Behavior

Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘behavior’ occupies a contested conceptual terrain that stretches from the rigorously external to the irreducibly interior. At one pole, the behaviorist tradition — running through Skinner’s operant conditioning and its clinical derivatives — defines behavior as any observable, measurable act of a whole organism, governed by reinforcement contingencies and amenable to modification through systematic intervention. Barrett’s historical survey makes clear how this program deliberately evacuated feeling and subjectivity from psychological science. At the opposing pole, phenomenological and enactive thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty (via Thompson) argue that behavior is not a mechanical response but a morphodynamic, dialogical event irreducible to nervous-system events alone — it is meaning-constituting rather than information-processing. Levine occupies a middle register, stratifying behavior across gradients of awareness from voluntary gesture to archetypal mudra, insisting that the body’s behavioral repertoire encodes trauma and healing alike. ACT theorists (Harris) re-describe behavior functionally and contextually, asking not what a behavior is but what it does — whether it moves a person toward or away from valued living. Neurobiological voices (Kandel, Panksepp) ground behavior in neural circuitry and evolutionary programming, while Hillman and von Franz challenge behavioral reduction by centering fantasy, soul, and archetypal patterning. The central tension is thus between behavior as surface and behavior as depth — a dispute about where psychological causality actually resides.

In the library 20 passages

Behavior is a kind of dialogue in which the organism has an ‘aptitude’ to respond to situations as in effect questions that need answering. Behavior is, as it were, dialogical and expresses meaning-constitution rather than information processing.

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, Thompson argues that behavior is a morphodynamic, meaning-constituting dialogue between organism and milieu, not a mechanical stimulus-response chain.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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In functional contextualism, we’re much more interested in the function of a behavior—the effect it has—than the form of it… We ask whether it functions as a towards move or as an away move.

ACT’s functional-contextual framework evaluates behavior not by its form or moral valence but by its workability — whether it moves the client toward or away from valued living.

Harris, Russ, ACT Made Simple: An Easy-To-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2009thesis

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Emotions were redefined as mere behaviors for survival: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating… the nagging problem of finding the fingerprints of emotional feelings was, with the flick of a pen, defined out of existence.

Barrett critiques behaviorism’s historical reduction of emotions to observable survival behaviors, arguing it methodologically eliminated the inner life psychology most needs to explain.

Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017thesis

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The capability for behavioral modification seems to be built directly into the neural architecture of the behavioral reflex… a prerequisite for studying behavioral modification is the analysis of the wiring diagram underlying the behavior.

Kandel’s reductionist neuroscience argues that behavioral plasticity is intrinsic to neural circuitry, making the circuit diagram the necessary foundation for understanding how behavior changes through learning.

Kandel, Eric R., In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006thesis

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Archetypal behaviors coming from the deep ‘collective unconscious’… these involuntary gestures… frequently indicated pleasingly unforeseen resources and shifts toward flow and wholeness.

Levine identifies a stratum of behavior — spontaneous mudras — that corresponds to Jungian archetypal patterns, suggesting that the deepest behavioral layer carries transpersonal therapeutic significance.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting

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Jung to some extent took the opposite approach to that of the behaviorists… he did not observe people from the outside, did not ask how we behave… Instead he studied what we feel and what we fantasize while we are doing those things.

Von Franz contrasts Jung’s depth-psychological method — attending to fantasy and feeling — with behaviorism’s exclusive focus on external observable action.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

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The behaviors that achieve this transformation were not left to chance by evolution but are programmed into the cricket’s neurobehavioral repertoire… This behavioral program is activated by a specific hormone.

Panksepp grounds instinctual behavior in evolved neurobiological programs activated by hormonal triggers, illustrating how affective neuroscience understands behavior as species-typical and neurally pre-specified.

Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting

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Sequential contradictory behavior; for example, proximity seeking followed by freezing, withdrawal, or dazed behavior. Simultaneous contradictory behavior, such as avoidance combined with proximity seeking.

Ogden catalogs the disorganized attachment behaviors identified by Main and Solomon, demonstrating how trauma disrupts behavioral coherence and produces contradictory approach-avoidance patterns.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting

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Emotions such as fear and anxiety could be assessed using three response domains: (1) language behavior (what people say about their situation); (2) behavioral acts (such as escape and avoidance); and (3) physiological reactions.

LeDoux summarizes Lang’s tri-system model of fear, in which behavior is one of three measurable response domains used to assess and treat anxiety, bridging behavioral and neurobiological perspectives.

LeDoux, Joseph, Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety, 2015supporting

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When a predator rapidly approaches and comes close, the prey again dramatically changes its behavior… it suddenly displays an explosive escape response… If these responses do not eliminate contact, immobility may return.

Nijenhuis details the sequential behavioral phases of predator defense — escape, aggression, immobility — as the evolutionary substrate underlying somatoform dissociation in trauma survivors.

Nijenhuis, Ellert, Somatoform Dissociation: Phenomena, Measurement, and Theoretical Issues, 2004supporting

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Behavior in one group is consistent with behavior in previous groups, especially if the groups are similar in composition, in group task, in group norms, in expected role behavior, or in global group characteristics.

Yalom invokes group-dynamic research to establish cross-situational behavioral consistency as a predictive tool for group composition and therapeutic outcome.

Yalom, Irvin D., The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Fifth Edition, 2008supporting

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Underlying adult interaction is an implicit contract that a great deal of immediate behavior will be invisible to the parties involved… this safety provides an autonomy and a freedom that would be impossible if each continuously dwelled on the fact that others observe one’s behavior.

Yalom identifies the social contract of behavioral invisibility as the backdrop against which group therapy’s deliberate process commentary becomes therapeutically disruptive and transformative.

Yalom, Irvin D., The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Fifth Edition, 2008supporting

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It is a peculiar idea that people will change ‘if you can just make them feel bad enough.’ If misery cured misbehavior there would be far less of it.

Miller challenges punitive change models, arguing through self-regulation theory that behavior change is driven not by induced distress but by monitored discrepancy between current state and valued goals.

Miller, William R., Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013supporting

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We can reframe these covert behaviors as ‘getting hooked by’ the cognitive content in question… The antidote, then, is learning how to unhook from such cognitive content and refocus attention on the activity at hand.

Harris extends the ACT behavioral framework to cover covert cognitive acts — rumination, fantasizing, blaming — treating them as functional behaviors subject to the same workability analysis as overt actions.

Harris, Russ, ACT Made Simple: An Easy-To-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2009supporting

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The idea of a physical taint determining behavior carried great weight in the psychiatry of the last century… A criminal psychopath was the consequence of biophysical forces… The condition is fundamentally unalterable except by physical means.

Hillman critically surveys the hereditary-taint model in which behavior is biologically determined and unalterable, contrasting it with his own daimonic account of character and vocation.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting

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The orchestration of such premoral behaviors requires a highly sophisticated level of emotional and social functioning… the brain as having genetically shaped mechanisms whose function is the acquisition of moral rules based in complex feeling states.

Levine draws on de Waal and Hauser to argue that reconciliation and empathy behaviors in primates constitute the evolutionary precursors of human moral behavior, grounding ethics in affective neuroscience.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting

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Even a simple behavior can be modified by learning… a synapse can readily undergo long-lasting changes and that these affect the strength of the communication between two nerve cells.

Kandel’s foundational neuroscientific claim is that even elementary behaviors are plastic — modifiable through learning at the level of individual synaptic connections.

Kandel, Eric R., In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006aside

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Behavior therapy consists of applying the principles of learning to the treatment of mental disorders and behavioral problems.

This passage provides a textbook definition of behavior therapy as the clinical application of learning principles, situating the term within its historical academic context.

James, William, The Principles of Psychology, 1890aside

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In the traditional view of operant conditioning, the experimenter was equally free to select any arbitrary behavior to be strengthened by the reinforcement process… but some operant responses are more readily reinforced than others.

The passage qualifies classical operant theory by introducing biological preparedness constraints — not all behaviors are equally conditionable — complicating the assumption of behavioral equivalence.

James, William, The Principles of Psychology, 1890aside

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