The ultimate goals of knowledge about persons are different from the goals of knowledge about things and animals. It makes a certain sense to talk about prediction and control as exclusive desiderata when we speak of molecules or paramecia or domestic animals, although I would argue it even there. But how could it seriously be said that our efforts to know human beings are for the sake of prediction and control? The opposite is more often the case - that we would be horrified by this possibility of prediction and control. If humanistic science may be said to have any goals beyond sheer fascination with the human mystery and enjoyment of it, these would be to release the person from external controls and to make him less predictable to the observer (to make him freer, more creative, more inner-determined) even though perhaps more predictable to himself.
And as for the goals of self-knowledge, that is still a different and even more complex story. Self-knowledge is first and foremost, for no sake other than itself. It is intrinsically fascinating. It feels good and tastes good (in the long run, at least). And also we have been assured in our time that even when it is a painful process, it is the preferred path to the removal of symptoms. It is a way of removing unnecessary anxiety, depression, and fear. It is a means to the end of feeling good. Even, we have learned, the nineteenth-century goal of self-control (that in any case was through will power, not self-knowledge) is being replaced by the notion of spontaneity, almost the opposite of the older concept of self-control. What this means is that if we know our own biological nature, i.e., the intrinsic self, well enough, then this knowledge indicates to us our personal destiny. That is, it implies that we would love our own nature and would yield to it, enjoy it, and express it fully if only we knew it well enough. In turn this implies a rejection of many historical philosophies of the good life. The way to be a good person, for most Western philosophers and religionists, has been to control and suppress the lower, animal biological nature.
But the spontaneity theory of the humanistic psychologists implies a profoundly different schema (the model instance to which the exceptions are peripheral instances). The most basic impulses aren o t seen as necessarily evil or dangerous in themselves. The problems of expression and gratification of these impulses are essentially problems of strategy rather than of right and wrong or of good and evil. The "controls" upon need expression and need gratification now become questions of how best to gratify, when to gratify, where and in what style. Such "Apollonizing" controls do not call the needs into question. And I would go so far as to say that any environment or culture that does call them into question, that makes a permanent ethical problem of sex, hunger, love, self-respect, etc., may be suspected a priori of being a "bad" society.
The upshot is that the word "control" can have a different meaning for humanists, one synergic with impulse, not in contradiction to it. This meaning enables us to say that the goal of self-knowledge is closer to what we call freedom than it is to suppressive self-control. So also for predictability. This too seems to undergo great changes in definition when applied to knowledge of self or of a person. This too can be studied empirically by studying people after therapy, people in their fully human moments, etc.
The word "predictable" as customarily used means "predictable by the scientist" and also carries the implication of "control by the scientist". It is interesting that when I can predict what a person will do under certain circumstances, this person tends to resent it. Somehow he feels that it implies a lack of respect for him, as if he were not his own master, as if he couldn't control himself, as if he were no more than a thing. He tends to feel dominated, controlled, outwitted (43, ch. 9).
I have observed instances of a person deliberately upsetting the predictions simply to reaffirm his unpredictability and therefore autonomy and self-governance. For instance, a ten-year-old girl, known for being always a good citizen, law-abiding and dutiful unexpectedly disrupted classroom discipline by passing out French fried potatoes instead of notebooks simply because, as she later said, everyone just took her good behavior for granted. A young man who heard his fianc?e say of him that he was so methodical that she always knew what to expect of him, deliberately did what was not expected of him. Somehow he felt her statement to be insulting. Being predictable is often a sign of severe pathology. Goldstein's brain-injured soldiers (22), for instance, could be easily manipulated because of their predictable responses to certain stimuli: being stimulus-bound means being both predictable and controllable.
And yet we also use the word in a complimentary way: "You can really count on him in an emergency"; "He'll always come through in a pinch"; "I would stake my life on his honesty". We seem to wish for continuity in the basic structure of the personality but not in all its details.
The goal of predictability is even more complex if we consider self-knowledge. There seems to be a parallel to the fact that self-knowledge decreases control from outside the person and increases control from within the person, i.e., less other-determined and more self-determined. As self-knowledge in-creases, it certainly seems to increase self-predictability, at least where important and basic issues are concerned. And yet this may mean being less predictable to others in many ways.
Finally I want to add a few words about these concepts of prediction, control, and understanding at the highest level that we now know, that is, at the Being level (48). At this level the Being values have become incorporated into the self. Indeed they have become defining characteristics of the self. Truth, justice, goodness, beauty, order, unity, comprehensiveness, etc. have now become metaneeds, thereby transcending the dichotomy between selfish and unselfish, between personal needs and impersonal desiderata.
Freedom has now become Spinozistic, i.e., the freedom to embrace and to love one's own destiny, which is certainly determined at least in part by the discovery and the understanding of what and who one is, of one's Real Self (a la Horney), and of being eager to surrender to it. This is to let it control, to choose freely to be determined by it; thus it is to transcend the dichotomies "freedom vs. determinism" or "freedom vs. control" or "understanding as a goal vs. prediction and control as goals". The meanings of these words shift and to some extent approach merging with each other in ways that demand careful study. In any case, by now one thing must be clear. The simplistic conceptions of "prediction" and "control" that were suitable to a Newtonian "billiard-table" (matter in motion) conception of science are left behind as soon as we get to the humanistic and transhumanistic levels of science.