Dubious John Watson, the Abused and Abusive Psychopathic Godfather of Behaviorist Psychology

“We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends […] Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother.” — George Orwell

Like quack Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, American psychologist John Watson (1878-1958) emerged as one of the major influencers on mental health with his concept of hard science behaviorism. This holds that only public events (behaviors of an individual) can be objectively observed and measured and, therefore, private events (thoughts and feelings) should be ignored. This became the basis for behavior modification in the 1970s and early 1980s.

In 1928, Watson took up the crusade against affection as president of the American Psychological Association. He applied the mechanistic paradigm of behaviorism to child rearing, warning about the dangers of too much mother love. “Men of science” (effectively quacks) were assumed to know better than the ancestral parenting practices of mothers, grandmothers and families about how to raise a child. Too much kindness to a baby would result in a whiney, dependent, failed human beings, or so they claimed.

According to the behaviorist view, the child “has to be taught to be independent.” We can confirm now that forcing “independence” on a baby leads to greater dependence. Instead, giving babies what they need leads to greater independence later.

In anthropological reports of small-band hunter-gatherers, parents took care of every need of babies and young children. Toddlers felt confident enough (and so did their parents) to walk into the bush on their own (see “Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods,” edited by Hewlett & Lamb, 2005).

Babies grow from being held. Their bodies get dysregulated when they are physically separated from caregivers.

Babies are built to expect the equivalent of an “external womb” after birth [see Allan Schore]. What is the external womb? It means being held constantly, breast fed on demand and having needs met quickly.

There is a critical period for turning on the genes that control anxiety for the rest of one’s life. If in the first six months of life the gene never gets turned on, the baby may become anxious toward new situations and feel that way for the rest of his or her life. Of course, in the pharma-scam world, drugs are administered to alleviate the anxiety. Researchers say that there are hundreds of genes affected by nurture. Similar mechanisms are found in mature human brains in terms of caregiver behavior, which matters for turning genes on and off.

When a baby is greatly distressed, the toxic hormone cortisol is released. It’s a neuron killer (Panksepp, 1998). A full-term baby (40-42 weeks), with only 25% of its brain developed, is undergoing rapid brain growth. The brain grows on average three times as large by the end of the first year (and head-size growth in the first year is a sign of intelligence, e.g., Gale et al., 2006).

The baby is absolutely dependent on caregivers for learning how to self-regulate. Responsive care — meeting the baby’s needs before he gets distressed — tunes the body and brain up for calmness. When a baby gets scared and a parent holds and comforts him, the baby builds expectations for soothing, which gets integrated into the ability to self-comfort. Babies don’t self-comfort in isolation. If they are left to cry alone, they learn to shut down in the face of extensive distress — stop growing, stop feeling, stop trusting (Henry & Wang, 1998).

The discredited behaviorist (not genetic) view sees the baby as an interloper into the life of the parents, an intrusion that must be controlled by various means so the adults can live their lives without too much bother.

Watson’s behaviorist quackery, in turn, has paved the way for non-familial caregivers to handle the young in neglectful ways.

Since the behaviorist-infected society was introduced, the connection between the lack of and poor health outcomes has been documented for touch, responsiveness, breastfeeding and more (Narvaez, et al). If we want a strong country and people, we’ve got to pay attention to what children need for optimal development.

John Watson the Person, Takes One to Know One

Like Freud, Watson was just friggin’ weird and was abused as a child. It appears he was reared to be a psychopath. During the first 13 years of his life, he lived in rural South Carolina. His mother subjected Watson to harsh religious training, so much so that he became an atheist. At age 13, Watson’s abusive alcoholic father left the family to live with two Indian women, a transgression that Watson never forgave.

His mother moved to the larger town of Greenville, where the now anti-social Watson claimed he had the “opportunity to experience a variety of different types of people, which he used to cultivate his theories on psychology.”

Despite his poor academic performance and having been arrested twice during high school (first for fighting, then for discharging firearms within city limits), Watson the juvenile delinquent was able to use his mother’s connections to gain admission to Furman University.

He continued to see himself as “unsocial” and made few friends. After graduating with average grades, he spent a year at “Batesburg Institute”, the name he gave to a one-room school in Greenville. He was principal, janitor, and handyman for the entire school.

With those stunning qualifications, somehow John Watson was admitted to the Rockefeller-funded cesspool University of Chicago. Enter our turtle on the fencepost theory. Following the pattern seen so often, we have to ask: How did this happen? Did somebody spot a fellow Crime Syndicate psychopath or asocial satanist in the same room? We can only imagine.

Watson fell under the combined tutelage of other usual suspects, such as John Dewey, James Rowland Angell, Henry Herbert Donaldson and Jacques Loeb. This led Watson to develop a highly descriptive, objective approach to the analysis of behavior that he would later call “behaviorism.”

Like other dubious characters of influence that Winter Watch has covered, [see The Foundations Fund the Hack Abraham Flexner to ‘Standardize’ Medicine] his rise was rapid. Watson earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1903. In 1908, Watson was offered and accepted a faculty position at Johns Hopkins University and was immediately promoted to chair of the psychology department.

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Read “The Sub-Zero Hack Nobel Laureates Who Promoted the 2021 American ‘Rescue’ Plan”

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Demonstrating signs of multi-generational child abuse, Watson first married Mary Amelia Ickes in 1904. They had at least two children, also named John and Mary Watson. As an adult, the child Mary was not affectionate with her own child, and “made several suicide attempts.” Mary’s husband was Paul Hartley, and their daughter is the actress, bipolar-disorder advocate and American Foundation for Suicide Prevention Founder Mariette Hartley.

The dysfunctional drama continued as Watson’s wife Mary later sought divorce due to his ongoing affair with his assistant, Rosalie Rayner. Watson’s affair had become front-page news during divorce proceedings in the Baltimore. In October 1920, Johns Hopkins University asked Watson to leave his faculty position because of publicity surrounding the affair.

In turn, Watson married Rayner in 1920. John and Rosalie had two children, James and William Watson, and they raised them in the behaviorist principles John believed. Like their half-sister, Mary, both sons also later attempted suicide. Son William successfully committed  suicide in 1954.

Along the way Watson wrote the book “Psychological Care of Infant and Child” in 1928 with help from his mistress-turned-wife. In their book, Watson proclaimed his belief that children should be treated as young adults and warned against the inevitable dangers of a mother providing too much love and affection. Watson explained that love, along with everything else as the behaviorist saw the world, is conditioned. Watson supported his warnings by mentioning another head-shaking notion, invalidism, saying that society does not overly comfort children as they become young adults in the real world, so parents should not set up these unrealistic expectations. Watson said that nothing about parenting being instinctual.

This quack later admitted he should not have written the book, as he wasn’t knowledgeable enough. Yet, only in a kakistocracy would such a book be heavily promoted by the usual suspects (The New York Slimes, et al) and become extremely popular. Many critics were surprised to see his contemporaries come to accept his views. The book sold 100,000 copies within just a few months of release. He became president of the American Psychological Association.

In 1920, psychopath Watson and Rayner conducted the Little Albert experiment. The goal of the experiment was to show how principles of — at the time recently discovered — classical conditioning could be applied to condition fear of a white rat into “Little Albert,” a 9-month-old baby boy.

Watson and Rayner conditioned “Little Albert” by clanging an iron rod when a white rat was presented. First, they presented to the boy a white rat and observed that he was not afraid of it. Second, they presented him with a white rat and then clanged an iron rod. “Little Albert” responded by crying. This second presentation was repeated several times. Finally, Watson and Rayner presented the white rat by itself and the boy showed fear. Later, in an attempt to see if the fear transferred to other objects, Watson presented Albert with a rabbit, a dog, and a fur coat. He cried at the sight of all of them. This study demonstrated how emotions could become conditioned responses.

But there was a problem with the outcome. As the story of “Little Albert” made the rounds, inaccuracies and inconsistencies crept in. Analyses of Watson’s film footage of Albert suggested that the infant was not normal. He was  mentally and developmentally disabled as well as ill. In 2009, Beck and Levinson found records of a child, Douglas Merritte, who seemed to have been Little Albert. They found that he had died from congenital hydrocephalus at the age of 6. We see shades of Albert Kinsey’s fraudulent research that uses the abhorrent desires of pedophiles to establish baseline norms.

Watson proclaimed “men are built, not born.” More accurately, sick men are built and conditioned, well men are born and nurtured.

Bigger bucks awaited Watson outside of quack books and experiments on children. He began working for the U.S. advertising agency J. Walter Thompson. In less than two years, Watson rose to the position of vice president of the ad firm. His con man skills served him well in advertising. He is credited with the institution of the “coffee break.” To top it off, shortly before his death in 1957 he was awarded a gold medal from the American Psychological Association for his contributions to psychology.

Perhaps understandably, before his death Watson burned his very large collection of letters and personal papers, thus depriving historians of a valuable resource for understanding the early history of behaviorism and of the dysfunctional Watson himself.

Winter Watch Takeaway

A caregiver who learns to ignore a baby crying will likely learn to ignore the more subtle signaling of the child’s needs. Second-guessing intuition to stop child distress, the adult who ignores a baby’s needs practices and increasingly learns to “harden the heart.” The bond between caregiver and baby is broken by the adult, and it cannot be repaired by the young child.

Indeed, Watson’s pseudoscience proved a useful manifesto for nefarious cultural forces in the decades that followed, during which we witnessed the push of women from home to factory with no maternity leave, the dissolution of the nuclear family, the self-obsessed Women’s Movement, the degradation of traditional values and the emergence of the government-controlled, bank-owned materialistic consumer who only connects with other human beings via the Internet. But don’t worry. Pharma companies are working on solutions.