The Low Countries. Jaargang 6

Mister Psychology
The Work of Piet Vroon

The Dutch psychologist Piet Vroon passed away on 13 January 1998. Pieter Adrianus Vroon was born in 1939. After completing his studies in psychology at Utrecht in the shortest imaginable time (three years), he obtained his doctorate from the same university in 1972 and graduated cum laude with a thesis on Some Psychophysical and Cognitive Aspects of the Time Sense (Enkele psychofysische en cognitieve aspecten van de tijdzin), a study of the human awareness of time. This work consisted of a series of experiments on the estimation of duration, introduced by a rather philosophical discussion of what time has come to mean in our thinking and behaviour. Four years later, in 1976, Consciousness, Brain and Behaviour (Bewustzijn, hersenen en gedrag) was published, a book that attracted a wide readership both within the confines of academic psychology and beyond. The subtitle, The Individual in his Double Role as Master and Servant (Het individu in zijn dubbelrol van heer en knecht) was not only typical of the book itself, but also came to characterise all of Vroon's later work. Our knowledge of the processes behind human behaviour is minuscule. Unknown nerve impulses course through our brains. We know that we see, speak, think - but how we do these things is a mystery even to ourselves. Our actions and experiences are generated by machinery that works in secret, yet we have the feeling that we are free and autonomous individuals. We choose some things and dismiss others, we make decisions - in short, we are masters of our own behaviour. This double role is what characterises us. In every person's intellectual life Vroon saw at work Hegel's dialectic of the master and the servant, each of whom knows that he exists by virtue of the other's good grace.

In 1983, Vroon was appointed Professor of the Theory, Philosophy and History of Psychology. The articles and books that he was to write during the next ten years covered the entire breadth of his teaching assignment. He had already authored a monograph on intelligence (Intelligence: On Myths and Measurement), published in 1980, and this was followed by Man as Metaphor (De mens als metafoor) in 1985, written with Douwe Draaisma. This last book was an historically and philosophically inspired discussion of the language used to describe human thought processes. Between 1981 and 1995 Vroon also made a name for himself as the author of columns that appeared in the science section of de Volkskrant, one of the Netherlands' leading morning

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newspapers. These columns helped make Vroon the most widely-read Dutch psychologist of his time, earning him the nickname ‘Mister Psychology’.

At the end of the eighties, Vroon's interest shifted to evolutionary psychology, resulting in The Crocodile's Tears (Tranen van de krokodil), published in 1989. The book's theme was the rapid evolution of the brain. According to Vroon, the adaptation by which evolution takes place makes maximum use of all existing systems. Starting from scratch - dismantling everything and coming up with a new design - is unheard of. Nature prefers to add a new part to what already exists. The price that must be paid for this efficiency is lack of coordination between the components. Following on from a hypothesis by the American neurophysiologist Paul MacLean, Vroon divided the brain into three parts. The oldest part (brainstem, hypothalamus and cerebellum) is a reptilian brain and is marked by primitive instincts. This part also controls the physical expression of emotions - the tears, but not the sorrow. Above this reptilian brain is the limbic system. This functions as the mammalian brain and governs the more psychological aspects of emotions. The newest part, the neocortex, makes it possible for us to make differentiated observations and to process symbolic information. Language and memory are based for the most part on the activity of the neocortex. As feeling and thinking creatures, we are the servants of three masters.

This triple division, claims Vroon, affects the way we interpret behaviour and engage in psychology. Our brain is not a unit but a federation of republics. This results in all manner of splits: between words and deeds, between words and feelings, between conscious and unconscious processes. The world of language is subject to laws that are different from those obeyed by the emotions. The same person who delivers a discerning argument on the moral repugnance of jealousy can experience stomach-churning jealousy himself if he sees his partner flirting with someone else. Both responses - judgement and feeling - may be authentic, but they are not complementary.

The ‘three brains’ correspond with three main currents in psychology. Behaviourism centres on the reptile in us: our rituals and fixed behavioural patterns. Psychoanalysis is interested in the emotional aspects of our thinking and acting, behaviour that arises from the undirected passions of the limbic system. Lastly, cognitive psychology is the science of the neocortex and studies the processing of symbolic information. The Crocodile's Tears is a patently ambitious book in which Vroon attempts to connect the science of the brain with a theory on psychology and with science in general.

That attempt has succeeded in attracting a very large and appreciative audience. The book's theme was in capable hands, given Vroon's talent for organising a highly diverse collection of discoveries, hypotheses and experiments into a theoretical argument. In doing so he may have trespassed into areas that lay outside his direct expertise as a psychologist, but most of his. readers lovingly forgave him. Typical of the life and work of Piet Vroon was an aphorism by Michael Corner that applies to Vroon's books: ‘Better tell ten things which are interesting, some of which prove to be false, than ten things which are true, none of which prove to be interesting.’

douwe draaisma

Translated by Nancy Forest-Flier.

Further reading

amerongen, a. van, h. de vries and p. vroon, Smell: The Secret Seducer. New York, 1997.

vroon, piet, Intelligence: On Myths and Measurement. Amsterdam, 1980.