Introduction

Janet's classic contribution to the literature on OCD (1903) has still not been translated into English. Fortunately, Pitman has provided a highly readable synopsis of Janet's work (1984) as well as an interesting review/commentary (1987a), which will be used as the basis of the discussion here. In his review/commentary, Pitman presents a summary of Janet's ideas in three segments, each of which will be considered in turn here; the points Pitman himself offers will be considered in the course of commenting on Janet's work. Havens (1966) also provides an interesting account of Janet's contribution, some points from which will be briefly discussed in what follows, as will some of Reed's (1985) comments on Janet.

Janet on the clinical stages of psychasthenic illness

Janet includes OCD, among other conditions, in the category he terms psychasthenic illness. He divides this category into three stages, these being, from the least to the most severe, the psychasthenic state, forced agitations, and obsessions and compulsions. According to Janet, patients develop the less severe stages of the illness before the more severe and, similarly, lose the more severe stages of the illness before they lose the less severe.

The first stage of the illness – the psychasthenic state – involves the patient's feeling that actions have been unsatisfactorily or incompletely performed. Incompleteness in “perceptions” is also present, consisting of such experiences as derealisation and depersonalisation. Indecision, amnesia, poor control of thoughts, and “emotional insufficiencies” (that is, an inability to experience emotions fully) are reported by patients.

Introduction

Much of the theorising found in psychodynamic approaches tends to pay close attention to the detail of individual patients. This makes it difficult to review thoroughly the whole of the psychodynamic literature on OCD, and in what follows no attempt to do this will be made. To the extent that generalisations across individual patients are possible from this perspective, furthermore, one finds psychodynamic theorists offering a number of different accounts of OCD. It seems unlikely that each of these is intended to apply to a different subgroup of OCD patients, and these accounts thus stand instead as alternative, and perhaps also incompatible, approaches to the disorder.

Given these points, the present discussion will take the following course. Firstly, some of the psychodynamic accounts of OCD that have been offered will be briefly outlined, the emphasis being on exposition rather than criticism. Following this, a single case discussion presented by Malan (1979) will be critically discussed at some length, along with some of Malan's comments concerning psychodynamic theory and therapy. There are two justifications for concentrating critical comment on Malan's case discussion. Firstly, and as already noted, much psychodynamic theorising takes into account the detail of individual patients and is therefore also best discussed with reference to such details. This does not, of course, mean that all of the points raised by any given case will be irrelevant to the evaluation of psychodynamic accounts of other cases, and indeed, it is suggested that some of the themes raised by the case discussion to be considered here (for example, the nature of symbolisation and the role of the unconscious) would be central to many psychodynamic discussions.

Reed's account

Reed's hypothesis of the central problem

A number of authors (for example, Beech and Perigault, 1974; Beech and Liddell, 1974; Carr, 1974; Volans, 1974, 1976; Reed, 1985, 1991) have suggested that a generalised cognitive style or deficit in OCD sufferers may be responsible for the occurrence of OCD symptoms. Reed's ideas represent the most fully worked out contribution from this school. He advances what he terms a “cognitive-structural approach” (Reed, 1985) to explain both the obsessional personality (and personality disorder) and OCD. In what follows, the term obsessional will be used generically, as it is by Reed, to cover OCD, the obsessional personality/personality disorder, and the person who exhibits either of these. Unlike many of the approaches discussed in other chapters of this book, Reed's account has not been subject to widespread critical discussion; particularly detailed consideration of this account is therefore offered here.

What, then, is the central problem in obsessional disorders, according to Reed? His attempts to answer this question in just a few words tend to be a little cryptic. For example, he suggests that obsessional traits and symptoms reflect difficulties in “spontaneous categorizing and integration” (1985, p. 220) leading to attempts to compensate for these difficulties by “the artificial over-structuring of input, of fields of awareness, of tasks and situations” (p. 220); there is, he argues, a “maladaptive over-defining of categories and boundaries” (1969b, p. 787). Reed states that the central phenomenon of these disorders “may thus be seen as a striving towards boundary fixing or the setting of limits in the cognitive/ perceptual modalities” (1985, p. 220).

Introduction and natural history

It is quite common for books on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) to open by offering a brief definition of the disorder. Because the definition of OCD is to be treated here as a major issue in its own right, such an introduction is not possible. Instead, a few examples of symptoms reported by OCD patients are offered. A fuller picture of the symptoms reported by these patients will be provided by the discussion of the definition of the disorder later in this chapter. All the following examples are taken from de Silva (1988, pp. 196–7):

1. (a) thought plus… [mental] image [of the patient's having] knocked someone down with his car

2. (b) impulse…to shout obscenities during prayer or a church service

3. (c) [mental] image of corpses rotting away…

4. (d) repeated and extensive washing of hands to get rid of contamination by germs

5. (e) checking gas taps, door handles, and switches three times [whenever the patient] went past them

6. (f) imagining in sequence…photographs of members of [the patient's] family, his parents, pictures of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, and then photographs of two other persons

Chapters 2 to 7 will review a variety of theoretical approaches to OCD. Although a diversity of work will be covered by this review, including behavioural, cognitive, psychodynamic, and biological approaches to the disorder, the review will not aim to be exhaustive. In particular, it will omit detailed consideration of such important elements as the interesting relationship between OCD and depression (Stengel, 1945; Lewis, 1934), and the phenomenological approach of Schneider (1925), whose classic work on personality disorders includes a discussion of obsessionals, termed by him insecure psychopaths.

Some basic explanatory forms

The environmental complexity thesis about cognition asserts a link between certain capacities of organic systems and a specific feature of these systems' environments. This is a familiar pattern of explanation. It exemplifies one of the basic stances or approaches that can be taken in investigating organic properties. The internal is understood in terms of its relation to the external. If a causal explanation is involved, the channel of causal influence goes “outside-in.”

One of the aims of this book is getting a better understanding of this general pattern of explanation, and understanding some versions of the environmental complexity thesis as instances of this pattern.

Most generally, the term “externalist” will be used for all explanations of properties of organic systems in terms of properties of their environments. Explanations of one set of organic properties in terms of other internal or intrinsic properties of the organic system will be called “internalist.”

These terms “externalist” and “internalist” apply to our explanations of properties of organic systems, not to the organic systems themselves. But an externalist claim can be true or false, and if a system, or some aspect of it, really is controlled entirely or for the most part by events in its environment, then an externalist pattern of explanation applies to it.

This chapter will mainly be concerned with the relations between internalism and externalism. A third basic pattern of explanation will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5, but I will introduce it now.

Meetings and departures

Spencer and Dewey? Spencer the scientistic, laissez-faire Victorian who believed in laws of progressive change and explained mind in terms of astronomical rhythms making our lives more complicated … and Dewey the great American liberal, the man who thought ontological guarantees of progress only deflect people from bringing improvement about themselves, and who thought intelligence functions in the transformation of environments? Dewey has been befriended by foes of systematic philosophy such as Richard Rorty (1982). Even postmodernists approve of Dewey. For people like that Spencer embodies all the callousness, arrogance and folly of science-worship and system-building.

It is not an obvious combination, but the idea I am calling the environmental complexity thesis lies close to the heart of Dewey's epistemology. Let us have some cards on the table. Here is a passage from Dewey's Experience and Nature (1929a) which I take to express a version of the environmental complexity thesis:

In Dewey's epistemology an important role is played by a contingent fact about the pattern of nature: the balance which actual environments display between the stable and the unstable, the reliable and the capricious.

Although this book was brewing for a number of years, it owes many aspects of its present form to a series of discussions with Richard Francis during 1992 and 1993. Through these discussions a vague plan to investigate the “function of mind in nature,” and the relations between intelligence and environmental complexity, took on a more definite shape. It was also in these discussions that this set of questions in the philosophy of mind became linked to more general issues about the relations between organisms and environments, and the general pattern of “externalist” explanations – explanations of internal properties of organic systems in terms of external properties.

So the book is intended to address two types of questions at once. First, is it possible to develop an informative philosophical theory about the mind, by linking mind to properties of environmental complexity? The second set of questions concerns externalist patterns of explanation in general. What are these explanations like? What are the characteristic debates and issues that surround the attempt to understand the internal in terms of the external?

I see these questions as closely linked, and in this book they are often examined simultaneously. However, for practical reasons the book is divided into two parts which are largely self-contained. This division is partly methodological and partly a matter of content. Part I is intended as a self-contained essay in the philosophy of mind, and it is completely nontechnical.

The next question

The previous chapter looked at some relationships between flexible and inflexible ways of dealing with environments while assuming that the cue used in a flexible strategy is a “given,” a fixed constraint within which the organism optimizes. The organism either makes use of this cue, accepting its reliability properties, or it does not. It was also assumed that there are no additional intrinsic costs associated with being flexible. The only costs discussed in Chapter 7 are costs stemming from making wrong decisions. In this chapter both of these assumptions will be dropped. We will look at ways in which organisms can shape the reliability properties of cues they use, and we will also look at one way to build in some costs associated with the mechanisms that make flexibility possible. The same modifications to the model of the previous chapter will address both of these issues at once. In the previous chapter we assumed that a cue with certain reliability properties was available, and asked: should the organism use this cue in the determination of behavior? In this chapter the question is: given the general nature of an organism's physical connections to the world, what is the best cue available for guiding its behavior with respect to a particular problem?

These questions will be addressed with the aid of signal detection theory, a psychologistic application of statistical decision theory.

Asymmetric externalism

In this chapter we will look at a critically important issue, which marks what I view as the most important divide between Spencer's version of the environmental complexity thesis and Dewey's version. This issue is the role played by organic systems, such as intelligent agents, in the construction of their environments.

Up to this point we have been primarily concerned with different approaches to explaining organic properties, and with the idea that cognition, a form of organic complexity, might be understood in terms of its relations to environmental conditions. Our perspective has been “outside-in.” In this chapter we will look down this same road from the other direction; we will look at explanations of environmental properties in terms of organic properties. The direction of influence we are concerned with now is “inside-out.”

We will approach these questions, as we did in Chapter 2, by looking first at the relationships between some basic explanatory schemas, and describing a range of disputes in different fields in terms of this categorization.

In Chapter 2 I distinguished three basic types of explanation: externalist, internalist and constructive. Externalist explanations explain internal properties of organic systems in terms of environmental properties. Internalist explanations are explanations of one set of internal properties in terms of another, and constructive explanations explain environmental properties in terms of organic properties. Some externalist explanations are c-externalist: they are externalist explanations where explanandum and explanans are both properties of complexity.

Basics

This book is largely about a single idea concerning the place of mind within nature. The idea is this:

Environmental Complexity Thesis:

The function of cognition is to enable the agent to deal with environmental complexity.

Naturalistic philosophy has already developed part of a theory of the place of mind within nature, a physicalist theory of what minds are made up of, and of how some of the strange properties of mentality can exist in the natural world. It may be possible to also develop another kind of theory of the place of mind in nature, a theory of what mind is doing here, perhaps a theory of what it is for. The environmental complexity thesis expresses one possible way to develop such a theory.

The topic of this book lies at the intersection of philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, and epistemology. The aim is an account of the place of mind in nature, but many of the concepts used will be biological. And although I will not give a “theory of knowledge,” this book is intended as a contribution to epistemology. In 1976 Alvin Goldman motivated an approach to epistemology, known as “reliabilism,” by appealing to a sense of the word “know” illustrated by a phrase from Shakespeare's Hamlet: “I know a hawk from a handsaw.” The present work is intended to shed light upon another sense of “know.”

The division

In the previous chapter we looked at a basic difference between Spencer's and Dewey's versions of the environmental complexity thesis: Dewey was opposed to conceptions of mind which are asymmetrically externalist. He accepted, with others of a generally empiricist temper, that thought is highly responsive to patterns in experience. But unlike Spencer and unlike more orthodox empiricist views, Dewey placed great stress on the role played by thought in the transformation of external affairs, and hence on the future course of experience. On this point I follow Dewey. But though this is, in my view, the most fundamental difference between their conceptions of the place of mind in nature, it is not the most obvious difference between them. The most obvious difference is in their attitudes to the concept of correspondence.

Spencer believed that states of mind, by virtue of their role in adapting organisms to particular external conditions, often bear a relation of correspondence to these external conditions. Dewey viewed his account of the role played by the mind in dealing with environmental problems as a replacement for the idea that the business of thought is correspondence to the external world. He saw the idea of correspondence as a typical product of a “dualist” view about mind and nature – philosophers first assert a breach or gulf between mind and the world, and then invent magical relations to overcome it.

Spencer's place

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) occupies an unusual place in history. He was unquestionably one of the most prominent intellectual figures in the English-speaking world during the Victorian period. He was largely self-taught, and not affiliated with any university or research institution. He published on biology, psychology, philosophy, sociology, ethics and political science. Spencer is often associated with the label “social Darwinism,” although this is a questionable term for someone more inclined towards (what are now called) Lamarckian mechanisms for change. He did advocate an extreme laissez-faire position in politics and economics. Spencer was respected, with qualifications, by Darwin and was a close friend of T. H. Huxley. Once when Spencer was in financial straits, J. S. Mill offered to finance some of his writings personally. William James was captured by his views early but later revolted. Spencer was active and influential during the entire second half of the nineteenth century, but soon after the turn of the century his reputation fell like a stone, never to recover.

Spencer is, as far as I know, the first person to use a version of the environmental complexity thesis as the central idea in a theory of the place of mind in nature. This historical claim is made very cautiously. There are difficult questions about the extent to which Spencer's work is continuous with earlier empiricist and associationist thought, and with the work of earlier evolutionists such as Lamarck. Many historians consider Spencer a very unoriginal thinker.