Skinner's Dark Year and Walden Two
ALAN C. ELMS University of California, Davis
ABSTRACT: B. F. Skinner's basic assumptions about
human behavior are described most vividly in his Uto-
pian novel Walden Two. Though offered simply as a
fictional application of radical behaviorism to the de-
sign of society, Walden Two possessed strong emotional
connotations for Skinner, The "Dark Year," a period
during his youth when he failed as a creative writer,
displayed many earmarks of a major identity crisis.
Walden Two was written during a period of mid-life
crisis when identity issues again became highly salient
for Skinner. The novel incorporated issues from both
periods into its picture of an ideal society and helped
Skinner to resolve his developmental conflicts. He
emerged with a restructured identity as public advocate
for a behavioristic science of human conduct,
A theorist's life history and personality character-
istics surely influence his or her choice of theoret-
ical model in any field (cf. Coser, 1977; Feuer,
1974; Tomkins, 1963). But such influences are
likely to be particularly salient in the development
of personality theories. The personality theorist
experiences certain aspects of personality most
vivdly within his or her own person. Even the most
conscientious theorists, who take extraordinary
care to seek evidence from a wide variety of ex-
ternal sources, may still find it hard to accept con-
clusions about personality that appear strongly at
variance with their own personal experience. Thus,
a fuller understanding of the strengths and limi-
tations of specific personality theories may come
not only from detailed study of theory-derived
hypotheses but also from increased knowledge of
the personal context out of which the theories de-
veloped. Such research on the subjective origins of
personality theories (and of psychological theories
in general) has only recently begun to receive sys-
tematic attention, under the titles of "the psy-
chology of psychology" (Coan, 1973) or "the psy-
chology of knowledge" (Atwood & Tomkins, 1976).
The subjective origins of subjectively oriented
personality theories are often clearly demonstrable.
Freud's concern with the Oedipal triangle (Abra-
ham, in press; Elms, 1980), Jung's fascination with
the secret and the schizoid (Stolorow & Atwood,
1979), Allport's rejection of "dirty" motives (Elms,
470 • MAY 1981 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
1972-73)—all these theoretical emphases can be
discerned initially in the personal lives and devel-
opmental histories of the theorists themselves.
Choices of metaphors, or unusually intense de-
scriptions of internal processes, can be correlated
with biographical and autobiographical material
to delineate personally salient hypotheses and con-
structs. Behavioristic models of personality, how-
ever, may appear unlikely to harbor such subjec-
tive components. With their stress on external
influences and observable phenomena, with their
rejection of reified metaphors for the inner life,
they offer a seemingly objective view of person-
ality, untainted by their devisers' personalities.
B. F. Skinner is the preeminent behaviorist of
our era—indeed, for many, the preeminent psy-
chologist. Though his empirical findings have been
derived almost entirely from observations of lower
organisms, the larger part of his published work
deals with human beings. His writings on human
behavior generally avoid subjective accounts or
figurative speech and thus provide little evidence
for any subjective origins of his psychological con-
structs. But one book, unique in Skinner's pub-
lished work, employs figurative language from
beginning to end in describing the basic elements
of personality and social interaction from a be-
haviorist perspective. That book is Skinner's (1948/
1976) Utopian novel, Walden Two.
Walden Two is Skinner's best-known book, with
over 2 million copies in print. It describes a society
based on principles of operant conditioning, but
it is by no means simply a mechanical dramati-
zation of Skinner's scientific ideas. Nor was its
writing merely an intellectual exercise. According
to Skinner (1967, p. 408), "Walden Two was not
Preparation of this article was supported in part by a Faculty
Research Grant from the University of California. An earlier
version was presented at the meeting of the American Psycho-
logical Association, New York City, September 1979.
The author wishes to thank B. F. Skinner for his comments
regarding the factual accuracy of an earlier version of this ar-
ticle. All inferences drawn from the factual record are solely
the responsibility of the author.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Alan C. Elms, De-
partment of Psychology, University of California, Davis, Cali-
fornia 95616.
Vol. 36, No. 5, 470-479
Copyright 1981 In the American I'sychnlngicnl Association, Inc.
0003-06(i.\/SI/3B05-tWOS00.75
planned at all," He describes himself as caught by
surprise when what began as "a description of a
feasible design for community living" turned into
a novel: "The characters soon took over. In general
1 write very slowly and in longhand. . . . Walden
Two was an entirely different experience. I wrote
it on the typewriter in seven weeks" (1967, p. 403).
Parts of it were written "with an emotional inten-
sity that I have never experienced at any other
time" (1979, p. 298). One crucial section was typed
out "in white heat" (1979, p. 298). "I would dash
off a fair version of a short chapter in a single
morning. . . . 1 revised sparingly. Except for a
bout of dramaturgy during my junior year at Ham-
ilton, when I wrote a three-act play in one morn-
ing, I had never experienced anything like it"
(1979, p. 297).
Skinner has published several accounts of the
novel's origins, advancing at least three distinct
kinds of reasons for writing it:
1. To provide a model of life for returning
World War II veterans. In talking to a friend
whose son and son-in-law were on active duty dur-
ing the war's closing months, Skinner expressed
regret that at war's end they and other young peo-
ple would "abandon their crusading spirit and
come back only to fall into the old lockstep of
American life" (1979, p. 292). He suggested that
with the aid of "an experimental attitude toward
life" (1967, p. 403), young people could improve
upon previously attempted Utopian communities
and "could build a culture that would come closer
to satisfying human needs than the American way
of life" (1979, p. 292). The friend encouraged Skin-
ner to put his ideas in writing. Though he says he
"gave the matter no further thought" (1979, p.
293) while completing an already promised sci-
entific paper, Skinner began writing Walden Two
the day after the paper was finished.
2. To apply a "science of behavior" to the res-
olution of dissatisfactions that were external but
personal. Some of these dissatisfactions involved
family life; others were avocational or professional.
Skinner writes,
I had seen my wife and her friends struggling to save
themselves from domesticity. . . . Our older daughter
had just finished first grade, and there is nothing like a
child's first year in school to turn one's thoughts to ed-
ucation. We were soon to leave Minnesota and move to
Indiana and I had been in search of housing. I would be
leaving a group of talented young string players who had
put up with my inadequacies at the piano and I was not
sure I could ever replace them. I had just finished a
productive year on a Guggenheim Fellowship, but I had
accepted the chairmanship of a department at Indiana
and was not sure when I would again have time for
science or scholarship. Was there not something to be
done about problems of that sort? (1976b, p. v)
3. To provide "self-therapy." Skinner has de-
scribed the book as "pretty obviously a venture in
self-therapy, in which I was struggling to reconcile
two aspects of my own behavior represented by
Burris and Frazier" (1967, p. 403). Without re-
ferring again to self-therapy or to a psychological
struggle, Skinner later clarified what he meant by
the two aspects:
I did not know until I had finished the book that I was
both Burris and Frazier. Burris, the narrator, is a pe-
destrian college teacher, particularly unhappy with his
lot because he has just returned from an exciting wartime
experience. . . . Frazier, the founder of Walden Two,
is a self-proclaimed genius who has deserted academic
psychology for behavioral engineering, the new disci-
pline upon which the community is based. (1979, p. 296)
Skinner provides other explanations for the speed
with which he wrote Walden Two. Many details
were adapted from his own life at the time; he had
recently discussed the relevant philosophical issues
at length with a group of colleagues; and his "verbal
behavior was generously reinforced" as he read the
manuscript-in-progress aloud to his wife and to sev-
eral colleagues (1979, pp. 297-298). But these ex-
planations do not refer, as do the earlier reasons, to
the emotional intensity with which he wrote the
book. In discussing that intensity, Skinner repeatedly
cites some kind of dissatisfaction with life at the time
the book took shape. His anticipation of the life re-
turning World War it veterans would face led to
dissatisfaction at a relatively impersonal level (though
Skinner himself was in a sense one of those returning
veterans, as can be seen later). At a more personal
level, he cites the dissatisfactions with life experi-
enced by his wife and friends, and experienced by
himself in terms of environmental factors. Most per-
sonal was his dissatisfaction with his own inner life,
involving a conflict between contrasting self-im-
ages—or, in Skinner's behaviorist terminology, a con-
flict between "two aspects of my own behavior."
These self-described dissatisfactions strongly
suggest that Walden Two was an immediate re-
sponse to a mid-life crisis, of the kind identified
by Levinson (1978, p. 192) as beginning typically
at age 40 or 41. Skinner was 41 when he wrote the
book. Many aspects of his life at the time, as well
as the feelings reported by Burris, Walden Two's
narrator and (Burrhus F.) Skinner's namesake, pro-
vide evidence for such a mid-life crisis. However,
as is often the case (Levinson, 1978, p. 199), major
features of that crisis appear to have involved reac-
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • MAY 1981 • 471
tivations of much earlier conflicts in Skinner's life;
and those conflicts left their mark on Walden Two
as well. A crucial set of events occurred during a
period Skinner calls the "Dark Year"—a period
in early adulthood, at age 22, when he underwent
what appears to have been a severe identity crisis.
A review of that identity crisis and its relationship
to Skinner's mid-life crisis provides a basis for dis-
cussing in detail the major subjective origins of
Walden Two.
Skinner's Identity Crisis
Skinner's sole autobiographical mention of an iden-
tity crisis is jocular. He describes an experience at
the age of 14 or 15: "I woke up one morning and
could not find my left arm." After a panicky
search, he discovered the arm, which was twisted
sharply under his neck with the circulation cut off.
He refers to this incident as "a partial identity
crisis" (1976a, p. 134). The term is not used in his
much more extensive description of the Dark Year,
yet Skinner's account of that period includes all
the major features of a severe identity crisis, as
described by Erikson (1959, 1963, 1968).
Erikson (1963, p. 262) cites "the inability to set-
tle on an occupational identity" as a primary as-
pect of youthful identity crisis. During his final
undergraduate term, feeling compelled to choose
an occupational identity, Skinner decided to be-
come a writer. He had already written extensively
for college publications and had participated in
the Bread Loaf summer writing school. At the
point of making his career choice, he received an
encouraging letter about his writing ability from
Robert Frost. He subsequently proposed to spend
a year at home writing a novel. His father ex-
pressed serious reservations about the plan, but
offered to support him financially for the year, on
the condition that Skinner would "go to work" if
his writing career was not well launched by
year's end.
Within three months, Skinner was already ad-
mitting failure. "The results were disastrous. I frit-
tered away my time" (1967, p. 394). "The truth
was, I had no reason to write anything. I had noth-
ing to say, and nothing about my life was making
any change in that condition" (1976a, p. 264). In
his notebook Skinner blamed his parents for "un-
wittingly forcing" him into his "present course"
as well as for making fun of his "effeminate" in-
terests and his time-wasting activities (1976a, pp.
264-265). He blamed the city of Scranton, where
472 • MAY 1981 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
his family then lived, for being "ready to quench
any ideas of my own I may have. . . . I am too
sensitive to my surroundings to stand it" (1976a,
p. 265). He blamed literature itself for being "a
mean satisfaction of a mean instinct" and for being
unable to express the subtleties of life (1976a, pp.
266-267). But he felt that his agreement with his
father to give a writing career a one-year trial
should be honored, at least in appearance: "I found
myself committed, with no hope of reprieve, to
what I came to call the Dark Year" (1976a, p. 265).
The Dark Year was dark for several reasons. Not
only did Skinner discover that he was unable to
write anything important, but he was often the
object (or fancied himself to be the object) of jibes
and innuendos from people who would have con-
sidered even a successful writing career as inap-
propriate for a healthy young man. Skinner writes,
"I was desperately hungry for intellectual stimu-
lation" (1976a, p. 27.1), "but there was no one with
whom I could talk or even correspond seriously.
I was confined to the autistic, not to say auto-erotic,
satisfactions to be found in a notebook" (1976a,
pp. 279-280). His family had moved from his boy-
hood home to Scranton just before he entered col-
lege, and when he returned to Scranton after col-
lege graduation, he had no ties to replace the
supportive social and intellectual environment of
the college campus. His parents were themselves
undergoing personal crises at the time and could
offer him little emotional support. Skinner began
to sit in the family library for extended periods,
remaining "absolutely motionless in a kind of cata-
tonic stupor" or performing stereotyped move-
ments (1976a, p. 287). He proposed seeing a psy-
chiatrist, but his father's response was negative.
In his notebooks of the time Skinner wrote,
Cleverness lost its glamour for me. . . . Nothing is worth
doing. . . . The world considers me lazy because I do
not earn bread. The world expects of me that I should
measure up to its standard of strength, which means that
if I "got a job" for eight hours of office work . . . I
should be a man. . . . I see clearly now that the only
thing left for me to do in life is to justify myself for
doing nothing. (1976a, pp. 282-283)
He contemplated opening a model-ship-building
shop in Greenwich Village or raising chickens as
a way to support himself while renewing his efforts
to write. He considered "deserting writing for sev-
eral years" in order to take advantage of an "op-
portunity . . . to make a great deal of money,"
but that opportunity "vanished as suddenly as it
had appeared" (1976a, pp. 264-265). Instead, he
temporarily "rescued" himself and his "self-re-
speet" (1967, p. 394), first by becoming a laborer
for a landscape gardener and then (after devel-
oping a grass allergy) by working under his father's
sponsorship on "a digest of decisions of the An-
thracite Board of Conciliation" (1976a, p. 285).
Skinner describes the latter as "hack-work . . . dull
and monotonous" (1976a, p. 286). But he made
money at it, earned his father's approval, and by
the end of the year had completed what could
technically be called his first book.
The Dark Year clearly involved an identity cri-
sis. Most important, Skinner's occupational iden-
tity, which had been gradually constructed during
college and then confirmed by Frost's letter,
abruptly collapsed. Further, Skinner was unable
to find in the reactions of others any clear indi-
cation that he was a worthy individual. Separated
from his boyhood and college friends, he could not
fall back on the ready-made identity of a peer
group. He had given up his religious beliefs and
felt alienated from the political system. Even his
sexual identity was not as firmly established as he
would have liked. His sexual experiences in college
had been less than satisfying; the availability of
female companions in Scranton was quite limited;
and being questioned by his mother about his
"effeminate" activities must have been painful.
Skinner's own descriptions of the Dark Year,
both contemporary and retrospective, indicate pro-
found distress. At its worst, the crisis appears to
have reached a level of "severe identity confu-
sion," which Erikson (1968, p. 163) describes as
"defined by a certain self-perpetuating propensity,
by an increasing waste of defensive energy, and
by a deepened psychosociat isolation." Among the
symptoms of severe identity confusion listed by
Erikson are "a special form of painful self-con-
sciousness which dwells on discrepancies between
one's self-esteem . . . and one's appearance in the
eyes of others" (p. 183); "the display of a total
commitment to a role fixation . . . as against a
free experimentation with available roles" (p.
184); "extreme work paralysis" (p. 184); and a
"time confusion" that may manifest itself in such
forms as "catatonic immobility" or "an intense and
even fanatic investment in a future, or a rapid
succession in a number of possible futures" (p.
181). All of these symptoms appear in the quoted
self-descriptions of the Dark Year, and they con-
firm Skinner's own diagnosis of the year as "di-
sastrous" for his "self-respect."
The crisis was finally resolved as such intense
identity crises often are: through the wholehearted
acceptance of an ideology—indeed an extreme
ideology—in Skinner's case, radical behaviorism.
But Skinner did not arrive at this resolution im-
mediately upon the conclusion of his Dark Year
in Scranton. Still ambivalent about literature and
writing, he considered going back to college for
an MA in English and dabbled in Ouspenskian
philosophical mysticism. His own account of the
latter "digression" suggests that the identity crisis
remained at least intermittently acute following
the calendar end of the Dark Year: "I was floun-
dering in a stormy sea and perilously close to
drowning, but help was on the way" (1976a, p.
298). Help came in the form of his discovery of
Watson and Pavlov, whose ideas gave focus to his
previously scattered reading in psychology. Skin-
ner quickly came to think of himself as a behav-
iorist, applied to and entered Harvard's graduate
program in psychology, and at the end of his first
year there could write home to his parents,
I am looked upon as the leader of a certain school of
psychological theories. . . . The behaviorists, whom I
represent, have acquired a good deal of strength this
year. . . . Many of the new men, coming here this year,
will come over to our "party," giving us moral and phys-
ical support. (1979, p. 48)
By this time Skinner had very definite ideas con-
cerning his mission in psychology. He was con-
vinced of the Tightness of his position versus the
error of others' positions and had begun to build
a social support system among those who agreed
with him. At the age of 25 his identity was firmly
established. This new identity served Skinner well
for many years, and only when it was threatened
by a series of professional disappointments and
personal frustrations did Skinner again confront a
major psychological crisis. His principal response
to the later crisis, incorporating many of the con-
cerns of the earlier one, was Walden Two.
Skinner's Mid-Life Crisis
During graduate school and for some time there-
after, Skinner was mainly preoccupied with lab-
oratory research. His identity as a behaviorist, in
addition to giving him a clear position in profes-
sional discussions, supplied a general orientation
for his research and was in turn strengthened by
his positive research findings. In his late twenties
he was able to set down "in a rather expansive
mood. . . . plans for the second thirty years" of
his life, including statements such as "No surrender
to the physiology of the central nervous system"
and "Support behavioristic methodology through-
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • MAY 1981 • 473
out" (1979, pp. 114-115). He also began to write isfying in several regards. Skinner's second daugh-
a book (never published) titled A Sketch for an ter was born, and he built her a completely en-
Epistemology, in which he distinguished between closed "baby-tender" (later called an Air-Crib or,
methodological behaviorism and radical behavior- by others, a baby-box) as an improvement on the
ism for the first time, aligning himself solidly with standard crib. He began to write Verbal Behavior
the latter (1979, p. 117). He told his behaviorist (published in 1957), which he enjoyed much more
friend Fred Keller, "It will make everybody mad, than the psychology of literature book. He was
I'm afraid, if it gets published" (1979, p. 119), thus invited and agreed to chair the psychology de-
identifying himself by the professional enemies he partment at Indiana University.
made as well as by his friends. He was now able However, Skinner's wife became unhappy over
to resolve other identity issues as well. In his early the prospective move: "We looked for houses [in
thirties he began his first full-time, salaried faculty Bloomington] and found nothing we liked. When
appointment and almost simultaneously got mar- we were alone, Yvonne was often in tears. The
ried. Though professional recognition came more professional advantages meant little to her, and she
slowly than he would have preferred, success fol- would be giving up a pleasant house and leaving
lowed success in the laboratory, and it was clear old friends" (1979, p. 284). Skinner himself saw
to him that he had developed a powerful research professional advantages to the move—"more
strategy. At the end of 1938, with his first child professional weight" and the opportunity to build
born and his first psychology book completed, he a new laboratory and to have his own graduate
could write, "The last day of my best and happiest students (1979, p. 286). But he was not eager to
year!" (1979, p. 226). assume the position's administrative duties, and his
The latter half of his thirties, however, saw more first major proposal to modify departmental prac-
than the usual run of frustrations. When the book tices at Indiana was rejected even before he ar-
(The Behavior of Organisms) was published in 1939, rived. Skinner writes, "I accepted Indiana's offer
reviews and sales were both disappointing. At a time in part because I was feeling rather out of things.
when Skinner was considering another book, on the . . . Under wartime restrictions I had attended no
psychology of literature, his father volunteered to professional meetings and had lost contact with my
pay him the equivalent of a summer-school salary old friends in the East" (1979, p. 285). But moving
if he would bring his family to Scranton for the from Minnesota to Indiana promised little im-
summer. Skinner began writing the book in the base- provement in that regard. Further, The Behavior
ment of his parents' home, "as far as possible," he of Organisms was still selling poorly, "and no one
notes, "from the attic study in which I had attacked seemed to be taking up the study of operant be-
literature in a different way during that dark year" havior" (1979, p. 285).
(1979, p. 243). But as he adds, "Scranton was not the This was Skinner's situation as of mid-1946, im-
place for me at any age" (1979, p. 245). Replaying mediately prior to the writing of Walden Two. It
the Dark Year, he tired of the manuscript and even- is understandable that he would empathize with
tually abandoned it. returning World War II veterans who had to leave
The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor he behind their "crusading spirit" as they rejoined the
resumed work on a project he had previously "lockstep" of civilian life. He had spent over two
abandoned: the training of pigeons to guide mis- years in the wartime excitement of Project Pigeon,
siles or bombs to their targets. This was to be Skin- only to be forced to abandon it and return to a
ner's major research activity during World War mundane academic career. It is understandable,
II. He found the laboratory results quite gratifying, too, that he would worry about the uncertainties
but government officials repeatedly drew back of moving to Indiana, where according to an al-
from making use of the trained pigeons. Skinner ternate account, he as well as his wife would have
relates that after two years of research, the project to struggle to find new friends, and where he might
was finally "declared of no value to the defense not "again have time for science or scholarship"
of the country. . . . Project Pigeon was discour- (1976b, p. v). Given the circumstances, it is equally
aging. . . . My verbal behavior with respect to understandable that he would feel the need for
Washington underwent extinction, and the effect self-therapy, to help reconcile the self-image of
generalized. My co-workers told me after it was "a pedestrian college teacher" with the intriguing
all over that toward the end of the project I was potential alter ego of a "self-proclaimed genius
not finishing my sentences" (1979, p. 274). who has deserted academic psychology for behav-
The next year appears to have been more sat- ioral engineering" (1979, p. 296). Skinner was at

474 • MAY 1981 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST

the right age to begin a mid-life transition, and
conditions were such as to turn the initial phase
of that transition into a full-blown mid-life crisis.
According to Levinson (1978, pp. 192-194), a
man's mid-life transition typically involves a reap-
praisal of his adult accomplishments to date, at-
tempts "to modify the negative elements of the
present [life] structure and to test new choices,"
and a resolution of "the polarities that are sources
of deep division in his life." For most men,
this period evokes tumultuous struggles within the self
and with the external w o r l d . . . . A profound reappraisal
of this kind cannot be a cool, intellectual process. It must
involve emotional turmoil, despair, the sense of not
knowing where to turn or of being stagnant and unable
to move at all. . . . A man who attempts a radical cri-
tique of his life at 40 will be up against the parts of
himself that have a strong investment in the present
structure. . . . Internal voices that have been muted for
years now clamor to be heard. . . . During the Mid-life
Transition he must learn to listen more attentively to
these voices and decide consciously what part he will
give them in life. (Levinson, 1978, pp. 199-200)
In his autobiographical accounts, Skinner only
hints at inner turmoil; his descriptions of this pe-
riod are much cooler emotionally than those of the
Dark Year. But in Walden Two (1948/1976), Skin-
ner's mouthpiece Burris speaks quite openly of his
mid-life distress.
From the book's second page, Burris expresses
dissatisfaction with his career as a college teacher.
Of his former students he says, "Their pitiful dis-
play of erudition was all I had to show for my life
as a teacher, and I looked upon that handiwork
not only without satisfaction, but with actual dis-
may" (p. 2). He "had assumed an appropriate sense
of social responsibility" during the war, but, he
remarks, "my new interest in social problems and
my good will appeared to have exactly no effect
whatsoever upon society. I could not see that they
were of the slightest value to anyone. Yet I con-
tinued to pay for them day after day with a sus-
tained feeling of frustration and depression" (pp.
3-4). After two days of touring Walden Two, Bur-
ris thinks to himself, "Could I ever escape from
the world of books? My eyes ached in vivid rem-
iniscence and I was seized with a violent revulsion,
almost a retching" (p. 85). Further touring leaves
Burris's mind "a chaotic jumble," but he "could
not shake off the sheer habit of academic life. It
seemed as inevitable as it was unsatisfying" (p.
266). When Frazier tells Burris that after he spends
a month in Walden Two, he "will shake off the
pessimism which fills the abysmal depths to which
we've sunk" (p. 273), Burris does not reject the
metaphor's personal application. Instead, he be-
comes increasingly anxious about his future, re-
ferring to his "sense of personal failure" (p. 291)
and to a loss of faith not just in his own teaching
ability but in formal education itself:
Education was completely bewildered as to its place in
the world of the future. It could insure no sense of be-
longing to a movement, no esprit de corps. I could get
no satisfaction from atavistic or nostalgic attempts to re-
construct a happier era, and so I contented myself with
doing the day's work, (p, 293)
Finally Burris resolves his remaining doubts: "I
relinquished my hold on my unrewarding past. It
was all too clear that nothing could be made of it"
(p. 294).
Burris's feelings cannot be taken as an exact rep-
resentation of Skinner's feelings at the time. His
conflicted character appears intended to offer a
dramatic contrast to Frazier's certainty, and his
expressed dissatisfactions with mundane life are
aroused in part by the idyllic qualities of Walden
Two. But given Skinner's identification of Burris
as representing himself to a considerable degree,
and given various details of Burris's life that re-
semble sources of dissatisfaction present in Skin-
ner's own life at the time, Burris's emotional ex-
perience of crisis seems likely to have been at most
only a modest exaggeration of Skinner's feelings.
The sense of occupational despair and the longing
for a new life-style as reported by Burris were not
resolved for Skinner by the decision to move to
Indiana. Instead, they were directly and power-
fully expressed in the writing of Walden Two.
Walden Two as a Means of Coping
With Crisis
On literally his first free day between the end of
one set of professional obligations and the begin-
ning of another, Skinner embarked upon the writ-
ing of Walden Two. At one level the book presents
a relatively straightforward series of speculations
on a planned society, incorporating Skinner's major
empirical findings in a traditional utopian-novel
format. But Skinner's own testimony concerning
the process of writing the book—the speed, emo-
tional intensity, and lack of planning—suggests the
operation of powerful psychological forces in ad-
dition to strictly intellectual concerns. Though later
affirming his statement that the book was a kind
of self-therapy, Skinner played down that aspect
of its writing: "I don't take much stock in the ther-
apeutic value of literature. There are cases of peo-
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • MAY 1981 • 475
pie who came out of psychoses, also neuroses, by
writing a book. It wasn't that serious a problem
with me. As a matter of fact, I didn't pay much
attention to Wai den Two for a good many years;
I didn't even use it in my own courses for a long
time" (Elms, Note 1). But the evidence already
cited suggests that relatively serious psychological
problems were involved; and Skinner's failure to
"pay much attention" to the book after its com-
pletion further suggests that writing it helped him
to resolve those problems. How did the book's
writing achieve this end?
First, the book incorporates fantasied resolutions
of several specific elements of Skinner's mid-life
crisis. Skinner says the book was easy to write
partly because it made use of various aspects of
his present life. But the book usually presents the
positive aspects in an exaggerated and idealized
form, with the narrator on the verge of attaining
them rather than leaving them (as would happen
upon Skinner's own imminent departure to Indi-
ana), and with these idealized benefits promising
to continue unabated into the distant future. The
residents of Walden Two live in a comfortable,
efficient, ingeniously designed physical environ-
ment, whereas Skinner was soon to leave his "pleas-
ant" house and was having difficulty finding a sat-
isfactory replacement. The residents' daily social
relationships are both warm and undemanding;
Skinner was abandoning an established social net-
work to live in an u n f a m i l i a r city. Walden Two
provides its inhabitants with a ready audience for
creative work and with tolerant accompanists for
amateur musicians; Skinner was leaving similar
(though probably less convenient) circumstances
and was uncertain he could ever regain them.
In addition, Skinner included in the book imag-
inary sojutions for several concerns that he could
not resolve satisfactorily in his real life, either in
his former location or in his new one. For instance,
Walden Two's children are raised mainly by
professionals rather than by their own parents;
Skinner himself moved no further in this direction
than the invention of the Air-Crib. In the book,
the experimental analysis of behavior, instead of
being a largely ignored byway of psychology, is
accepted by an entire society as the most effective
and rewarding means to a good life. Even the
minor physical inconveniences of life have been
smoothed out by one little gadget or procedural
innovation after another. Furthermore, in deciding
to move to Walden Two, Burris is able to leave the
frustrations of academic life behind while he gains
academic security, the opportunity to conduct in-
476 • MAY 1981 » AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
novative research in an exciting environment, and
ample time to read and write. Even Frazier, a key
administrator during the early years of Walden
Two, has by now turned over most of the job to
others and allows the society to function without
his supervision, while Skinner, with considerable
ambivalence, was just about to become an ad-
ministrator. Finally, in the grandest fantasy Skin-
ner could imagine with regard to his current
professional life, Frazier has been able to experi-
ment for more than a decade with the lives of
nearly a thousand human beings, in a totally be-
neficent way—to the extent of seeing himself at
times as superior to God. Skinner's own control
over a small population of laboratory rats and pi-
geons, effective as it was, must have seemed pale
by comparison.
Walden Two thus provided Skinner with fan-
tasied satisfactions for a variety of mid-life crisis
issues. Certain youthful identity crisis issues, re-
newed by mid-life stresses, may have been simul-
taneously addressed; but Walden Two deals with
a number of these earlier issues much more di-
rectly. One of the book's most prominent themes,
beyond that of basing a society on the experimental
analysts of behavior, is the proper distribution of
time between leisure activities (including intellec-
tual and aesthetic pursuits) and responsible labor.
Walden Two's adults willingly perform a maxi-
mum of four hours' work for the community each
day. By so doing, they gain a sense of participation
and free themselves for their own pursuits the rest
of the time. Frazier emphatically justifies the re-
quirement that part of the work be physical:
The really intelligent man doesn't want to feel that his
work is being done by anyone else. He's sensitive enough
to be disturbed by slight resentments which, multiplied
a millionfold, mean his downfall. . . . That's the virtue
of Walden Two which pleases me most. I was never
happy in being waited on. I could never enjoy the flesh-
pots for thinking of what might be going on below stairs.
. . . Here a man can hold up his head and say, "I've
done my share!" (p. 51)
This passage, and the general theme it repre-
sents, is strongly reminiscent of Skinner's distress
at being thought a loafer by his parents and neigh-
bors during the first months of the Dark Year. His
relief at getting a job as a gardener's helper seems
to have been elaborated into a basic principle of
the Walden Two social structure 19 years later.
Skinner accepted this interpretation when it was
advanced by an interviewer:
I was rescued from the doldrums of an intellectual life
that wasn't paying off, simply by putting my eight hours
a day in digging holes and planting bushes and things
like that. That, I think, is why I wanted in Walden Two
to have everyone do a little work of that kind. (Elms,
Note 1)
Certain descriptions of social life in Walden
Two, though they broadly reflect Skinner's con-
cerns at the time of writing the book, appear more
specifically related to his concerns as a rather un-
sophisticated young man. His undergraduate years
at Hamilton College had introduced him to "an
entirely new world" of intellectual conversations
and string quartet evenings at faculty homes
(1976a, pp. 216-217). During the Dark Year this
world was replaced by awkward social encounters
at parentally arranged country club dances and
Kiwanis Club luncheons. In Walden Two, much
is made of the sheer ease of socializing, the careful
design of teacups to prevent spillage, the so-
phisticated but unpressured quality of social graces:
These were delightful people, Their conversation had a
measure and cadence more often found in well-wrought
fiction than in fact. They were pleasant and well-man-
nered, yet perfectly candid; they were lively, but not
boisterous; affectionate, but not effusive. But they were
of another world, and I could not even be sure they were
speaking a language I knew. (p. 24)
This might have been "another world" to Skinner
in his early twenties and one he longed to enjoy
again during the Dark Year. But it surely would
not have been unfamiliar to the 41-year-old vet-
eran of Harvard Graduate School, the Harvard
Society of Fellows, and many years of association
with a variety of faculty members, business ex-
ecutives, and government officials.
The professionalization of child raising in Wal-
den Two was in part a reaction to the demands
of Skinner's own two small children, especially
their demands on his wife's time and energy. But
in the novel, Frazier speaks at length about another
gain besides child-raising expertise and efficiency:
"the weakening of the family structure" (p. 126).
No sensible person will suppose that love or affection has
anything to do with blood. . . . Love and affection are
psychological and cultural, and blood relationships can
be happily forgotten. . . . The hereditary connection
will be minimized to the point of being forgotten,
(p. 133)
In the family, neither [parent] may have characteristics
suitable to the child's developing personality. It's a sort
of coerced identification, which we are glad to avoid,
(p. 135)
Burris later agrees:
Aside from the role of physical resemblance, I could not
see that hereditary connections could have any real bear-
ing upon relationships between men. . . . The important
thing was not that two people were related, but that they
had been told they were related. Better not to bring the
matter up at all. The family was only a little race, and
it had better go. It was no longer an efficient economic
or social unit or transmitter of culture—its current failure
was increasingly evident, (p. 291)
Skinner's descriptions of his feelings toward his
children at the time of Walden Two are generally
quite positive, and it seems unlikely that he was
very worried about his own or his wife's appro-
priateness as identification models. Much of the
hostility toward parental models, blood relation-
ships, and nuclear families is likely to have been
stimulated instead by Skinner's difficult relation-
ships with his parents, particularly during the Dark
Year. Well over half of the statement he wrote to
admit failure three months into the Dark Year is
spent blaming his parents for his predicament:
My family ties prevent my living simply alone, "strug-
gling to write." . . . My family ties prevent me, not
because I have a great deal of devotion and respect for
my father and mother, but because they have suffered
very much in the last four years and because my leaving
them would increase their present anxiety to an un-
bearable degree. Thus they are unwittingly forcing me
into rny present course. (1976a, p. 264)
If only there were no emotional ties to these blood
relations with whom he feels so little identification,
Skinner seems to be telling himself, there would
be no need for dark years—and in Walden Two,
the ties are indeed being systematically eliminated.
Strong emotion, especially strong negative emo-
tion, is itself a target in Walden Two. When Fra-
zier is asked what children get out of the innovative
child-raising practices in Walden Two, his eyes
flash "with a sort of helpless contempt," and he
responds,
What they get is escape from the petty emotions which
eat the heart out of the unprepared. They get the sat-
isfaction of pleasant and profitable social relations on a
scale almost undreamed of in the world at large. They
get immeasurably increased efficiency, because they can
stick to a job without suffering the aches and pains which
soon beset most of us. They get new horizons, for they
are spared the emotions characteristic of frustration and
failure, (p. 102)
They get, that is, much of the emotional ease and
satisfaction which Skinner fervently desired and
was unable to attain during the Dark Year.
Even one of Skinner's major theoretical tenets,
which he had supported by empirical research on
lower organisms and then applied fictionally-on a
large scale to the populace of Walden Two, can
be seen as related to the family frictions of the
Dark Year. Skinner's mother had always relied
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • MAY 1981 • 477
heavily on techniques of aversive control to reg-
ulate his behavior, largely through variants of "Tut
tut, what will people think?" Such attempts at
aversive control, from both mother and father,
appear to have reached their height—or at least
Skinner appears to have become excruciatingly
sensitive to them—during the Dark Year. In Wai-
den Two, such aversive control is repeatedly de-
scribed as one of the larger society's worst ills and
is linked with the negative emotional states that
must be eliminated: " 'Most of what I do [said Bur-
ris], I do to avoid undesirable consequences, to
evade unpleasantnesses, or to reject or attack forces
which interfere with my freedom.' 'All the un-
happy motives,' said Frazier" (p. 115). Positive
reinforcement is discussed less in terms of its ef-
fects on behavior (though Skinner makes clear that
it can be a powerful force) than in terms of the
feeling of freedom it generates: "We can achieve
a sort of control under which the controlled,
though they are following a code . . . nevertheless
feel free. They are doing what they want to do,
not what they are forced to do. . . . There's no
restraint and no revolt" (p. 246), As a radical be-
haviorist, Skinner can admit neither the absence
of control nor the existence of true freedom. But
in late adolescence and early manhood, he yearned
to feel free to do as he wished; and at the onset
of middle age he still valued that feeling, though
he knew by then that it was illusory.
As a scientist, Skinner assumes that the environ-
ment controls behavior, whether it be the social
or the natural environment. During the Dark Year,
the social environment came to seem so aversively,
suffocatingly controlling that an anguished Skinner
could write, "I am too sensitive to my surroundings
to stand it" (1976a, p. 265). In Walden Two, the
environment continues to control; Skinner saw no
way out of that. But it is as benevolent an envi-
ronment as Skinner could devise. Even during the
worst of the Dark Year, Skinner never contem-
plated a total escape from control; as he says, "I
had never learned to protest or revolt" (1976a, p.
283). But he knew it was possible to have parents
or parent substitutes who were less traditionally
restrictive than his were at the time—and to have
a more rewarding world than Scranton.
Walden Two: The Final Outcome
In addition to all the specific coping processes em-
bodied in Walden Two, two broad effects of writ-
ing the book appear to have been essential to Skin-
478 • MAY 1981 « AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
ner's continued personal growth. First, the creation
of Walden Two itself enabled Skinner finally to
overcome the key failure of the Dark Year. He
had now written a novel, one in which he had
something important to say; and he had written
it in even less time than the three months he had
devoted to writing at the beginning of the Dark
Year. Second, the process of writing the novel en-
abled Skinner to make the crucial transition from
laboratory scientist, mainly going where his ani-
mals led him and hoping someone else would fol-
low, to outspoken public advocate for a behavior-
istic science of human behavior. Walden Two was
his first major publication on human behavior. It
was followed by Science and Human Behavior
(1953), Verbal Behavior (1957), and numerous
other books and papers that were low on empirical
data but high on explanation and proselytization.
This, finally, is what Skinner seems to have meant
in his reference to Walden Two as an attempt to
reconcile two aspects of his behavior—an attempt
that ended less in a reconciliation than in a one-
sided victory. As Skinner said in a recent interview
(Elms, Note 1),
When I wrote the book, I was not really a Frazierian
. . . but I convinced myself, because the things that
Frazier said did hang together, I thought, very well, and
I'm now a thoroughgoing Frazierian as a result and I'm
no longer Burris. I think, quite definitely, I did go back
to Walden Two.
Conclusion
The proposals Skinner makes in Walden Two for
revising human behavior patterns and social struc-
tures are not invalidated by their partial origins
in Skinner's own developmental crises. But those
origins have produced a society of peculiar shape,
functioning- in terms of a peculiar conception of
human personality. Walden Two is above all a so-
ciety designed to avoid unpleasantness—by weak-
ening emotional ties among family members and
minimizing necessary parent-child contacts, by
relieving guilt or shame over doing less practical
work than one's fellows, by eliminating adolescent
social discomforts and making sure an amateur
artist never lacks audiences or accompanists, and
by spreading onerous administrative obligations as
broadly and thinly as possible. Walden Two's in-
habitants do have their pleasures, to be sure. But
by stressing the avoidance of unpleasantness as a
major goal of the society, Skinner has withdrawn
from the residents much of the variety of behav-
ioral choices, the range of emotional responses, and
the introspective richness of which human beings
are capable. He has done so not because of Fascistic
leanings, as some of his critics charge, but because
of his own mid-life needs to survive a contempo-
rary emotional crisis and to lay an earlier but still
troubling crisis finally to rest.
Skinner's original title for his book, abandoned
only because a similar title had recently been pub-
lished, was The Sun Is But a Morning Star (Skin-
ner, 1979, p. 299). It came from the closing lines
of Thoreau's Walden: "The light which puts out
our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to
which we are awake. There is more day to dawn.
The sun is but a morning star." Skinner has not
explained this choice of title, and in Walden Two
Burris says he "had always thought of the last para-
graph as a blemish. Its apparent mysticism and its
obscurity were unlike the rest of the book and quite
un-Thoreauvian" (p. 296), But Burris reads it again
"with feverish excitement" as he turns back to
Walden Two in the final pages of the novel, ap-
parently seeing in the passage the new Golden Age
promised by Frazier. The original title and Tho-
reau's words may have had a more personal im-
plication for Skinner as well. A new day was dawn-
ing; a new kind of life was beginning; he was able
to see his way clearly again. His personality had
been reborn from crisis, and the Dark Year was
truly over.
REFERENCE NOTE
I. Elms, A. C. Interview ith B. F. Skinner, Cambridge, Mass.,
August 9, 1977.
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