h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The behaviourists changed the subject matter of psychology from the study of conscious experience (FREUD I PRESUME) to the study of behaviour. Can you suggest reasons for this?

Freud's ideas were seen by many to be too radical and outward to be accepted - after all, who would admit to being part of the Oedipus/Electra complex, repression or not?
Scientists that wished to explore the mind also wanted to introduce a but of objectivity rather than the obvious subjectivity that Freud used, looking into his own dreams and those of his rather small sample size. They thus denounced everything that Freud had said about the internal workings - which included the mind and the ideas about consciousness - and instead replaced it with a rather more scientific ideal, Publically Observable Behaviour. This was seen to be the only way evidence of psychology and behaviour could be garnered.
Similarly, medical and scientific techonology had just discovered that the brain was a vast interconnection of neurones, which lead to the assumption by behaviourists that these neurones could only transfer information; this was all they had been observed to be doing. Thus the assumption that the brain was just a major connecting station for impulses (from POB) to be relayed around. This made sense due to the immense amount of sensory input us wee humans have: there should be an organ that regulates and collates these nerves and the brain was just that.
In essence you could quite easily say that Behaviourism stems mainly out of backlash against Freud and his sex-loving, cigar-smoking Psychodynamia.

Anyways, i will prolly be speaking to you way before you read this so.. lol ah well!

BenniBi