Regulation of the Stream of Consciousness: Toward a Theory of Ongoing Thought

Abstract

Consciousness—that familiar constellation of memories, sensations, plans, fantasies, fleeting images, and sometimes unrecognizable forms that constitutes our awareness from moment to moment—has received rough treatment at the hands of 20th-century American psychology. Neither the elaborate Titchnerian method of introspection nor the stirring, graceful prose of William James managed to extend the life of consciousness as a legitimate area for psychological investigation much past the turn of the century. As Roger Brown (1958) wrote, "In 1913 John Watson mercifully closed the bloodshot inner eye of American psychology. With great relief the profession trained its exteroceptors on the laboratory animal" (p. 93). Even the impact of Freudian thought and psychoanalysis, with its great interest in and respect for the inner life of the individual, failed to generate a renewed study of consciousness because it emphasized the overwhelming power of the unconscious and portrayed man's life as determined by a hydrauliclike system of drives of which the individual was generally unaware. More recently, careful, creative, rigorously executed scientific work (Holt, 1964; Paivio, 1971; Segal, 1971; Sheehan, 1972; Singer, 1974a,b) has managed to open the door a bit toward a systematic study of consciousness, though psychology is still occasionally chastised for its "diverting preoccupation with a supposed or real inner life" (Skinner, 1975, p. 46).