INTROSPECTION

(from Latin introspicere, to look within), the process of observing the operations of one's own mind with a view to discovering the laws that govern the mind. In a dualistic philosophy that divides the stuff of the natural world (matter, including the human body) from the contents of consciousness, introspection is the chief method of psychology. Thus, it was the method of primary importance to many philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and Alexander Bainas it was to the 19th-century pioneers of experimental psychology, especially Wilhelm Wundt, Oswald Klpe, and E.B. Titchener. To all these men the contents of consciousness appeared to be immediate experience: to have an experience was to know that one has it. In this sense introspection appeared to be self-validating; it could not lie. Wundt and Titchener believed that introspection finds in consciousness a dynamic mixture of essentially sensory materialssensations proper, images, and feelings that closely resemble sensations. This view is known as classical introspection and became unpopular after Titchener. Many other psychologists found other kinds of content in consciousness. The German philosopher Franz Brentano saw consciousness as constituted of both sensory contents and more impalpable acts. Controversy about the results of introspection made it quite clear by 1920 that introspection is not infallible and, later, that its fallibility is due to the fact that it is not immediate but is an observational, inferential process that takes time and is subject to errors of observation. By 1940 both the concept of dualism and the word introspection had largely disappeared from scientific psychology in the United States, where behaviourism, which rejected the significance of consciousness, ruled. Actually, the repudiation of dualism by modern experimental psychology led only to the surrender of the word introspection, not to the abandonment of the method. The general method (not classical introspection) is used without the name in phenomenological description as the Gestalt psychologists used it, as the phenomenologists and existentialistsmostly in Europeuse it, and as it is employed in the description of experience in studies of perception. Introspection is also used in psychophysics, where are determined the relations of conscious events, usually of a sensory nature, to magnitudes of the stimulus, especially in the determination of the sensory thresholds and sensory scales. It is also used in the reports of patients as they describe their conscious states to psychiatrists and psychoanalysts in free association.