ABSTRACT
In which we encounter biological arguments in psychology, attempts to reduce human beings to animal behaviour and attempts to reduce animals to biological matter. After meeting Pavlov, Skinner and Chomsky, we find some surprising alternatives to popular stories about aggression among woolly monkeys in Cornwall, and we explore some questions concerning the nature of experience, our experience of nature. I wanted to like psychology, and I must admit I was enjoying learning about the surprising variety of explanations for human action that were jostling for attention in the lectures and the textbooks. It was not an enemy as such, but felt like a very strange enigmatic friend. Some of my friends, fellow students, settled on a particular conceptual framework and then used that as a resource base to assess the value of the other rival accounts. We were expected to compare-and-contrast theories in our essays and exams, and that comparative work was a skill we were explicitly schooled in. I too grasped for an approach to psychology that I would be happy with, whether it was one of the stories about behaviour or cognition, but each option was problematic, and especially so when it was presented as universally applicable. It was worse when we were told that because it was ‘natural’ it could never be changed; our ‘animal nature’ is often viewed by psychologists as the bedrock and limit of human potential.
