for example, peripheral objects in the visual field, background noise, and tactile sensations on the body); however, only a tiny fraction of this information ever reaches awareness. How does favoured information get through? Is it selected because of its importance? And, if so, on what basis is that selection made? Almost immediately the information-processing model of mind suggested the operation of unconscious mechanisms.
In the 1940s American experimental psychologists Leo Postman, Jerome Bruner, and Elliot McGinnies had conducted a series of controversial experiments on the influence of personal values on perception. The results were interpreted within the context of psychoanalytic thinking; however, such interpretations were eventually superseded by accounts which relied on the new computer-based model of mind.
A key experiment in their programme of research concerned a phenomenon described as
perceptual defence.
The tachistoscope (a piece of laboratory equipment which can display stimuli for very precise durations) was used to show experimental subjects either emotionally neutral words (e.g. apple, broom, glass) or so called taboo words (e.g. whore, penis, belly). All the words were exposed for incremental durations, and subjects were instructed to identify words as soon as they could. The shortest tachistoscopic exposures were experienced by subjects as nothing more than a flash of light, but as durations increased the words being displayed became easier to identify. Thus, initial exposures were subliminal (i.e. below the limen or threshold of awareness), whereas later exposures were supraliminal (i.e. above the threshold of awareness).
The research team discovered that their subjects required much longer exposure times to recognise taboo words than neutral words. This suggested that some kind of psychological defence was in operation – automatically raising the recognition threshold for taboo words in order to protect the ego from experiencing anxiety.
Although the phenomenon of perceptual defence seemed consistent with psychoanalytic theory, many believed that the results might have a more straightforward explanation. Perhaps subjects were recognising neutral and taboo words at equivalent exposure times, but choosing to delay making a response to taboo words in case they were wrong. Clearly, in a social climate where the word ‘belly’ possessed improper connotations, the gratuitous expression of more provocative words would have been the cause of considerable embarrassment. The credibility of perceptual defence studies was further undermined by a campaign of more technical criticism, focusing on flaws in the statistical procedures employed to analyse the results. Even so, interest in perceptual defence persisted in several quarters, leading to the design of more sophisticated experiments that were less vulnerable to criticism on both counts (i.e. social and statistical).