The Tale of a Prince Who Went Mad
Article Contents
The Tale of a Prince Who Went Mad
I will begin with the well-known story of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, about the wise man and the turkey:
A disaster struck the royal household. The prince, who until then had been sane and well-mannered, sank into melancholy and began raving. He rolled about on the floor beneath the dining table, dragging along pieces of bread and bones he found there, saying that he was a turkey…
Nor was that enough for him; he also insisted on no longer wearing his clothes, explaining that a turkey does not wear clothes…
The king was deeply grieved by this… The king summoned his physicians and sages… but to no avail. The prince persisted: “I am a turkey, and there is nothing at all strange about my behavior, for all turkeys act this way…”.
One day, long after all the physicians and sages had despaired of curing him, a certain wise man came from a distant city and declared that he would take it upon himself to cure him completely…
What did the wise man do? He too removed his clothes, sat down beneath the table beside the prince, and he too began dragging crumbs and bones, with an innocent expression, as though this were the most natural thing in the world…
The prince fixed him with a puzzled stare and asked, “Who are you, and what are you doing here?” The wise man replied, “And what are you doing here?” “I am a turkey,” the son answered innocently – “I too am a turkey,” the wise man muttered after him…
A few days passed, then even weeks, and the two grew accustomed to one another, eating the same food together, unclothed, and a strong bond formed between them.
The wise man understood that the time had come to begin taking practical action. He signaled to those around him to throw two shirts under the table, and turning to the prince he said: “Do you suppose that a turkey cannot wear a shirt and still remain a turkey?”… And so both of them put on shirts.
After a reasonable time had passed, the wise man signaled, and they threw them trousers to wear. Again he turned to the prince and said: “Do you think one cannot be a turkey while wearing trousers?!”…
Thus the prince put on one garment after another, without any resistance. Again a considerable time passed, and the wise man signaled to those present to toss down human food from the table, and again said to the prince: “Do you think that if one eats good food he ceases to be a turkey? One can eat it and still remain a turkey,” and he ate.
After some time, the wise man turned to the prince and asked him to sit with him on a chair at the table, and from that point it did not take long before he restored him to the full course of normal life, without the prince sensing that he had become a turkey who in every respect behaved like a human being…
Breslov Hasidim explain that the point of the parable is to show how one can overcome the destructive feeling that the service of God is meant only for people greater than ourselves. In the copyist’s note to this parable it says:
“It may be said that the person who wishes to draw near to the service of God is a ‘turkey’ clothed in materiality, etc., and in this way he can gradually draw himself closer to the service of God, until he enters into it completely…”
On the surface, however, this interpretation does not appear convincing. Let us begin with a difficulty that ought to arise here on its own: at the end of the process, had that prince really been cured? Without doubt—no. He behaved in a perfectly healthy manner, but in fact, in his essence, he was still just as ill as at the beginning.
If so, why is he presented as a healthy person? Seemingly the wise man is the hero of the story, and he indeed succeeded in outwitting the prince. But his cleverness did not operate on the medical plane; it belonged rather to the realm of rhetorical persuasion. Seemingly the goal of the cure was to bring the prince to normal behavior, not necessarily to heal him. But that is not a cure.
The entry “Behaviorism” from the CET website:
|
Behaviorism (behaviorism) “A school in psychology that regards a purely objective approach to the study of behavior as the only legitimate approach in modern psychology. The founder of the school (1913), John Broadus Watson, attributed central interest and importance to the behavior of human beings or animals, insofar as it can be studied from the standpoint of an outside observer (sometimes equipped with various measuring instruments). According to this view, which exemplifies an essentially positivist approach, psychology must cease dealing with questions of consciousness and the organism’s inner world in order to advance as a science. Watson did not deny the existence of consciousness, but demanded that psychology ignore it and prefer the more reliable evidence of behavior. The main activity of the behaviorists lay in their opposition to introspection—the central method in research psychology in Germany and the United States until the beginning of the twentieth century. Introspection is a subjective method, and it was difficult to prove the reliability of findings obtained through it. The behaviorists dealt with a person’s ability to reproduce learned material verbally, with the reaction times required in various situations, with bodily changes (which can be measured) that occur in emotional situations, and more. They never asked the person himself how he felt or what he was thinking. Thoughts, Watson hoped, would find physiological expression in minute hidden movements of the vocal cords, and thus in the future it would be possible to investigate thoughts objectively as well. In the 1920s behaviorism became an almost exclusive school in American psychology. It was formulated as a psychology that describes the behavior of human beings and animals in terms of stimuli, responses, and the connections between them, and that uses objective, experimental research methods. The best-known of the modern behaviorists is Skinner, who rejected assumptions about physiological mechanisms driving behavior. Thus, for example, Skinner treated the reflex as a relation between stimulus and response, expressed in the high probability that a certain response will appear following a certain stimulus, but rejected the need to posit a physiological mechanism mediating between the two. Today behaviorism is one of the schools in psychology, but its influence is relatively slight. In scientific psychology, the rise of cognitive psychology marks the historical return of interest in the internal mechanisms of cognition, such as memory, thought, and language processes. In other areas, such as existentialist psychology, interest in the individual’s subjective experience has also returned and been accepted, and in personality psychology it is even accepted to infer processes occurring in the subconscious. Historically, behaviorism played a major role in advancing scientific psychology in the twentieth century.”
|
Formulate for yourselves the difficulty in the turkey story in behaviorist terms.
The entry “The Chinese Room” (in part) from Wikipedia:
|
“The Chinese Room” is a thought experiment proposed by the philosopher John Searle (John Searle) in 1980, as a way of criticizing “the Turing Test” and approaches of “strong” artificial intelligence and functionalism, arguing that this test teaches us nothing about a machine’s capacity to understand. The belief underlying “strong” artificial intelligence is that a machine that passes the Turing Test can be regarded as “thinking” in the same sense as a human being; alternatively, this may be presented as though human brains are computers (of some sort) running a program. Supporters of this approach also believe that systems displaying such an ability help us explain how human beings think. A third belief, essential to the first two, is that the brain’s biological substrate is not essential to thought. Searle summarizes this viewpoint, which he opposes, as follows: The computer is not merely a tool for studying the brain; moreover, a properly programmed computer is in fact a brain, in the sense that one can say of computers given the appropriate program that they understand and possess other cognitive states as well (Hofstadter andDennett, 353) In the thought experiment of the Chinese Room, a person who does not understand Chinese sits in a closed room. Outside the room sits a person who understands Chinese and inserts Chinese characters into the room. Inside the room there is a book containing a complex set of rules (determined in advance) for responding to these characters and giving an answer that will appear sensible to a person who understands Chinese. The procedure is carried out on the basis of routines, for example: “When you receive the character X write the character Y”. The idea is that a Chinese-speaking interviewer passes characters written in Chinese into the room, and the appropriate answers are taken out of the room, so that to an outside observer it appears as though there is a Chinese speaker inside the room.
|
Let us now return to the story of the ‘turkey’ and take one more step into it. Earlier we asked why Rabbi Nachman thinks that this prince was cured. Now we ask why Rabbi Nachman thinks he was ever ill at all?
As the story describes it, that prince looks in astonishment at the wise man who comes down beneath the table and asks him what a person like him is looking for there under the table. That is, in the depths of his consciousness he knows that he is in fact a human being and not a turkey. If so, he was never truly ill.
Consider how these two questions resolve one another.
Now see an implication in Maimonides, Laws of Divorce 2:20, who writes:
The question is: what does such coercion accomplish? After all, if a bill of divorce is given without his consent (in the language of the Sages: a ‘coerced bill of divorce’), she is not divorced. In the terminology we encountered above, one could say that here we have achieved only a behaviorist goal.
These words of Maimonides can be understood in light of the questions I raised above. In the background we must remember that Jewish law addresses a world in which there is clear faith, and in which the religious ideal is widespread in society, so that it is obvious to everyone that this is the right thing to do. In such a situation, the reasonable assumption is that every Jew wants to observe commandments, and only the inclination diverts him from his path. How does the inclination operate? It tries to repress awareness of the obligation to observe commandments deep within, and wrap it in thick external coverings so that its voice will not be heard. How does it manage to do this? The immediate convenience of sin is what assists it. Because of this, a person manages to ‘convince himself’ that this is not a sin at all (that is, that he really is a turkey).
What is the way to bring him out of such a state? If we compel him to observe commandments, then the repression will not help him. Even if he makes himself into a turkey, he will still have to perform the commandments. Even if he objects to divorcing his wife and shrieks about it at the top of his lungs, we will tell him that she will in any case be divorced, and his resistance will be of no help. Alternatively, he will receive lashes until he divorces her, and his claim that he is acting under compulsion will not help him. In such a state he has no remaining motive to repress the truth. In any event it will not help. The woman will be divorced regardless. Thus the truth that lies within must emerge outward, because there is no longer any mechanism supporting the repression. In such a situation he stops deceiving himself, and truly and sincerely returns to wanting to fulfill the commandment—in this case, to divorce his wife.
This is a very interesting legal mechanism, one that sustains itself. The coercion seemingly solves nothing. In terms of the strict law, the woman is not divorced, since he does not truly want it. Yet the arbitrary legal fact—that the woman will be regarded as divorced despite his unwillingness—causes him genuinely to want it. Consequently, it turns out that she is indeed divorced.
A similar mechanism is proposed for that sick prince as well. The doctor compels him to behave like a human being, thereby removing every motive to continue repressing the fact that he is a human being. After all, he already knows this in the depths of his heart from the outset; he merely represses it for various reasons. In such a situation, there is no longer any point in continuing to repress the fact that he is human.
Perhaps this is the explanation of the principle formulated by the author of Sefer Ha-Chinukh, namely: “Hearts are drawn after actions.” After a person performs good actions, his heart too becomes good. According to this, however, bad actions do not draw the heart after them; rather, they merely prevent it from being drawn toward the good.
Now we can understand that our two difficulties with the turkey story are resolved, one through the other. We asked why that prince was ill at all, since deep in his heart he knows the truth. We also asked: if he really is ill, why do we think he was cured? The answer is that the prince was both ill and not ill. Within him there was an inner point that knew the truth, for otherwise there would be no way to heal him. But his illness consisted in repressing that fact from conscious awareness, because it was convenient for him.
So perhaps Rabbi Nachman was right after all?! It may be that the prince knew all along that he was a human being, and therefore the wise man’s way of healing him was indeed the correct one. He brought him to a state in which he behaved like a Jew in any case, and therefore there was no point in repressing what he already knew. And indeed the prince truly was healed in the end. If that prince now behaves exactly like a human being, and inwardly he always knew that he was a human being, then what remains of his illness?!…
In closing, return and think again about behaviorism as a psychological approach. Is it correct? (Hint: no). Does that mean it cannot have therapeutic value (that is, as a technique of healing)?
Source (Sefaria): https://www.sefaria.org.il/sheets/237655?lang=he