Science has its origins in the needs to know and to understand (or explain), i.e., cognitive needs (38,43). In another publication (50) I have summarized the various lines of evidence that make me feel these needs to be instinctlike and therefore defining characteristics of humanness (although not only of humanness), and of specieshood. In the same paper I tried to differentiate the cognitive activities instigated by anxiety and those that proceed without fear or by overcoming fear and can therefore be called "healthy". That is, these cognitive impulses seem to function under conditions either of fear or of courage, but they will have different characteristics under these two different conditions.
Curiosity, exploring, manipulating, when instigated by fear or anxiety, can be seen to have the primary goal of allaying anxiety. What looks behaviorally like an interest in the nature of the object being examined or the area being explored, may be primarily an effort by the organism to calm itself down and to lower the level of tension, vigilance, and apprehension. The unknown object is now primarily an anxiety-producer, and the behavior of examination and probing is first and foremost a detoxification of the object, making it into something that need not be feared. Some organisms, once reassured, may then go over into an examination of the object per se out of sheer, nonanxious curiosity in the independently existing reality out there. Other organisms may, however, lose all interest in the object once it is detoxified, familiarized (33), and no longer fearsome. That is to say, familiarization can produce inattention and boredom.
Phenomenologically these two kinds of curiosity feel different from each other. They are also different clinically and personologically. And finally they are also different behaviorally in several infrahuman species as well as m the human being, as many ingenious experiments have shown.
With human beings, we are irresistibly impelled by the same kinds of data to postulate another, "higher" concept beyond sheer curiosity. Different scholars have spoken variously of the need to understand, the need for meaning, the need for values, for a philosophy or a theory, or for a religion or cosmology, or for an explanatory or lawful "system" of some kind. These first approximations generally refer to some need to order, to structure, to organize, to abstract, or to simplify the chaotic multiplicity of facts. In most contexts, by contrast, the word "curiosity" can be interpreted as focusing upon a single fact, some single object, or at most a delimited set of objects or situations or processes rather than upon the whole world or large portions of it.
This need to understand, like its prepotent need to know, can also be seen as expressing itself and organizing behavior in the service of either allaying anxiety or nonanxious interest in the nature of reality. In both cases clinical and personological experience shows that anxiety and fear are generally prepotent over impersonal interest in the nature of reality. In this context "courage" can be seen as either absence of fear or as the ability to overcome the fear and to function well in spite of It.
Any cognitive activities, whether institutionalized ones like scientific work and philosophizing or personal ones like the search for insight in psychotherapy, can be better understood against this background. How much of anxiety and how much of anxiety-free interest are involved? Since most human activities are a mixture of both, what, we must ask, is the proportion of anxiety to courage? Behavior, including the behavior of the scientist, can be seen in simplest schema as a resultant of these two forces, that is, as a mixture of anxiety-allaying (defensive) devices and of problem-centered (coping) devices.
I have described this basic dialectic in several different ways in differing contexts. Each of these can be useful for different purposes. First of all (34, ch. 10, "Coping with Dangers") I made the distinction between the Freudian "defense mechanisms" (for allaying anxiety while still seeking gratification) and what I called "coping mechanisms" (for positive, courageous, and victorious solution of life problems in the absence of anxiety or in spite of it). Another useful distinction (43, ch. 3) is that between deficiency-motivations and growth-motivations. Cognition can be more one or more the other. Where it is primarily deficiency-motivated, it is more need-reductive, more homeostatic, more the relief of felt deficit. When behavior is more growth-motivated, it is less need-reductive and more a movement toward self-actualization and fuller humanness, more expressive, more selfless, more reality-centered. This is a little like saying, "Once we get our personal problems solved, then we can get truly interested in the world for its own sake". Thirdly (43, ch. 4), growth was seen as an endless series of daily choices and decisions in each of which one can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.
In other words, the scientist can be seen as relatively defensive, deficiency-motivated, and safety-need-motivated, moved largely by anxiety and behaving in such a way as to allay it. Or he can be seen as having mastered his anxieties, as coping positively with problems in order to be victorious over them, as growth-motivated toward personal fulfillment and fullest humanness, and therefore as freed to turn outward toward an intrinsically fascinating reality, in wholehearted absorption with it rather than with its relevance to his personal emotional difficulties, i.e., he can be problem-centered rather than ego-centered. [3-1]
Seeing this motivation at work in the most pathological instances demonstrates unmistakably that the search for knowledge can be anxiety-allaying.
First of all, let us examine briefly the brain-injured soldiers from whom Kurt Goldstein (22) learned so much. Their very real injuries and the real losses in capacity that ensued not only made them feel less capable but also made the world look more overwhelming. Much of their behavior could be understood as an attempt to retain self-esteem and to avoid anxiety-producing confrontation with problems from which they could expect only defeat. To this end they first of all narrowed their worlds in order to avoid problems that they were incapable of handling and to restrict themselves to the problems they were capable of handling. Within such constricted worlds, daring less and trying less, being "modest" about aspirations and goals, they could function well. Secondly they ordered and structured these narrowed worlds carefully. They made a place for everything, and everything was in its place. They geometrized their little realms in an effort to make them predictable, controllable, and safe. Thirdly they tended to freeze them into static and unchanging forms and to avoid change and flux. Their worlds were thus made more predictable, more controllable, and less anxiety-producing.
For people who have limited capacities that they cannot trust, who see the world as too much for them, and who can't accept this state of affairs, these are sensible, logical, understandable things to do. They work. The soldiers' anxiety and pain were in fact reduced thereby. To the casual observer the patients looked normal.
That these safety-producing mechanisms are pragmatically sound (rather than "crazy" or weird and mysterious) can easily be seen from the close parallel with, let us say, newly blinded people, who, because they are less capable than before, must also see the world as more dangerous, more overwhelming, and must at once elaborate all sorts of safety mechanisms to protect themselves from actual harm. So they at once have to narrow the world, perhaps confining themselves to their homes until they can get it "under control". Every piece of furniture must be fixed into place; everything must remain where it is. Nothing unpredicted or unexpected should happen; this is dangerous. The world must remain as it is. Change becomes dangerous. The routes from one place to another must be memorized by rote. All necessary objects must stay where they belong.
Something like this can be seen in compulsive-obsessive neurotics. A basic problem here seems to be, if I may oversimplify, a fear of the impulses and emotions within the person himself.
Unconsciously he fears that if they should get out of control, terrible things might happen, murder perhaps. So on the one hand he keeps himself under tight control, and on the other hand he projects this intrapsychic drama on the world and tries also to controlit. What he rejects within himself - emotion, impulsiveness, spontaneity, expressiveness - he rejects out there, too, although in an ambivalent way. As he rejects his inner voices and signals and consequently loses his trust in his spontaneous wishes and instinctlike impulses, he has to rely on external signals to tell him what to do and when to do it, e.g., calendars, clocks, schedules, agenda, quantifications, geometrizations, laws, rules of all sorts. Since change, flux, and unexpectedness may catch him with his controls down, he must also layout the future, program it, make it exactly, make it predictable. His behavior also tends to get organized" into repeatable rituals and ceremonials.
Here too we recognize the same safety-mechanisms. The obsessional person narrows his world by avoiding uncomfortable kinds of people, problems, impulses, and emotions, i.e., he lives a constricted life and tends to become a constricted person. He diminishes the world so that he may be able to control it. To avoid what he fears, he orders, regulates, and even freezes his world so that it can be predictable and therefore controllable. He tends to live "by the numbers", by the rule book, and to rely on external rather than internal cues, on logic and fact rather than on impulse, intuition, and emotion. (One obsessional patient once asked how he could prove that he was in love!)
The extreme hysterical neurotic, who is usually contrasted to the obsessional, is of less interest to us here because his massive repressions and denials avoid painful knowledge. It is hard to conceive of such a person being able to be a scientist at all, much less an engineer or technologist.
Finally we can learn from certain suspicious and paranoid people who compulsively need to know everything that is going on, i.e., who are afraid of not knowing. They have to know what is going on behind the closed door. The strange noise must be explained. The barely heard words must be fully heard. Danger lies in the unknown, and it stays dangerous so long as it is unknown. This knowledge-seeking behavior is primarily defensive. It is compulsive, inflexible, anxiety-instigated, and anxiety-producing. It is only apparently knowledge-seeking, because the reality, once it is known to be not dangerous, ceases to be interesting. That is, reality itself doesn't matter.
Some other sick (or primarily anxiety-instigated), clinically observed expressions of our needs to know and to understand (whether in scientist or lay knowers) can be listed:
1. The compulsive need for certainty (rather than the enjoyment and appreciation of it).
2. The premature generalization that so often is a consequence of the desperate need for certainty (because one cannot bear the state of waiting, of not knowing what the decision will be).
3. For the same reasons, desperately and stubbornly hanging on to a generalization, in spite of new information that contradicts it.
4. The denial of ignorance (for fear of looking stupid, weak, ludicrous) - the inability to say "I don't know", "I was wrong". The denial of doubt, confusion, puzzlement: the need to appear decisive, certain, confident, sure of oneself; the inability to be humble.
6. The inflexible, neurotic need to be tough, powerful, fearless, strong, severe. Counterphobic mechanisms are defenses against fear, i.e., they are ways of denying that one is afraid when one really is afraid. Ultimately the fear of looking weak, soft, or mushy may turn out to be a defense against (misconceived and misinterpreted) femininity. Among scientists the legitimate wish to be "hard-nosed", or tough-minded, or rigorous may be pathologized into being "merely hard-nosed", or exclusively tough-minded, or of finding it impossiblen o t to be rigorous. There may develop an inability to be gentle, surrendering, noncontrolling, patient, receptive even when the circumstances clearly call for it as prerequisite to better knowing, e.g., as in psychotherapy.
7. The ability to be only active, dominant, masterful, controlling, "in charge", "masculine", and the inability to be also noncontrolling, noninterfering, receptive. This is a loss of versatility in the knower.
8. Rationalization of the psychoanalytic sort ("I don't like that fellow and I'm going to find a good reason why").
9. Intolerance of ambiguity: the inability to be comfortable with the vague, the mysterious, the not yet fully known.
10. The need to conform, to win approval, to be a member of the group - the inability to disagree, to be unpopular, to stand alone. What this does to cognizing can be seen in the experiments of Asch (4), Crutchfield (14), and others.
11. Grandiosity, megalomania, arrogance, egotism, paranoid tendencies. Very often this turns out, in deep therapy, to be a defense against deeper lying feelings of weakness, worthlessness. In any case, this kind of ego gets in the way of a clear view of reality.
12. The fear of paranoia, grandiosity or hubris. Defenses against one's own pride, greatness, godlikeness. Lowering of levels of aspiration. Evasion of one's own growth. The inability to believe that one could discover something important, therefore blindness to such discoveries, disbelief in them, inability to rush in and exploit the discovery. Assigning oneself to trivial problems.
13. Overrespect for authority, for the great man. The need to keep his love. Becoming only a disciple, a loyal follower, ultimately a stooge, unable to be independent, unable to affirm himself. ("Don't be a Freudian; be a Freud"." Don't follow in the footsteps of the masters; seek their goals.")
14. Underrespect for authority. The need to fight authority. The inability to learn from one's elders or teachers.
15. The need to be always and only rational, sensible, logical, analytic, precise, intellectual, etc. Inability to be also non-rational, wild, crazy, intuitive, etc., when this is more suitable.
16. Intellectualization, i.e., transforming the emotional into the rational, perceiving only the intellectual aspect of complex situations, being satisfied with naming rather than experiencing, etc. This is a common shortcoming of professional intellectuals, who tend to be blinder to the emotional and impulsive side of life than to its cognitive aspects.
17. The intellect may be used as a tool for dominating, one-upmanship, or for impressing people often at the cost of part of the truth.
18. Knowledge and truth may be feared, and therefore avoided or distorted, for many reasons (43, ch. 5).
19. Rubricizing, i.e., pathological categorizing as a flight from concrete experiencing and cognizing (38, ch. 14).
20. Dichotomizing compulsively; two-valued orientation; either-or; black or white (38, 232-234).
21. The need for novelty and the devaluation of the familiar. The inability to perceive a miracle if it is repeated one hundred times. Devaluing what is already known, as, e.g., truisms, platitudes, etc.
And so on and so on. The list could be extended almost endlessly. For instance, all the Freudian defense mechanisms make for cognitive inefficiency, in addition to their other effects. Neuroses and psychoses in general can all be considered to be cognitive illnesses in addition to their other aspects. This is almost as true for the character disorders, the existential "disorders", the "value pathologies", and the diminishing, stunting, or loss of the human capacities. Even cultures and ideologies, many of them, can be analyzed from this point of view, e.g., as encouraging stupidity, as discouraging curiosity, etc.
The path to the full truth is a rocky one. Full knowing is difficult. This is true not only for the layman but also for the scientist. The main difference between him and the layman is that he has enlisted in this search for truth deliberately, willingly, and consciously and that he then proceeds to learn as much as he can about the techniques and ethics (11) of truth-seeking. Indeed, science in general can be considered a technique with which fallible men try to outwit their own human propensities to fear the truth, to avoid it, and to distort it.
The systematic study of the cognitive pathologies, then, would seem to be an obvious and normal part of scientific studies. Clearly such a branch of knowledge should help the scientist to become a better knower, a more efficient instrument. Why so little has been done in this direction is a puzzle.
It seems, then, that these "good", "nice" scientific words - prediction, control, rigor, certainty, exactness, preciseness, neatness, orderliness, lawfulness, quantification, proof, explanation, validation, reliability, rationality, organization, etc. - are all capable of being pathologized when pushed to the extreme. All of them may be pressed into the service of the safety needs, i.e., they may become primarily anxiety-avoiding and anxiety-controlling mechanisms. They may be mechanisms for detoxifying a chaotic and frightening world as well as ways of loving and understanding a fascinating and beautiful world. Working for certainty or exactness or predictability, etc. may be either healthy or unhealthy, either defense-motivated or growth-motivated, and may lead either to the relief of anxiety or to the positive joy of discovery and understanding. Science can be a defense, and it can also be a path to the fullest self-actualization.
Just to make sure that a vital point be not misunderstood, we must also look at the courageous, growth-motivated, psychologically healthy scientist, again taking an extreme type for the moment in order to get sharp differentiations and contrasts. All of these same mechanisms and goals are also found in the growth-motivated scientist. The difference is that they are not neuroticized [3-2]. They are not compulsive, rigid, and uncontrollable, nor is anxiety produced when these rewards have to be postponed. They are not desperately needed, nor are they exclusively needed. It is possible for healthy scientists to enjoy not only the beauties of precision but also the pleasures of sloppiness, casualness, and ambiguity. They are able to enjoy rationality and logic but are also able to be pleasantly crazy, wild, or emotional. They are not afraid of hunches, intuitions, or improbable ideas. It is pleasant to be sensible, but it is also pleasant to ignore common sense occasionally. It is fun to discover lawfulness, and a neat set of experiments that solve a problem can and does produce peak-experiences. But puzzling, guessing, and making fantastic and playful surmises is also part of the scientific game and part of the fun of the chase. Contemplating an elegant line of reasoning or mathematical demonstrations can produce great esthetic and sacral experiences, but so also can the contemplation of the unfathomable.
All of this is exemplified in the greater versatility of the great scientist, of the creative, courageous, and bold scientists. This ability to be either controlled and/or uncontrolled, tight and/or loose, sensible and/or crazy, sober and/or playful seems to be characteristic not only of psychological health but also of scientific creativeness.
Ultimately, I am convinced, we shall have to include in the education of the young scientist both the techniques of caution and of boldness. Mere caution and soberness, mere compulsiveness can produce only good technicians who are much less likely to discover or to invent new truths or new theories. The caution, patience, and conservatism which are sine qua non for the scientist had better be supplemented by boldness and daring if creativeness is also the hope, Both are necessary. They need not be mutually exclusive. They can be integrated with each other. Taken together they constitute flexibility, adaptability, versatility. Or as psychoanalysts often say, the best psychoanalyst (or scientist or general human being) is the one who combines the good characteristics of the hysterical and of the obsessional, without having the bad characteristics of either.
From the epistemological point of view, if we accept the isomorphic and parallel interrelationships between knower and known (52), then we can confidently expect the "taller", bolder, more Olympian knower to be able to cognize higher truths. The merely cautious knower, avoiding everything that could produce anxiety, is partially blind. The world that he is able to know is smaller than the world that the strong man can know.