A Science of Human Behavior

– I thought I’d like to start today with a kind of a summary of where I been these last 45 years. This was pretty well written up as an epilogue in the Kerr-Bowen book year before last. That would be the personal part of it. I started in Topeka, Kansas, 1946. As far as I’m concerned, the human is part scientific and is partly not scientific. Therefore goes the debate, is he scientific or not? What the hell, he’s half scientific. He has the same insides as a gorilla, horse, chicken. Same liver, same heart, same circulation. But the only difference, he has a larger brain. And the brain is an organ. And this organ, the function of it is different. So does that separate the human being from science? So if you think whatever’s tangible, and it doesn’t make any difference to me, except I take the one that the human can be scientific. If the human wishes to work on it. I was there 45 years ago, I’m still there. And there are a lot of people that will step to the other side of it, which is okay. Meaning there’s nothing wrong with being different as long as you say I’m there. And you write it out and you sign it. It is not acceptable when you pretend that you disagree but you don’t write it down and sign it. You can deal with a difference of opinion, but you can’t deal with a difference which is not explicitly said. So I went into those years. I’d been in the army. And I had decided on going into surgery. Which I saw at that time as more scientific. I thought about psychiatry but I had to veer away from it because it was not considered scientific. And then the ideas of Freud were popularized during the war. And Freud himself spoke of a science of the psyche. And I thought, well that would be if there’s another science to it. I like to shift over so I shifted from surgery at Mayo to psychiatry at the Menninger Foundation. Then I get there, and there were people who decided that Freudian theory is not scientific. Well I’m already there. I thought I’d had a little experience with science during the war. And it won’t take long to go through this thing and find out where Freud missed the science. So I’ve now been a lifetime on it. The first years I learned more about Freud. My orientation of that would be, post-graduate would be a fellowship in psychiatry. Personal psychoanalysis on the staff for eight years. And at that time, and it is still so, the average professional person is not interested in theory. That is a fact of everybody. They get so caught up in trying to improve that as a therapy that they miss theory. And so it was then. So I was pretty much alone. And then when you look at Freudian theory, before I looked at it, before it’s not a science, the more it is a theory of human experience. Not what the human is, but his experience. So, you see psychoanalysis, Freudian theory branches out and it is like a lot of things. That is an analogy, a similarity, but a similarity is never accepted by science. In other words it had roots that go off into all kinds of things. If you’re satisfied with that then it doesn’t carry any weight with science. Just a similarity. So I fooled around for five years with that. Looking at Freudian theory and trying to extend it to mathematics, any kind of place that I could extend it to. And it would not go. It simply would not go. So the big turning point came when doing a comparative study of all of the disciplines that have to do with human behavior. And I did about 20 of those. They had to do with psychiatry, psychology, anthropology, social work, chemistry, you name it. Anything that had to do with human experience. And I went on over into the sciences and as far as I was concerned there were three sciences that might replace Freud. I mean replace Freud, not extend Freud. I wanted to find out how the other disciplines had dealt with the question of science. And that included astronomy, which I would see as the mother of sciences. We wouldn’t know anything about the stars without science. You can end up with something like astrology, which is no science at all. I mean that’s just an extension of the human mind. It’d be astronomy, evolution, and paleontology. Now Freud could go back to the Garden of Eden. He’d go beyond that Garden of Eden like it was yesterday. You could move over to evolution, that goes to the Big Bang. That goes back to before there was life on Earth. So I began toying with trying to get in some kind of a way of thinking which would permit us to go way, way back to the beginning of all life. We will get there someday. Now when you try to combine evolution with the human being, even going back millions and millions, billions of years ahead of that. You can follow the development of man from before there was life on Earth. So there’s a virtue in that. There’s a disadvantage too. So on that, you can believe that the human being goes back to the Garden of Eden if you want to. I didn’t On that the human being owes his existence to the beginning of all life. Not the human being. So then, I could not combine Freud and evolution without systems theory. There was not a systems theory that existed that could accomplish that. So I went through general systems and there was a system that had to do with technology, which didn’t work. So I tinkered with systems, thinking, to fit evolution. That I called natural systems. And it went together beautifully. So that, that was a new theory. It’s just as simple as that. Just replace Freud with evolution and put in systems.