My family ties prevent my living simply alone, “struggling to write.” …
My family ties prevent me, not because I have a great deal of devotion and respect for my father and mother, but because they have suffered very much in the last four years and because my leaving them would increase their present anxiety to an unbearable degree.

Thus they are unwittingly forcing me into my present course. True, they have offered me a year to stay at home to write. But if the first three months of that year are exemplary, this will be the condition:

My father and mother will be patently ashamed to explain to friends what I am “doing.” I have already felt the sting of implied ‘You ought to go to work. If you were my boy—.” My father will assume that I am doing nothing. He will come home at noon and scowl at me in my smoking jacket and slippers. He will tell me to do this around the house or that with the car with the
implication: ‘You have nothing to do—.”

Mother will say at least once a day, “It’s going to be pretty hard, son, for you to settle down to work when you can’t play the piano for an hour after breakfast, or read all afternoon.” If I go for a walk Mother will ask meaningfully: “All alone—?” To be alone in Scran ton is a sin.

Father will laugh with half-veiled disgust if I make a date to go walking with a girl at half-past eight in the morning to discuss Dostoevski.

I will accept an invitation to a piano recital with tea afterwards and Mother will say, “Don’t you think that’s so effeminate?” I will ridicule a sermon, with the parental rebuke, “It isn’t right for you to do that! Those are the men who get things donein the world.”

Without ever inquiring into my ideas father will flutter his hand in the air and talk of my “highfalutin theories.” … I am too sensitive to my surroundings to stand it.

I could do little or no creative work during a year here. It was a big and important mistake that I ever thought I could. At the end of that year according to my agreement I would admit (outwardly) failure and go to work.47

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

He wrote his parents telling them of his decision and received back a long and considered letter from his father representing their view. The letter, reproduced in full in Skinner’s autobiography, made clear that his parents were very dubious about his plan. A few weeks after this letter from his father came a letter from Robert Frost that took a very different tone. Skinner had sent Frost some of his short stories to evaluate. Frost’s letter, also
reproduced in full in Skinner’s autobiography, ended with the following paragraph:

Those are real niceties of observation you’ve got here and you’ve done ‘em to a shade. “The Laugh” has the largest value. That’s the one you show most as caring in. You see I want you to care. I don’t want you to be academic about it—a writer of exercises. Of course, not too expressly, overtly caring. You’ll have to search yourself here. You know best whether you are haunted with any impatience about what other people see or don’t see. That will be you if you are you. I am inclined to say you are. But you have the final say. I wish you’d tell me how you come out in thinking it over—if it isn’t too much trouble—some time. I ought to say you have the touch of art. The work is clean run. You are worthtwice anyone else I have seen in prose this year.45

Unlike his parents whom Skinner had experienced as ridiculing his feelings, Frost encouraged Skinner to care. The story that Frost liked best was the one that he saw most caring in, “The Laugh.” In an echo of a theme we saw in Skinner’s story about “Beautiful Homes,” “The Laugh” was a story about a husband who demeans his wife by laughing at her. Frost was encouraging Skinner to pursue writing, and Skinner felt that this was all the evidence of his promise as a writer that his parents could ask for. He writes this
conclusion in his autobiography as “I should be allowed to try my wings.”46 The particular phrasing he uses here is telling. Skinner sees the pursuit of writing as a kind of escape (”to try my wings”), yet rather than forcefully breaking away from his parents he wants them to sanction this freedom (”I should be allowed”). This may explain in part his choice to go home to write: He was hoping that his parents would actively release him as he had released the animals under his constraint.

But it was not long after he returned home before Skinner realized the tragedy of his choice. He found himself fully unable to write. Despite his wish to produce something, no thoughts or feelings forced their way out of him and onto the blank page. The impotence of any inner life in motivating his behavior was painfully obvious to him, and the power of the external environment was felt more forcefully. Skinner turned to blaming his parents, both for his going home to write in the first place and for his inability to write once there. The following is from a note he wrote to himself at the end of the summer after arriving home.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

When Skinner returned to Hamilton he returned to writing, although after his freshman year he focused more on short stories than on poetry. He became aware that many of his stories were references to his relationship with his parents. From one story in particular we learn that another reason for Skinner’s resistance against his wish for more affection with his parents may have been that his parents had not provided good satisfaction for this wish.
The story, written toward the end of his college career, is about his behavior freshman year of sending a book home to his parents. It provides a remarkable window into his emotional life.

Father and mother had laughed at Henry’s first letters. Prosaic descriptions of college, the food, and his health, but with them an occasional unguarded note of homesickness. This pleased father and mother. They felt proud and happy that being away from home was hurting their son. It proved to them something they had sometimes doubted: that he really loved them.

His overtones of homesickness increased as the months passed until a book came, carefully planned to reach home on mother and father’s wedding anniversary. It was a large book, a gift edition in blue and gold, called Beautiful Homes of History. On the first page was carefully written: “To father and mother, whose home surpasses the beauty andholiness of any of these. Henry.”

Mother read it with moist eyes, and hated to have father smile at it. She did feel a little uncertain about it; but then, it was so unexpected! It really was dear of Henry! They both felt peculiarly happy. But after it was put on top of the bookstand, father occasionally laughed at it; and sometimes mother smiled too,although it made her feel guilty.

Two months afterward Henry came home for the holidays. But during the first hour when he told them his joyous history, no one spoke of the book. No one even spoke of homesickness. Mother looked at the boy before her, and wondered about Beautiful Homes. There was something incongruous there, betweenthe inscription and Henry.

That night before she went to bed she went to the bookstand and ran her fingers over the cool gold letters on the blue cover. She read the words in a whisper: “Beautiful Homes of History.” Then with a little swell of feeling she lifted the cover.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

Some particular examples Skinner chose to use in his analysis of human behavior in Science and Human Behavior (1953) now become noteworthy when we adopt this perspective. When he analyzes emotion, Skinner’s first and most frequent example is of the emotion of anger, and when he illustrates how angry behaviors can be both innate and learned, the example he gives is that of one child attacking another. Then, when he turns to explicating the Freudian defense mechanisms, the example he uses to illustrate repression is that of sibling rivalry. In this analysis he asserts that
rivalry between two brothers for affection and other reinforcers from parents can lead one to aggress against the other, and that the negative consequences of this can lead the aggressive brother to feel guilt and to repress his aggressive tendencies. Thus, for Skinner, sibling rivalry was a ready example for illustrating anger, guilt, and repression.

These observations suggest that Skinner had competitive feelings toward Ebbe, that these feelings caused guilt and a need for repression, and that his need to repress these feelings at the time of Ebbe’s death may have contributed to his numbness and immobility. If this is the case, it would illuminate other aspects of Skinner’s life. For one, we see at the time of Ebbe’s death a sequence for Skinner that has implications elsewhere: Angry feelings lead to guilt about negative consequences of this anger, which leads to repression and immobility. His analogy to the hazing incident makes more sense in light of this sequence: He submits without a “struggle” because he feels guilty of the negative consequences of expressing his anger. This same sequence also finds an echo in his pattern of submission to his parents’ control without protest, while at the same time showing sympathy for the “struggling” minnowwho took revenge on his father.

A second implication of this discovery of guilt over competition with Ebbe is that it might explain in part his ambivalence toward his wish for a more affectionate relationship with his parents. Skinner had reported that Ebbe enjoyed more affection with their parents, yet in his description of defense mechanisms he had written that rivalry with a sibling over parental affection can lead to negative consequences. Ebbe’s death may have brought Skinner guilt in particular about his wish for greater closeness with his parents,
serving as one reason why he was led to regret the sentimental inscription he had written in the gift he had sent them only a few months before. Ebbe’s death then appears to have made powerful demands on Skinner to deny angry feelings as well as affectionate wishes. This event may well have played a role in Skinner’s later denial of the importance of emotions and wishes in his theory.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

On a Sunday morning, he and Ebbe drove their parents to church and then met a friend of Ebbe’s in town for a sundae at the drugstore. By the time they had driven back to their house Ebbe was complaining of a headache, and within a short while he was obviously in great pain and frightened, and he cried for them to call a doctor. Skinner stood by helplessly as Ebbe’s friend called a doctor he knew lived nearby. In the 15 minutes it took for the doctor to arrive Ebbe had fallen unconscious; food was flowing out of his mouth. Skinner asked the doctor if he should go get his parents from church and was told that he should. He drove so fast that his mother, not aware of the seriousness of Ebbe’s condition, complained about being bounced about. When they arrived at the house they found the maid standing on the front porch crying that Ebbe was dead. A poorly done autopsy at the time gave the cause of death as acute indigestion, but Skinner showed the report to a medical friend years later who guessed it was more probably amassive cerebral hemorrhage.

Skinner’s description of his stunned and disoriented parents is a compelling one. His mother threw her arms around the still warm body of her son while his father walked from room to room in a kind of trance repeatedly saying “For heaven’s sake, for heaven’s sake.” Skinner’s account of his own reaction is much harder to decipher. In the autobiographical chapter he wrote in his sixth decade he reports, “I was not much moved. I probably felt guilty because I was not.”39 But in the autobiographical volume he wrote a decade later he says specifically “I was far from unmoved.”40 In this account he reports that Ebbe’s death had a devastating effect on all of them, and he emphasizes his own ineffectiveness in being unable to do anything for his brother. Here it is implied that it is through a feeling of shock that he was stunned into a helpless immobility. He writes, in a rather odd analogy, “Just as I allowed myself to be tied to that classroom seat by two hazing sophomores, so I submitted to that tragic loss with little or nostruggle.”41

What is going on here? Should we draw from his earlier account the conclusion that Skinner was actually lacking in feeling at his brother’s death, and that his later claim to being moved is a false claim of feeling, resulting from his guilt in having none? After all his actual statement in the second account, that he was “far from unmoved,” is a noteworthy way to put it, using a double negative to say that he was not not moved. Or should we draw from his later account that Skinner did in fact feel deeply at his brother’s death, but that his inability to control the situation to prevent the
tragedy and its devastating effects led him to a feeling of stunned numbness that he had earlier misidentified as a lack of feeling? Now perhaps the double negative should be seen as an effort to avoid the powerful negative feeling that did exist. An answer to these questions might take us a long way in understanding the role of personal experience in Skinner’s theoretical discounting of the importance of emotion.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

Although Skinner hoped that Hamilton College would be an opportunity for freedom, in his first year he found it to be a mixed opportunity. Classes were run on a schedule as strict as the daily ac tivities had been in Susquehanna, with a bell in the chapel tower replacing the railroad shop whistle. The bell tolled 12 times at the beginning of each period, and students who were not in their seats by the 12th stroke were marked absent or late; only a few
such absences were excused. Here was another environment that controlled his behavior by an orderly schedule, serving as a basis for the attention paid in his theory to the influence of the environment on behavior and to the issues of order and control. Freshmen were subjected to hazing by upperclassmen, and Skinner recounts a time when he was “captured” by two sophomores and tied to a chair in a classroom. He reports: “I did not resist; I
simply let my captors tie me up without protest.”38

As in his years at home, he was submitting to the control of others, and this passivity rather than active attempt to change the situation perhaps found expression later in his theoretical distinction between respondent and operant behavior. Yet Hamilton did provide new opportunities for freedom, such as in the use of an honor system during examinations. Skinner also found himself writing poems as he had never done at home and being reinforced when somewere published in the Hamilton Literary Magazine.

On balance, however, in his first year Skinner was most impressed by the constraints and requirements imposed by the college, and he was disappointed to find college more of a burden than an incentive. He showed some signs of homesickness, and on a lonely excursion to the nearest city one day, he wandered into a bookstore and bought a book called Homes in America that he sent to his parents. But he was soon ashamed of the sentimental inscription he had written inside the book, in an echo of the earlier ambivalence we saw over the relative affection he and Ebbe received from their parents. In his visit home during the spring vacation of his freshman year, a traumatic event was to bring this ambivalence to the fore.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

Joy came easily to Ebbe and he took delight in things that his parents would have scorned. Skinner gives an example of this when he recounts a time when the family was sitting in the library and Ebbe got up and went to the kitchen. He came back a minute later laughing hilariously as he reported that he had intended to go to the toilet, and only discovered that he was in the kitchen after he had started to urinate into the coal pail. Only one
paragraph earlier Skinner had recounted his parents’ reaction of troubled concern when he himself had had a similar moment of absent-mindedness and made a faulty salute in a Boy Scout rally. This contrast between Ebbe’s style and that of his parents probably had an impact on the young Skinner, and it may have fed his later sensitivity to the distinction between reinforcement and punishment, and his preference for the former.

Tension emerged between the two boys as Ebbe grew older, however. In part, this was because Ebbe found it as easy to laugh at his older brother as at himself, and Skinner did not like to be laughed at. The examples Skinner recalls in his autobiography indicate that he was especially sensitive when Ebbe teased him for “putting on airs,” such as when Skinner referred to his father’s secretary as “Miss Jessie Sykes” or reported information on the
anatomy of a peanut that he had gleaned from an advertisement. In part, the tension resulted from the fact that Ebbe grew to be a much better athlete and more popular than his older brother.

That the tension reflected Skinner’s concern with maintaining a dominant position is suggested not only by the previous examples but also in his account of an interaction between them when Skinner was making discoveries about his sexuality. Experiencing an erection, he showed it to his brother who displayed great interest and started to play with it. Skinner reports that at that age he felt that to ejaculate was to be demeaned or defeated, and thus that he saw his brother as trying to put himself in a superior position. Skinner announced to the disappointed Ebbe that he could take that kind of stimulation forever without having an orgasm.

There is also some evidence that Skinner was jealous of Ebbe’s greater closeness to their parents. When reporting this greater closeness in his autobiography, Skinner writes that Ebbe “enjoyed” more expressions of affection from both parents as if he wished for more himself. Skinner quickly follows this, however, with the assertion that there was plenty of affection to go around. He also takes pains to assert in three different places that there was no rivalry between them, and wonders whether “the lack of sibling rivalry is disappointing”34 to his readers. That he needed to negate rivalry so many times would be enough to raise suspicion about its authenticity, but to have it come on the heels of the aforementioned examples of competition between them makes it very tempting to doubt his assertion to the reader of a lack of rivalry, as we would doubt his assertion to Ebbe that he could resist ejaculation forever. We will soon find an event in his college years that gives further evidence of Skinner’s competitive feelings, and of their impact on his theoretical model.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

If Skinner’s home environment was laced with aversive control, he found avenues of escape in building things and in studying animals. He was always building things, and in his list of the things he built, the first and the most frequent type of item he records is that which enables movement or travel. He built roller-skate scooters, steerable wagons, sleds, rafts, slides, kites, model airplanes, and tin propellers that could be sent high into the air with a spooland- string spinner. He tried repeatedly to make a glider in which
he himself could fly. It is tempting to see these devices as symbolic means of achieving both the progress that his parents valued and the escape from his constraining environment that he himself wanted. That he sometimes used invention explicitly to escape his parents’ aversive control is shown in the following example.

At one point Skinner’s mother began a campaign to get him to hang up his pajamas. Every morning as he was eating breakfast she would go upstairs to his room to check whether he had left his pajamas lying on the bed, and when she found that he had she would call to him to come immediately and hang them up, and he would have to stop eating to go upstairs and put them on a hook. She continued this for weeks over which time her morning
call to him became increasingly unbearable. He writes: “It did not make me any more inclined to hang them up before coming down to breakfast, but it was nonetheless aversive, and I escaped in the following way.”29 The closet was near to the door of his room, and he rigged a pulley system from a hook in the closet to a sign hanging above the door. When his pajamas were in place on the hook the sign remained above the door out of the way. But as soon as he took his pajamas off the hook at night the sign fell down to the middle of the doorway so that he ran into it when starting to leave his room the following morning. The sign read: “Hang up your pajamas!”

His contact with animals also seems to have served as a means of dealing with his parents’ constraining maneuvers. The town of Susquehanna was set in a river valley with fields, hills, and forest. Skinner explored this natural world extensively and caught many animals to bring home and study: chipmunks, frogs, turtles, snakes, butterflies, bees, and fireflies. It is striking how his descriptions of his play with these animals reveals a recurrent theme of him trapping them and their forcefully trying to break free, as if Skinner is acting out in his relationship with animals the role
his parents took toward him. He writes, for example, “I had a cage-like mousetrap that caught mice alive, and I used it to catch chipmunks. I could never tame them, and I let them go when red marks developed on the sides of their snouts as they tried to force their way between the wires of the trap.”30 Just a few sentences later the same pattern recurs with a different captive: “I could catch a bee in a hollyhock blossom, folding the petals together to make a small bottle, the bee buzzing furiously until I tired of the game and released it.”31 Skinner is a different captor than his parents,
however, in being moved to release his captives.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

A similar pattern occurs in his narrative 30 pages later, but this time it is his father who has done the catching and he declines to let the captive free. Writing about fishing with his father, Skinner says, “For bait my father caught minnows with a net in the shallow water near our cottage. He would put a hook through the back of a live minnow (I never watched him) and throw the struggling creature overboard. The minnow sometimes took revenge by weaving in and out among the eel grass so that the line could not be pulled in without breaking it.”32

Skinner’s distaste for his father’s capture of the minnow is made salient by his isolated comment that he could not watch his father hook it, and this distaste stands in contrast to his comfort with baiting hooks himself, recounted only one paragraph before this one. It may be that in this case he identifies more strongly with the captive rather than with the captor. Support for the idea that the young Skinner identified with the minnow who suffered under his father’s constraint is found in his personification of the minnow, depicting it as a “struggling creature” who “took revenge.”

Although Skinner may have identified with the minnow who struggled against his father’s control, by Skinner’s report, he himself never revolted. He writes: “I was never aware of the control exercised by my family or my associates in Susquehanna, but it was nonetheless irksome … I accepted all this as I had been taught to do; I had never learned to protest or complain or even to try to find out what was wrong.”33 In his first experimental designs
in graduate school Skinner would combine his childhood patterns of building things and capturing animals as a way to express his concern with escaping a constraining environment, and his theoretical distinction between respondent and operant behavior can be seen to reflect his concern with passive acceptance versus active revolt in relation to this environment.

Beyond the mitigation provided by building things and capturing animals, another source of relief from the oppressiveness of Skinner’s home life came in the form of a younger brother, Ebbe. Born 21/2 years after Skinner, Ebbe was an easygoing and goodhumored boy of whom the young Skinner was very fond. Skinner used to call his brother “Honey,” a term he picked up from his mother. He and Ebbe were constant playmates, and Ebbe’s role as an early reinforcer is shown in a memory Skinner had of a day when Ebbe was in bed sick with a cold. Working with the boards of orange crates to fashion a stool, Skinner brought his creation in to show his brother. Ebbe responded with such delight that Skinner went right back to make a second stool, and this pleased Ebbe so much that Skinner promptly went back and made a third. Their mother finally had to intervene to stop him from making still more.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

Skinner’s father, Will, played his own part in perpetuating a strict atmosphere. When Skinner was discovered to have lifted a quarter from his grandmother’s purse at the age of 4 or 5, he was lectured about the dangers of a criminal way of life. Some years later his father took him to a county jail to see the prisoners sitting in the bare room behind bars, and once while the family was on vacation he was taken to an illustrated lecture on life at Sing
Sing Prison. After recounting these events in his autobiography, Skinner writes that he doesn’t think they were done to frighten him, making the threat of fear salient by negation.

Although his father never physically punished Skinner, he was not against using emotional manipulation, not only inducing fear by the implicit threats in the aforementioned examples but also inducing shame by social evaluation. Skinner was round- shouldered and had a tendency to droop in his posture, an inclination that led both parents to worry. His father dealt with this by slouching across the room with his hands dangling like an ape’s to show Skinner how bad he looked. Skinner was powerfully influenced by these kinds of controlling maneuvers from both of his parents, and this may have led him later to seek control himself through the science of behaviorism. In his first experiments he would try a direct identification with his parents in exposing his rats to threats, but later he would reject punishment as a means of control.

One striking aspect of Skinner’s autobiographical account is the inconsistency with which he describes the punishment he received as a child. After recounting the only time he had been physically punished (itself a rather unusual label for having his mouth washed out with soap), he says “I must have been punished in other ways because my parents’ disapproval was something I carefully avoided.”26 Only a page later he claims he was not punished by his parents: “Unwilling to punish me, my parents showed
some skill in finding alternative measures.”27

Two pages later he returns to the conclusion that he was punished with the remarkable statement: “I must have been punished in some way for very early sex play, perhaps even as a baby.”28 This series of contradictory statements indicates a confusion on Skinner’s part in how to characterize his parents’ aversive control of him. It is also noteworthy that the two times he says that he was punished he writes it as “I must have been,” as if he does not remember actual examples yet decides he should reach this conclusion from other evidence. Skinner might characterize this failure of memory as a repression, that is, an avoidance of something unpleasant by failing to approach it even in thought. This personal aversion to punishment was later expressed in a theoretical rejection of it.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest