At the very end of the 19th century, Hugo Münsterberg, a psychologist at Harvard University, warned the American public not to expect too much from his laboratory colleagues in the way of life lessons. The message fell on deaf ears. From lessons in personality types to new strategies for effective thinking, the promise implicit in the coming deluge of popular psychology – or ‘yellow psychology’, as its early critics preferred – was a secular version of what the Greeks called metanoia: a change of mind, a new way of looking at oneself and the world.
The market in popular psychology in postwar Britain was led by Penguin books, whose blue-spined Pelican imprint brought the insights of Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, B F Skinner, R D Laing and a roll call of clinical and laboratory experts to a mass readership. Among the purveyors of new psychological knowledge, there was, however, one ‘expert’ who stands conspicuously apart: Edward de Bono, a Maltese physician and medical researcher who turned his back on academia to become a student of creativity.
Eschewing experiment, ignoring all existing studies and scholarship, de Bono’s reputation as a thinker and proponent of lateral thinking is founded on nifty puzzles, a storehouse of anecdotes, an abundance of imperial generalities, no end of clunking analogies and neologisms, and a toolkit that was by no means as novel as his publishers or readers might have assumed. Beginning with his bestseller The Use of Lateral Thinking (1967), de Bono’s quixotic brand of psychology takes aim at traditional logic, identifying it as the enemy of insight and invention:
By far the greatest amount of scientific effort is directed towards the logical enlargement of some accepted hole … Yet great new ideas and great scientific advances have often come about through people ignoring the hole … This hole-hopping is rare because the process of education … is designed to make people appreciate the holes that have been dug by them … Many great discoverers like Faraday had no formal education at all, and others like Darwin or Clerk Maxwell had insufficient to curb their originality.Read Full Article »
