Biografia en ingl

LECTURE NOTES ON JOHN B. WATSON



1. PROLOGUE

.Everyone in America has been affected, or know someone who has been affected, by Watson. Rigidly scheduled feeding, picking up, changing, etc. -- not when they cried.

WATSON'S GRANDDAUGHTER -- MARIETTE HARTLEY. (Actress who had leading roles in a few pictures but never made it big.) Daughter of Watson's first wife Mary Ickes, Wrote thebook Breaking the Silence about Watson's life, work, and effects on our culture.

Hartley writes, "I was lying in bed reading a bouch called Touching--feeling very alive, very fresh in my body, having jsut finished nursing my daughter, Justine--and was fully sympathetic with Ashley Montagu's emphasis on the importance of touch. He discussed child-raising theories popular in thetwenties--antiseptic theories that greatly influenced psychology, theories that claimed that any show of love or close physical contact made the child too dependent.... [Children were viewed, Montagu went on], as mechanical objects at the mercy of their environment, and parents could make them into anything they wished.

The child's wishes, needs, feelings were treated [by Watson and his approach] as if they didnot exist.

Unsound as this thinking is, and damaging as it has been to millions of children, many of whom later grew up into disturbed persons, the behavioristic, mechanistic approach to child-rearing is still largely with us.

The man responsible--wrote Montagu--the man to thank, was "Professor John Broadus Watson of Johns Hopkins University."

I dropped the book and got chills.

JohnBroadus Watson. My mother's father. Big John. My grandfather."

[Watson's] 1928 book, The Psychological Care of the Infant and Child, was the bestselling "Spock" of his generation--rebutted by Spock in his generation. In it, my grandfather wrote:

Children should be awakened at 6:30 A.M. for orange juice and a pee. Play 'till 7:30. Breakfast should be at 7:30 sharp; at 8:00 they should be placedon the toilet for twenty minutes or less 'til bowel movement is complete. Then follow up with a verbal report. The child would then play indoors 'till 10P00 A.M., after 10:00 outside, a short nap after lunch, then "social play" with others. In the evening a bath, quiet play until bedtime at 8:00 sharp.

(2) He argued that institutions like the Boy Scouts and the YMCA could lead to homosexuality.Girls were even in more danger because they held hands, kissed, and slept in the same bed at pajama parties. "Our whole social fabric is woven so as to make all women slightly homosexual."

In Big John's ideal world, children wer to be taken from mothers duriing their third our fourth week; if not, attachments were bound to develop. He claimed that the reason mothers indulged in baby-loving wassexual. Otherwise, why would they kiss ther children on the lips? He railed against mothers whose excessive affection made the child forever dependent and emotionally unstable. Children should never b kissed, hugged, or allowed to sit on th ir laps. If there has to be kissing, let it b on th forehead. Parents would soon find they could be 'perfectly objective and yet kindly.

My mother's[Watson's daughter's] upbringing was purely intellectual. The only time my mother was "kissed on the forehead" was when she was about twelve and Big John went to war. Althought she was reading the newspaper by the time she was two, there was never any touching, not any at all.

Grandfather's theories infected my mother's life, my life, and the lives of millions.

How do you break a legacy? How doyou keep from passing a debilitating inheritance down, generation to g eneration, like a ge netic flaw?



2. WATSON'S CHILDHOOD.

What could have led to such an outlook? Let's look & see.

a. WATSON'S FAMILY

When James Madison Watson died, he left his small farm which backed onto the Reedy River near Greenville, South Carolina, to his son Pickens Watson, who took over the farm.

In...