Despite my fear that Watson had littered the pages of history with the corps- es of mind and consciousness, introspection was clearly alive and well in the 1970s and 1980s, at least in composition studies. Introspection might have fall- en out of vogue in the wake of behaviorism, but the “interior view” of the intro- spectionists had survived and been nurtured elsewhere while it waited for Elbow and Murray to surface anew as spokespersons. While writing process movement founders such as Murray, Elbow, and Emig never drew directly on Titchener’s work or mention the method of introspection, they drew consciously on Freud’s work. Three years after Murray proposed nurturing the student writer’s “other self,” Janet Emig described the multiple selves—or multiple layers of self—that must be attended to by the writing teacher. Her version of Murray’s “other self” had a Freudian twist: the writing teacher must nurture the student’s unconscious self.
Rather than dividing the writer into two separate selves as Murray did, she divided the self into layers. These layers first take the form of skin in her opening startling and wonderful image of the writer who has dutifully produced “the conscious student theme” (1983, p. 46):
the theme seems to have been written from one layer of the self—the ectoderm only, with student involvement with his own thought and language moving down an unhappy scale from sporadic engagement to abject diffidence. (Emig, 1983, p. 46)
Emig quickly drops the skin analogy—we hear nothing further about the ec- toderm or endoderm—but in this line, she vividly plants the idea of the layered self, some of the layers exposed on the surface, and some submerged underneath. It was a small leap to Freud’s concept of the conscious and unconscious self, and the related (though not strictly interchangeable) constructs: the id, ego, and super-ego.
Freud never viewed the conscious or unconscious as having different loca- tions within the body in any literal sense. But popular imagination did. Even now we talk of “uncovering” our unconscious thoughts, of “peeling the onion” of our selves in therapy, of repressed or recovered memories which implies a place where the forgotten memories have been stored, held under the surface, hidden from our conscious self, which lies at the surface. Emig was not a Freud- ian scholar, and did not cite Freud in “The Uses of the Unconscious in Compos- ing” (1964) so she was likely working with this popular understanding of the spatial division of the conscious and unconscious selves.
Like Murray, who wanted to see a shift from the “exterior view” of compo- sition to the “interior view,” Emig argued that traditional writing instruction doesn’t allow the student to “consult this [unconscious] part of the self” and “conspires against his inwardly attending” (1983, p. 46). She discusses how au- thor Rudyard Kipling personified the “unconscious part of the writing self into daemons” (1983, p. 49) and how Amy Lowell described dropping a simple topic for a poem “into the subconscious much as one drops a letter into the mailbox. Six months later … the poem … was ‘there’’” (Lowell quoted in Emig, 1983, p. 52). Writing teachers needed to encourage inward attending—journeys to the unconscious—if students were to write papers that went beyond (or below) the “surface scrapings” produced by a traditional overemphasis on the surface of the self—the control of the conscious mind.
Five years after Emig’s “The Uses of the Unconscious in Composing,” Mur- ray would make his plea for the role of procrastination in composing on the grounds that procrastination allowed the subconscious to do its work. In Write Before Writing, he describes why writers procrastinate:
They sharpen well-pointed pencils and go out to buy more blank paper, rearrange offices, wander through libraries and bookstores, chop wood, walk, drive, make unnecessary calls,
nap, daydream, and try not ‘consciously’ to think about what they are going to write so they can think subconsciously about it. (1978, p. 376)
To Murray, Elbow, and Emig, one legitimate subject of composition studies was the writing self, and that self was divided: into the writing self and the other self; into the unconscious or subconscious and conscious; or into the id, ego, and super-ego. Emig and Murray emphasized the subconscious mind, uncon- scious mind, or the id as a corrective to the overemphasis in traditional writing instruction on the conscious mind. Just as the concept of self (or “selves,” or “layers of the self”) was central to the work of early writing process pioneers such as Murray, Elbow and Emig, consciousness (not in the Freudian sense), or mind had been central to the work of introspectionists such as Titchener. And this comparison provided me the bridge to my otherwise absurd claim that James Berlin was a behaviorist. To use an analogy that would never show up on the SAT: John B. Waston is to Titchener as James Berlin is to Murray, Elbow, and Emig.
Like Watson, who rejected the concept of consciousness and thus the central concepts of introspectionists like Titchener, James Berlin would reject the self at the center of Murray, Elbow, and Emig’s version of composition studies. Berlin’s criticism of the self in the late 1980s boils down to his view that the self—as a private space—does not exist, and the self that does exist cannot be trusted in the way that Elbow, Murray, and Emig trust it.
Berlin’s critique of this private self begins with a discussion of the concept that Berlin would put at the center of his composition theory and practice: ideology. Drawing from Theborn’s interpretation of Althusser’s definition of ide- ology, Berlin establishes his working definition of ideology as “economic, social, and political arrangements” (1987, p. 667), which privilege certain groups and their interactions with each other and the material world. He “situates rhetoric within ideology” (1987, p. 667), which means that he sees rhetoric as advancing instead of mediating various ideologies.
Berlin labels the rhetoric of Elbow and Murray as “subjective” or “expres- sionistic.” He labels Emig’s work in The Composing Process of Twelfth Graders as “cognitive rhetoric,” but ignores her “Uses of the Unconscious in Composing,” which would probably have qualified her for membership as an expressionist. In
Rhetoric and Reality, he identifies the focus of Elbow’s expressionistic rhetoric: His emphasis, like that of all the expressionists considered in
this section, is on the “I,” on defining the self so as to secure an authentic identity and voice. This type of expressionistic rhetoric focuses on a dialectic between the individual and
analogy as a means of getting in touch with the self. (1987, p. 153)
While Berlin acknowledges that Elbow and Murray’s version of expressionis- tic rhetoric was actually a protest against the dominant political and pedagogical ideology and practice of the mid-twentieth century, he asserts that their focus on the individual perpetuates a naïve understanding of the self that undermines its own potential for changing dominant political and economic inequalities.
Berlin claims that expressivism’s focus on discovery of the self is problematic in two ways: it doesn’t acknowledge the ways in which the self has been formed by ideological forces, so it often replicates dominant oppressive ideologies; and a focus on individual self-expression can be appropriated by the dominant ide- ology because it leads to only individual resistance (1987, p. 676). Individual resistance is impotent; a rhetoric that doesn’t lead to collective action, in Berlin’s mind, supports hegemony.
Here to save the day is social epistemic rhetoric. In Berlin’s description of social epistemic rhetoric, knowledge results from the dialectic between a person, the social group in which the person is acting, and the “material conditions of existence,” all of which depend on language because they are “verbal constructs” (1987, p. 678). Furthermore, language—in which all three elements of this dia- lectic are grounded—is itself the result of social construction in discourse com- munities, so the individual is never really an individual. In essence, the “self” or knowledge or idea that the student in an expressivist classroom is discovering and expressing is actually the product of social construction and ideology. Ac- cording to Berlin, ideology is inescapable but “must be continually challenged” so as to reveal its economic and political consequences for individuals … (1987, p. 679). In Berlin’s opinion, the only rhetoric prepared to continually challenge and reveal ideology is the social epistemic.
Pedagogy based in a social epistemic rhetoric, then, starts by showing stu- dents the ways in which they have been constructed by their social, economic, and political realities in ways that make them feel powerless. Then, it attempts to help them work towards “a social order supporting the student’s “full human- ity” (Berlin, 1987, p. 680). Berlin describes Ira Shor’s interdisciplinary study of the hamburger as an example of social epistemic pedagogy. Shor’s class used economics, history, health sciences, sociology, English, and philosophy in order to analyze the modern rise of the hamburger and its effects on students’ lives. According to Shor, the only goal worth considering in a classroom is the goal of “liberated consciousness” (Berlin, 1987, p. 682).
Berlin’s critique of expressivism is curious, on many levels. None of the ex- pressivists he critiques would oppose several of his main assertions: that language
is social; that different teaching practices express different ideologies; that one of the goals of writing instruction is liberation. But despite these major areas of agreement, there is something incredibly aggressive about Berlin’s treatment of the expressivists. Like Watson’s Battle of Behaviorism, in which Watson is determined to advance behaviorism at the expense of introspectionism, Berlin is engaging in an act of warfare against the expressionists. This is hard to see, at first, since Berlin’s writing comes across as completely rational, academic, and disinterested.
But his attitude is revealed in the one metaphor that manages to invade his otherwise sterile prose. Held up next to the writing of the expressionists, Berlin’s writing is almost completely stripped of metaphor and analogy—no surprise, since he associates metaphor and analogy with the expressionists. But one re- current metaphor stretches throughout Berlin’s Rhetoric and Ideology, a more polemic essay than his (relatively) descriptive categorization of various influ- ences on writing instruction in Rhetoric and Reality. The metaphor, embedded in the word “camp,” is undeveloped in the text but central to Berlin’s attitude in the text: the image of a battle between Berlin and the expressionists belies Berlin’s academic, rational, reasonable tone. Berlin’s “camps” are not separate but happily co-existing summer camps on opposite sides of the same lake, with expressionists sunbathing on one shore and social epistemics drinking bug juice on the other. Instead, they are the camps of opposing armies, bunkered down and strategizing against one another. Or, at least, Berlin is bunkered down and strategizing against the expressionists; he is looking to defeat them.
Berlin’s aggression seems contraindicated. In an ethnographic study of ex- pressivist writing classrooms conducted in 1994 at Boston College, Karen Sur- man Paley (2001) found how the writing in these classes resists the divisive cat- egories imposed by Berlin. The “expressivist” instructors she studied invariably moved students beyond the personal in ways envisioned by the social epistemics. Furthermore, Paley visited the class of Patricia Bizzell, whom Berlin labels a so- cial epistemic, and describes the ways in which Bizzell’s focus on the social led to personal, autobiographical writing (2001). In other words, the focus on the individual Berlin ascribes to the expressivists and the focus on the social that Berlin ascribes to the social epistemics do not work against each other in prac- tice, although he set them apart in theory.
Furthermore, Emig, Murray, Elbow, and Berlin ultimately have the same goal—to escape manipulation of the dominant ideology when that ideolo- gy works against the “human purposes” MacDougall so eloquently defended against Watson’s focus on behavior. But Berlin’s ire at the expressionist is perhaps not rational, and may be rooted in an unconscious reaction to the unconscious self, the very construct he derides in the expressionists’ work. Thus, my absurd
sub-thesis: Berlin is a man uncomfortable with the unconscious. Yet, for all his attempts at consciousness and control, he cannot escape the unconscious: his ire at the expressionists is as much a gut reaction against their embrace of the unconscious as a conscious criticism of their theory or pedagogy.
While Emig never cited Freud, it may be useful to examine his description of the id in New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis when trying to understand Berlin’s response to the unconscious:
we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations …. It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organisation, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle. (1989, p. 91)
The beginning of Berlin’s discomfort is the preverbal nature of the uncon- scious. The unconscious is beyond and before language, in Freud’s formulation, and we can describe it only by analogy. We know it only through its metaphoric manifestation through our dreams and in our feelings—our non-verbal reac- tions to events and people. But Berlin wants to believe that knowledge doesn’t exist without rhetoric—“there is no knowledge without language.”
In Emig’s view, the unconscious, or id, knows things, not necessarily knowl- edge that comes through or from language, and in using the unconscious in composing, students can find a site of invention—a place to generate or discov- er knowledge. For example, my daydream—the image of Elbow, Murray, and Emig’s participation in my National Day of Introspection—was an example of my subconscious invention. To mix Amy Lowell’s unconscious mailbox analogy with Elbow’s cooking metaphor, I dropped my research on Watson and the in- trospectionists into the mailslot, let it mix around and simmer with my previous discomfort about Berlin’s attitude toward the expressionists, presto! Out came my daydream, the image of Murray introspecting and Berlin refusing, which was a preverbal thesis of sorts. That preverbal knowing, or image-knowledge, quickly turned to words when I meditated on it.
But Berlin’s second, more urgent point of contention is with the idea that the id “produces no collective will” (1987). The collective will that interests Berlin, of course, is a collective resistance to the dominant ideology. However, Berlin forgets that Freud’s complementary concept—the super-ego—could be viewed as the individual’s internalization of the dominant ideology. Emig is just as interested as Berlin in overcoming the damaging aspects of the super-ego, or dominant ideology, but, unlike Berlin, she sees the id as immensely useful in this quest.
In Emig’s view, the super-ego does damage on two fronts, and the use of the id can be used to correct both. First, the super-ego speaks in stale, flat, cliché. The id can provide fresh image and language to counteract these dead expressions. Secondly, and more to Berlin’s point, access of the id can point to differences between the values of the dominant ideology internalized by the super-ego and the needs of an individual human being which are contained in the id. Let’s consider an example from the Vietnam War, which played a major role in shaping Murray, Emig, and Elbow’s views of on the role of authority in the classroom. A male student’s super-ego may have internalized all forms of societal authority, including the authority of the draft. But, in an expressionist classroom, that student might be invited to listen to his unconscious, in a jour- nal, or through freewriting, perhaps. He might find that his id is uncomfortable with the war. He might move to Canada or become a Quaker or even become an activist. Listening to your unconscious, then, for the expressionists, can be the first step in political action—individual or collective action.
But Emig’s use of the id to escape ideology is frightening to Berlin, who views the presence of “desire” in the id as problematic. In Althusser’s work, which Berlin relies on quite a bit, desire cannot be trusted, since ideology creates and structures desire. Thus, desire itself and all inner life is unreliable and cannot be trusted. While the expressionists and Berlin both want to escape manipulation of the ideological forces that abuse power, Berlin’s distrust of the unconscious makes him suspicious of the expressivists. Emig sees the unconscious as a means of escaping the dominant ideology, but Berlin actually sees Emig’s means of es- cape as a trap door. The only alternative, then, is for Berlin to consciously escape manipulation. There is nothing to trust, in Berlin’s world, except social epistemic rhetoric, which helps him escape himself. He has consciously divorced himself from his id, and divorces himself from anyone who hasn’t. The expressivists’ ac- ceptance and use of the id is not only naive, but dangerous, a trap door.
Berlin’s criticism of the expressivists for failing to privilege collective over private action is the most distressing part of his critique. Elbow, Emig, and oth- ers protested Berlin’s critique on the grounds that they are, quite obviously, in- terested in political action. But what concerns me most in Berlin’s emphasis on collective action is what it reveals about his own attitude toward individual ex- perience: in dismissing the value of an individual act of conscience, he expresses a disregard for the value of that individual’s experience.
Berlin’s dismissal of private acts of conscience points to a similarity between Berlin and Watson. Watson rejected consciousness, mind, and individual ex- perience, and his dismissal of experience as a theoretical construct made him callous to the experience of the people whose behavior he would try to con- trol—including Little Albert and generations of consumers. In a surprisingly
similar way, Berlin’s dismissal of the value of the private self on theoretical grounds makes him callous to the experiences of those who take private stands against the dominant ideology. While the conscientious objector who moves