Psychoanalysis and the Explanation of Behaviour

Mind Association

Psychoanalysis and the Explanation of BehaviourAuthor(s): Peter AlexanderSource: Mind, New Series, Vol. 80, No. 319 (Jul., 1971), pp. 391-402Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2252550 .

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VI.-DISCUSSIONS

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE EXPLANATION OF BEHAVIOUR

Dr. T. MIsaHEL1 and Dr. J. Balmuth2 have put forward some crit- icisms of my article " Rational Behaviour and Psychoanalytic Explanation "3 which are interesting because they help to show how I could have argued more effectively for my main thesis without, I think, showing it to be untenable. I shall here consider a number of points which are fundamental to their arguments and attempt to show that some of these are mistaken and that others support my denial that psychoanalytic explanation shows that certain behaviour which we normally take not to be rational is, after all, rational.4 In the course of this consideration it will emerge that there are statements or suggestions in my original article which I now wish to modify or retract but I do not think that this affects the main burden of my argument there.

1. Mischel attacks my account of rational behaviour in terms of intentions to achieve something, by pointing to examples such as " I play chess because I enjoy it " and " I took a walk because I felt like it " where " I do not intend to achieve anything . . . by doing these things " (p. 73). I originally found such examples difficult, and still do, but one of the reasons for this is, I think, that they cannot be treated as simply as Mischel suggests.

The expressions " because I enjoy it " and " because I felt like it ", and others such as " because I want to " must perhaps be treated differently when we are considering requests for reasons. " Because I enjoy it " is more likely to figure in a context of reason- asking and reason-giving than " because I felt like it " or " because I want to "; it has, usually, a less defiant and question-blocking tone; we feel less cheated if we receive it in reply to a request for someone's reason for doing something. Why is this? It is because, I think, the expression " because I enjoy it ", more naturally and frequently than the other two, is used in two ways, one which allows further questions, such as " What do you enjoy about it? ", and one which forbids further questions, when we mean " No reason, I just enjoy it ". The other two expressions are nearly always used in the second way.

When we use "because I enjoy it" in the first way, further questions elicit reasons for the behaviour which embody information about something to be achieved by the activity in question. " Why

1 "Concerning Rational Behaviour and Psychoanalytic Explanation ", MIND, lxxiv, No. 293 (Januqary 1965), p. 71.

2 6 Psychoanalytic Explanation ", MIND. lxxiv, No. 294 (April 1965), p. 229. 3 MIND, lxxi, no. 283 (July 1962), p. 326. 4 I have been helped in this by discussions with Mr. Roy Edgley and Mr.

David Hirschmann.

391



392 P. ALEXANDER:

do you play chess? " " Because I enjoy it. " " But why do you enjoy it? " " Because (for instance) I enjoy attempting to solve the kind of problem one meets in playing chess." That is, the reason for playing chess is that it puts the player into a certain kind of problem-situation and this is what he intends to achieve in playing chess. Similar things emerge when we consider other possible reasons for playing chess. Of course, if the questioning continues we may come to a point at which the agent is not prepared to go on giving reasons and replies " I just enjoy that "; but this reply is appropriate only when the reasons he has thought of, or can think of, have been exhausted. It is not the last of the reasons.

When we use " because I enjoy it " in this second way we do not give reasons but suggest that it is inappropriate even to ask for reasons, or that we are not prepared to defend our behaviour or to show it to be reasonable. In effect we are saying " I don't consider why I do it, I do it just because I enjoy it ". This is how " because I want to " and " because I felt like it " are usually used. Here it may be truly said that there is no question of achieving anything by what we do but also that there is no question of reasons for doing it or of the behaviour's being either rational or irrational. It looks right to say, as Mischel does, that " it would clearly be wrong to say that I do not behave rationally if I do such things because I enjoy them or feel like doing them " (p. 73) but only because the expression " he did not behave rationally " is usually used as a critical remark with the force of " he behaved irrationally ".

We take it for granted that people want to do, or enjoy doing, the things they do unless they seem odd things to want or enjoy and/or there are reasons for doing them. We take it that people do the things they want to do, or enjoy doing, unless there are reasons against doing them. We don't ask for reasons for doing something which most people enjoy doing unless we think there are reasons against doing it or there are several possible reasons and we want to discover which of these is important on a given occasion to a given person. That I just enjoy doing something is not a reason conflicting with reasons against doing it because it is not a reason; it is something in spite of which reasons for and against may operate; it is something which falls out of sight when I begin to weigh reasons. That I do not enjoy doing something is not the reason for which I normally refrain from doing it; since I do not enjoy doing it no question of doing it arises, and so no question of reasons for or against doing it, unless someone says I ought to and gives reasons for this. Sunbathing is something people enjoy. We don't ask people their reasons for sunbathing unless we suspect that they don't enjoy it, or unless we know of reasons against sunbathing. If we do ask for reasons, " because I just enjoy it " is no answer.1

1 See A. I. Melden, Free Action (London, 1961), pp. 160 ff., P. H. Nowell- Smith, Ethics (London, 1954), p. 131, R. Abelson, " Because I want to " MIND, lxxiv, no. 296 (October 1966), p. 540.



THE EXPLANATION OF BEHAVIOUR 393

The word " because" does not always usher in a statement of a reason for or a cause of a piece of behaviour. " Because I want to " sometimes makes behaviour intelligible without giving a reason for it or showing it to deserve the title " rational " or giving a cause. The description " rational " is too weighty and honorific for a great deal of our behaviour which can be made intelligible without causal accounts of it. On the other,hand, I don't think that either Mischel or Balmuth has adduced arguments to show that we never sunbathe or play chess or thank someone with the intention of achieving something; only in such cases would I say that the behaviour is fittingly characterized as either rational or irrational.

Balmuth also attacks me on this point. He produces some rather different examples of reason-giving which he takes to show that there may be no question of attempting to achieve anything in rational behaviour. It seems to me that his examples of reasons are ellip- tical and need filling out before they can be seen to be reasons for the behaviour in question. It is not usually necessary, in our society, to fill these out because there are certain things we all know or take for granted upon which these "reasons " depend. He says " If I give as my reason for enlisting in the service that I love my country, or as my reason for getting up from my chair that a lady entered the room, it is not obvious that the reason shows the action ' one likely to achieve what was intended ' " (p. 230). This is because they are not, as they stand, reasons for the behaviour. " I love my country " does not give a reason for enlisting rather than for registering as a conscientious objector or doing nothing unless it is taken along with certain other statements such as that my country is in danger of extinction by invasion unless every able-bodied man enlists to prevent it. " A lady entered the room " is not a reason for rising unless, for example, it is an accepted con- vention that this is how one shows respect for ladies. These are not, as Balmuth says, quite different reasons from those given but parts of them which are essential to understanding them as reasons but which are taken as accepted and so not to need spelling out. When we do spell them out we reveal something to be achieved.

Balmuth also mentions, in passing, ritual and performatory actions as not satisfying my criteria of rationality but I am not clear that these constitute serious counter-instances. A particular action which is part of a ritual may be meant to achieve the correct carrying out of the ritual as a whole and many rituals are intended to achieve something. Similarly, but almost by definition, performatory actions are meant to achieve something; by saying " I do " in an appropriate context a man intends to achieve the married state.

If a man "gives as his reason for taking (sic) confession that he is a Catholic" (Balmuth, p. 230) there may be something he wishes to achieve or avoid by his action (as Balmuth seems to admit: he says there is not necessarily something); he may have reasons



394 P. ALEXANDER:

for being a Catholic which involve achieving something, such as true knowledge or a state of grace, and then the actions involved in being a Catholic can be explained in terms of these. Is it idolat- rous, or sinful in any way, to want to achieve a state of grace and to design one's actions accordingly? To work towards a state of grace, believing in God, is not necessarily to treat a state of grace as a God. Catholic practices and rituals.may have less mundane aims than fertility dances but they surely have some aims. Of course, one may be a Catholic for no reason, having been conditioned to it and never having thought about it, but then there is considerable doubt that the behaviour involved can be regarded as rational.

In urging that my criterion of rational behaviour is too narrow, Balmuth mentions (p. 231) Miss Anscombe's discussion' of " moti- vated acts " which acts, he says, must be included in rational behaviour. However, Anscombe in distinguishing backward- looking motives from mental causes says of them " What the agent reports in answer to the question ' Why? ' is a reason for acting if in treating it as a reason he conceives it as something good or bad, and his own action as doing good or harm " (my italics). So in acting for revenge I mean to do a person harm or myself good. If it is said that the reason for the action is not that it will do him harm or myself good but that, for example, he insulted me, I reply that it is normal in such situations to say things like " I wanted to pay him back for insulting me ". It is more usual to say something like this than " I acted for revenge ". Either way, my criterion seems to stand. As for the kind of motive which Anscombe calls " motive- in-general ", she holds that these function by showing an action " in a certain light "; this is more like showing what kind of an action it is than giving a reason for it, which would be to do something further.

2. According to Mischel's account (pp. 72-73), the woman in Freud's example who read " storks " instead of " stocks " both wants to mention storks, because she wants children, and does not want to mention storks, because to do so would be to remind herself of her lack of children. So she mistakes " stocks " for

storks ". This is a different account from the one I gave, but suppose it is

correct and consider what follows. There are, of course, reasons against reading " storks " instead of " stocks ". The sense of the passage will be altered or destroyed and, if the reading is done aloud, the audience will be misled or confused. If the woman had considered these things and decided to ignore them then she would have decided to say " storks " and would not have said it by mistake. We should then, perhaps, correctly say that her behaviour was irrational. But what is the point of talking of a mistake here? It is surely to suggest that she says " storks " unintentionally or

1 Intention (Oxford 1957), pp. 18-23.




involuntarily or without realizing that she is saying it. Her doing so is not considered; she has not weighed reasons for or against and come to a wrong or mistaken decision. Being in the grip of strong and conflicting desires, she has not entertained, or she has abdicated from, any such process of consideration. She deceives herself into a forlorn and unrecognized attempt to satisfy both desires. Her conflicting desires could not be seen by herself at the time as reasons for mistaking " stocks " for " storks " because if they were seen in this way her behaviour would be something other than a mistake or it would be a different sort of mistake. Reasons are just not in question in this sort of mistake, which is where it differs from some mistakes in calculation or inference.

This is not to deny that her behaviour is made intelligible to us when we learn that she lacks and wants children but only to deny that it is thereby explained in terms of reasons for it and that it is a candidate for either of the labels " rational " or " irrational ".

Mistaking, in this way, " stocks " for " storks " is a kind of behaviour for which it does not make sense to ask for reasons, although saytng "storks " instead of " stocks " need not always be this kind of mistake or, indeed, a mistake of any kind. Clearly a woman who wants children is more likely to mention storks than one who has no interest in children but it does not follow that, as Mischel says, she has more reason for doing so. Even if she had, this would not include reasons for mistaking " stocks " for " storks ".

3. I am unhappy about Mischel's saying both that " In an appropriate context, talking about the stork is wanting children, as talking about Jim is missing him " (p. 73) and that to say " she talks about the stork because she wants children " is to give an explanation of the woman's behaviour in terms of reasons for it (p. 72). Can x be a reason for y and, at the same time, be y? The alleged identity is, in any case, strange because, of course, I may talk about the stork without wanting children and want children without talking about the stork. " In an appropriate context " is Catch-221 and conceals a good deal; we must exclude there being reasons for talking about the stork and talking about the stork as being an ornithologist or as being a teller of fairy-tales, and so on. This separates one way of talking about the stork from others and so helps to make it intelligible, but not by giving reasons for it. The temptation to say both these things, to which I am subject as well as Mischel, may arise thus: for good reasons we hesitate to say that the woman's desire for children- is either a reason for, or a cause of, her talking about the stork so we are tempted to say that talking about the stork is wanting children; and yet it seems sensible, and seems to make the behaviour more intelligible, to say that she talks about the stork because she wants children, so we are tempted to say that this gives a reason for doing so. The answer is, surely, that to make

1 Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (London, 1963), p. 43.



396 P. ALEXANDER:

behaviour intelligible is not necessarily to give either reasons for it or causes of it. " She mentioned the stork because she wants children " differs from, on the one hand, " he moved that pawn because that would allow him to check with his Queen on the next move" and from, on the other hand, " his foot jerked because the doctor tapped a tendon in his knee ".

4. Does the neurotic who lunges at lamp-posts with his umbrella because he hates his father really " take himself to be killing his father " as Mischel seems to say (p. 75)? Mischel says that the neurotic unconsciously hates his father and unconsciously " identifies " lunging at lamp-posts with killing him, so what does it mean to say that he takes himself to be killing his father? He is not aware either that he is killing his father, something of which he could not be aware, or that he is taking himself to be killing his father. I am now smoking a cigarette and I take myself, in doing that, to be improving my concentration; I accept both descriptions of what I am doing. While smoking a cigarette I may also, without realizing it, be staining my fingers but can I say that I take myself to be staining my fingers? I do not here accept both descriptions of what I am doing, although an outside observer might. What we say I take myself to be doing is what I think of myself as doing in con- trast to what I don't realize that I am doing or to what I think of myself as not doing. What the neurotic takes himself to be doing is lunging at lamp-posts; he cannot take himself to be killing his father, because he is unconscious of the wish and because this is a description which conflicts with the one he accepts, and it seems doubtful that he is taking himself to be " symbolically " killing his father since he does not realize that this is what he is doing. An outside observer can, of course, say that he is both lunging at lamp-posts and " symbolically " killing his father but to suggest that this is what the neurotic takes himself to be doing is to reverse the usual criteria for " what he is doing " and " what he takes himself to be doing ". This whole passage in Mischel suggests a metaphor, in which what is important is divergence from a literal sense, rather than an analogy, in which what is important is a similarity; Mischel's quotation marks round " identified " and " symbolically" cry out for further elucidation.

Mischel says that my " central contention" that " something which would not look like a sufficient reason for doing x, if we were conscious of it, is not sufficient reason for doing x " is vitiated by my " failure to recognize that in 'doing x ' someone may also be doing various other things " (p. 75). The neurotic was lunging at lamp-posts. What other correct descriptions are there of what he was doing? There are, no doubt, many, but " killing his father " is not one of them. The most we can say is that he was " symbolically " killing his father. But among the reasons for the behaviour is, allegedly, that he (unconsciously) " identifies " lunging at lamp-posts with killing his father. Then how can Mischel say,




even accepting this, that it is not true that " the reasons would not appear to be appropriate to the form of the behaviour " if the neurotic were conscious of them? Would not an essential part of the alleged reason just evaporate; could the neurotic then accept both " lunging at lamp-posts " and " killing father " as descriptions of his behaviour and so identify them? As Mischel himself says later " If I were conscious of a desire to kill my father, I would, of course, have no reason to think that it is likely to be satisfied by my lunging at lamp-posts " (p. 76). Of course, a man might (consciously) take a lamp-post for his father-and this, together with a desire to kill his father, would constitute a reason for lunging at lamp- posts, though, presumably, not at a number of lamp-posts and not with an umbrella. But then he would not be accepting both the descriptions " killing father " and " lunging at lamp-posts ", and we, rightly, took him to accept the latter description.

If we say that what the neurotic is doing is " symbolically" killing his father then, I suppose, if he were conscious of his desire to kill his father this would be a reason for " symbolically " killing him by lunging at lamp-posts. However, then his conscious reason would not be the same as his unconscious reason, which, according to Mischel, involved identifying lunging at lamp-posts with killing his father.

If something is wrong with my central contention owing to my having ignored the fact that there may be several correct descriptions of any piece of behaviour, Mischel does not appear to have succeeded in using this example to show it.

Balmuth has a very different criticism of what I said about this example. A psychoanalytic explanation, he says, is " not devised, necessarily, to account for individual actions, nor to show that any one piece of behaviour has a specific end in view "; it " undertakes to account for a class of behaviour by showing a pattern of purposefulness behind the apparent irrationality " (p. 231). Just as " He loves her " may account for a variety of actions none of which is an act of love or an attempt to achieve something, so " He hates his father " may account for the neurotic's lunging at lamp-posts without this being an act of hate or an attempt to achieve something. A man's actions may reveal that he is in love without his admission that he acts from such a motive; and " the notion of ' unconscious reason' is the attempt to construe a person's neurotic behaviour so as to see what it reveals despite the person's denial that he entertains such a purpose as the reason for his behaviour " (p. 232, my italics).

This does not appear to me to be a strong objection because even Balmuth finds it necessary to bring in the idea of purpose. To show a pattern of purposefulness in a class of behaviour is to bring out what the behaviour is" intended to achieve and any part of that behaviour can be regarded as intended to help achieve it. I don't think that the analogy helps Balmuth for another reason: although " He loves her " may contribute to making a man's actions intelligible



398 P. ALEXANDER:

it gives neither a reason for (even a suppressed reason) nor, even more clearly, a purpose for his actions. He may have various reasons or purposes for acting as he does, for example, to win the lady's regard, or her hand, as a consequence of his loving her. But " he loves her " cannot by itself be an answer to the question " What was his purpose in doing that? ". " Because he loves her " is more like " because he felt like it " than " because he wanted to achieve so and so ". I am doubtful that it points to a purpose or to a reason for the behaviour.

In this passage, Balmuth takes me to task for examining the analogy between psychoanalytic explanations and everyday explanations by focussing on the concept of acting for a reason which can be made explicit instead of on the concept of someone's sup- 'pressing the reason for an act (p. 232). But one of my main contentions was that the analogy is not good here, either. A suppressed reason. good or bad, for an action must be a reason, good or bad. In the ordinary way, we know ourselves to suppress reasons which are as good as, or even better than, our avowed reasons. I argued that the typical Freudian " unconscious reason " bears little resemblance to a reason, so that if the idea of suppression is important this must involve the suppression of something other than reasons. A good deal of what Mischel and Balmuth say seems to bear this out since they attach great importance to feelings and the expression of wishes; their use of " reasons " and " purposes " in this connection seems to be unwarrantably loose. I invite a publisher to dinner, because, I tell my friends, I will enjoy talking to him; I don't tell them that I have a book for which I have been unable to find a publisher. That I want to get my book published is a relatively good reason, whether suppressed or not, for being pleasant to a publisher; the neurotic's alleged reason for lunging at lamp-posts, I argued, is very different.

5. In my original article I said " What makes A's behaviour rational is that . .. the good reasons were his reasons. He had those reasons for behaving thus " (pp. 328-329). Mischel argues, against me, that discovering my reason for a past action cannot be identified with recovering something I once " had in mind " (p. 76). What is important, he continues, is that I " recognize " a purposive pattern in my doings which either does, or does not, agree with my professed reason. " Failure of such agreement may lead to further self-questioning which may convince me that the reason for my action is not what I thought it was. And in that case I may well say 'Now I see what my reason must have been, though I did not suspect it ' " (p. 77). A reason is mine, he concludes, in the sense that ultimately I must be the one to avow it.

Mischel rejects the disanalogy which I thought I had found between the everyday discovery of reasons and the psychoanalytic " discovery " of them. However, his account of what constitutes




the everyday discovery of them presents some difficulties which I thought I had avoided. There may be a difference between the " purposive pattern " I now recognize in my past behaviour and the pattern the behaviour had for me at the time. I may " recognize " a purposive pattern now which I did not recognize at the time and what counts as a reason within that pattern may not have counted, or be capable of counting, as a reason in the situation as I then saw it. That is, the " reason ". I now avow may not have influenced my behaviour. We must surely be able to distinguish between '" the reasons for which I did it " and " what I now see can be regarded as reasons for doing it ". If I did not then see the situation as I now see it, can it be correct to say that my reasons were ones which depend upon my present view of the situation? If I acted for a reason then that reason was my reason and depended upon the way in which I then saw the situation. My real reason may not have been my avowed reason but this cannot mean that it depended upon a view of the situation which I did not, or could not, then have. I was then seeing the situation in such a way that my behaviour seemed appropriate; in discovering now what my reasons were I must discover how I then saw the situation; I must find the pattern my behaviour had, for me, at the time. Mischel's recipe allows that I may impose a pattern on my past behaviour in the light of a new way of seeing the situation depending upon knowledge acquired since the behaviour in question. The way I would have defended, perhaps to myself, my behaviour at the time is more important than the way I would now defend, criticize or explain it.

6. In Balmuth's section III he accuses me of having seriously misinterpreted the explanatory aims of psychoanalysis because of " a fundamental misunderstanding of what the psychoanalyst is trying to explain " (p. 232). I was considering the view that psychoanalysis has shown that some of our irrational behaviour is really rational and I think that this view stands up no better on his account than on mine. He criticizes me for not addressing myself to psychoanalytic explanations of the suppression of wishes but he seems also to be saying that I misunderstand the mode of explanation used, since I neglect the Freudian view that neurotic behaviour is expressive behaviour rather than achievement behaviour.

This may be correct but what now worries me is that Balmuth appears to accept without question both that the behaviour is expressive of wishes and that it demands explanation in terms of reasons, of which the neurotic is unconscious, for it. In my article I was concerned about what seems to be a confusion, in Freud and elsewhere, of reasons with other things. In devising explanations of both accidental slips and neurotic behaviour Freud from time to time refers to wishes, motives, purposes, reasons, intentions and " self-criticism " without either distinguishing them or making it clear that he equates them.



400 P. ALEXANDER:

That I have a wish is not a reason for expressing it. Reasons are things because of which or in spite of which things can be done. Anything I can do for a reason I can do without that reason. Al- though I can have a wish without expressing it I cannot express a wish without having it. I can say " I wish I were King " without wishing I were but then I am not expressing the wish to be King but doing something else, perhaps pretending to have the wish or expressing my boredom with life as it is.

I am also doubtful that expressing a wish is correctly regarded as either rational or irrational behaviour solely on the grounds that it is the expression of a wish one has. There may be reasons for or against expressing a wish one has in a given situation, and then it may be appropriate or inappropriate to express that wish, but the reasons do not include the fact that one has this wish. Without that it would just not be the expression of the wish.

I do not mean to deny that it may make a piece of behaviour more intelligible if we are told that it is an expression of some particular wish but only that this is an explanation in terms of reasons for the behaviour. A piece of behaviour which is not obviously the expression of a wish may be made more intelligible if we learn what wish it is an expression of; what may then need explaining is why it was not expressed in some more normal and obvious way. There may be reasons for this or there may be conflicting wishes, that is, wishes which cannot all be satisfied, but conflicting wishes are not conflicting reasons. Whether Balmuth's account of the Freudian view is broadly correct or not, it still seems that there is a need for further clarifications of what he says at this point.

I did not claim, as Balmuth says (p. 232), that psychoanalytic accounts fail to explain. Indeed, I specifically denied that I was claiming this (p. 336). What I did claim was that the explanations are not in terms of reasons for the behaviour and Balmuth's account appears to support this claim in so far as it equates neurotic behaviour with expressive behaviour.

Two further points in Balmuth's note are worth mentioning. He says that neurotic behaviour is not an attempt " to fulfil the state of affairs described in the wish " (p. 233) but this is perhaps too forthright a statement, as Mischel seems to agree, to figure in an account of the Freudian view. On this view, neurotic behaviour appears to be in the uneasy position of attempting both to fulfil a wish and to avoid doing so, hence the talk of " symbolic " behaviour.

Can the success of a psychoanalytic cure be regarded as a test of the theory or, more particularly, as a sign that the correct reason for a piece of behaviour has been found? Like others who have written on this subject1 I am doubtful about this. Balmuth appears

1 E.g. R. Peters, " Cure, Cause and Motive ", Analysis, vol. x (1949-50), pp. 103 ff. A. McIntyre in Symposium on " Cause and Cure in Psychotherapy ", Arist. Soc. Supp. Vol., xxix (1955), p. 52. H. Hartman in Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method and Philosophy, ed. S. Hook (New York, 1960), p. 22.




to argue along two different lines here. First, he attaches importance to the fact that when therapy succeeds the patient acknow- ledges the reason advanced as his reason (p. 234). I have given reasons for treating this acknowledgement with suspicion. Second, he takes the abandonment of the neurotic behaviour as evidence that the correct reason has been found. This raises another dis- similarity between psychoanalytic " reasons " and ordinary everyday reasons. In the ordinary way a person may alter his behaviour when a new reason which had never before occurred to him is suggested or when he is correctly accused of acting for a reason which is more disreputable than his avowed reason. In distinguishing between these we cannot rely on the person's behaviour alone and we are forced to rely somewhere on his honesty. In the psychoanalytic situation we have no means of distinguishing. If we rely on the behaviour alone we beg the question in favour of the theory, but the patient's honesty is not to the point since ex hIypothesi the conditions for his being either honest or dishonest about his

unconscious reasons " are absent.

7. It may be that the disagreements between us rest upon a lack of clarity, on both sides, about the dichotomy suggested when Mischel says (p. 78) " The neurotic acts irrationally; but his conduct is not something ' of which it does not make sense to say either that it was or was not done for a reason ' so that it can only be understood in terms of causes ". I may have been too much under the spell of this dichotomy when I wrote my article but I think that what I mainly hoped to establish was unaffected by this and I did not take a causal account of cure to entail a causal account of behaviour. To say that a piece of behaviour is non-rational is not to say that the only account to be given of it is a causal one. This is perhaps connected with a confusion about the differences between " the reason for an action " and " the reason why an action was done ". I cannot here give this the full consideration that it deserves but I can make some tentative suggestions.

I now think that, apart from the causal use, there is a use of reason why " in which there is no question of intentions to achieve

anything and in which to give a, or the, reason why an action was done is not to give a, or the, reason for which that action was done. That is, even when we are talking of actions, not all talk of reasons is talk of reasons for (or against) doing an action. In this use it does not make sense to talk of reasons against what was done as opposing the reasons why it was done. This is not the distinction between the reasons for doing somethilng and the reason a man had for doing that thing, where his reason was selected from among the reasons for doing it. It is rather the suggestion that in some contexts reasons why are not opposed to anything which can be regarded as reasons against and so are not reasons for.

It is sensible to say " The reason why he did that is that he was in



402 P. ALEXANDER: THE EXPLANATION OF BEHAVIOUR

love " but odd to say " His reason for doing that was that he was in love ". This is obscured if we say that " He is in love " explains his actions in terms of reasons. Reasons for acting can be good or bad, can be considered and accepted or rejected and can be recommended to others. We may say that a man's being in love is the reason why he behaves as he does without implying that this is something he weighed along with reasons for and against the actions. It is not either a good or bad reason for his actions. In this use I can't consider a reason why and decide to accept it or reject it. I can choose to reject a reason for acting and accept its negation and then I don't have that reason; by my choice I can ensure that it does not influence my behaviour. I cannot in this way avoid being in love or ensure that this does not influence my behaviour; I cannot decide whether to accept being in love or not being in love as a reason for acting. Reasons why, in this use, may help to make behaviour intelligible whether it is rational or irrational but they are not what makes one or other of these labels fit. If we talk of conflicting reasons they must, I think, be reasons for and against actions and it is only if such reasons are concerned that the descriptions " rational" and " irrational " are appropriate.

University of Bristol PETER ALEXANDER



Psychoanalysis and the Explanation of Behaviour

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