Psychology as an academic discipline in the last twenty years seems to have exhibited – I write as an external observer – two very different tendencies. The first has been one of general rapprochement among both experimentalists and clinicians. Theoretical rivalries have been muted, psychologists originally educated in very different milieus into very different standpoints have drawn gratefully upon each others' work, and even when controversy has been extended, a will to at least minimize disagreement has been evident. It is an interesting question how far this represents the outcome of rational progress in a unified science and how far it is a phenomenon to which social psychologists themselves should direct their attention. Perhaps it can mostly be explained by Heider's balance principle, by Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, by attribution theory, or by a mixture of all three. But happily I am not going to be concerned here with this tendency but with its counterpart, the persistence of an implacable will not to be assimilated, not to join the psychological melting pot, on the part of two groups of theoretically partisan psychologists: those who follow B. F. Skinner's prescriptions, and those who constitute the central tradition of psychoanalysis. My main concern will be with Skinner's work, and I shall be using psychoanalysis to illuminate it, rather than vice versa.

What I shall be arguing is that Skinner's work, when contrasted with psychoanalysis, reveals – in a way that is quite contrary to Skinner's own intentions – the ineliminability of philosophy from psychological science.