Sampling Normal and Schizophrenic Inner Experience: (Emotions, Personality, and Psychotherapy)

What are the basic data of psychology? In the early years of experimental psychology, they were reports of ''brighter'' or "heavier" or other esti­ mates of the magnitude of differences between the sensory stimuli pre­ sented in psychophysical experiments. Introspective accounts of the ex­ perience of seeing colored lights or shapes were important sources of psychological data in the laboratories of Cornell, Harvard, Leipzig, or Wiirzburg around the tum of the century. In 1910, John B. Watson called for the objectification of psychological research, even parodying the typical subjective introspective reports that emerged from Edward Bradford Titchener's laboratory. For almost fifty years psychologists largely eschewed subjective information and turned their attention to observable behavior. Rats running mazes or pigeons pecking away on varied schedules of reinforcement became the scientific prototypes for those psychologists who viewed themselves as "doing science. " Psychoanalysts and clinical psychologists sustained interest in the personal reports of patients or clients as valuable sources of data for research. For the psychologists, questionnaires and projective tests that allowed for quantitative analysis and psychometrics seemed to circum­ vent the problem of subjectivity. Sigmund Freud's introduction of on­ going free association became the basis for psychoanalysis as a therapy and as a means of learning about human psychology. Slips-of-the­ tongue, thought intrusions, fantasies, hesitations, and sudden emo­ tional expressions became the data employed by psychoanalysts in for­ mulating hypotheses about resistance, memory, transference, and a host of presumed human wishes and conflicts.

Table of Contents:
Preliminary Comments Designed to Suspend the Introspection Controversy.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Method.- Phase 1: The Pre-Sampling Retrospective General Account of the Subject’s Inner Experience.- Phase 2: The Sampling Itself.- Phase 3: Writing the Descriptions.- Phase 4: Reviewing Each Sampled Thought.- Phase 5: Comparing Sampled Thought Descriptions to the Pre-Sampling Generalizations.- Phase 6: The Follow-Up Sample.- 3. Method Considerations.- I. The Normal Subjects.- 4. A College Freshman.- 5. A Professional Potter.- 6. A Record Store Manager.- 7. A Medical Doctor.- 8. A Graduate Student.- 9. A Research Associate.- 10. Characteristics of Normal Inner Experience.- II. The Schizophrenic Subjects.- 11. A Schizophrenic Woman with “Goofed-Up” Images.- 12. A Schizophrenic Man with (Perhaps) No Inner Experience.- 13. A Decompensating Schizophrenic.- 14. A Schizophrenic Woman Who Heard Voices of the Gods.- 15. Implications for Understanding Schizophrenia.- 16. Discussion.- 17. A Look at Depression and Beyond.