How the Mind Works

How the Mind Works

BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY
Rice News Staff

Rats and pigeons were not quite the keys to the human mind that Meredith Skura imagined she would find when she pursued an undergraduate degree in psychology at Swarthmore College.

As a young undergraduate, Skura, Rice’s recently appointed Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English, dreamed of unlocking the human mind, discovering how people think and charting a new course in human understanding. Instead she weighed pigeons, shaved rats and decided that she needed a change.

“That was an academic misunderstanding,” Skura said with a laugh. “I didn’t know I wouldn’t study how people’s minds work. I studied pigeons and rats. I’d go down in the lab every morning and weigh my pigeon to see how much weight he had gained, which told me how many times he had pecked the right key.”

After graduating from Swarthmore, Skura flew the coop of animal behavior and pursued a graduate degree in literature at Yale University, but she never lost her curiosity about how human minds work. Now she is turning her attention to some of the earliest forms of autobiographical documents in the English language to explore the question of human thought.

The time period of her research is 1550 to 1750. Roughly 500 to 600 texts exist, some of them fragmentary. The documents include trial records of suspects who gave accounts of themselves after being arrested and church records from people seeking acceptance into a congregation. Those church records generally follow the format of “here am I, a terrible sinner who did horrible things, who experienced a moment when God made himself clear, who struggled but converted and seeks acceptance.”

At the time there were no accepted formats for writing personal narratives, said Skura, so questions arise about what those people thought was important enough to write about.

“I’m curious about how people’s minds work and how they think about themselves,” she said. “Particularly, how they did all of this when (personal narrative) was just beginning in written form. First of all, not that many people did it. Second of all, people who wrote these things didn’t do it for the public and seldom did it for publication. What are the differences between the people writing in the 16th century and the people writing under very different conditions later in the 17th century, particularly after the English Civil War?”

Her project, which received funding from the Mellon Foundation, also explores the universality of human nature, Skura said. Scholars have a tendency to say people living today cannot understand people from the past because the context of the past cannot be known. Yet she believes there are some universal traits that connect the past and the present.

Skura recalls one personal narrative from a man becoming a minister in the first half of the 17th century who reports having a dream in which he is going up to the pulpit and realizes he has forgotten his sermon. That, she said, is a fear of public speaking dream. The writer may not have called it that, but every person who has ever had to give a speech can recognize the situation.

Although Skura is known for her work on Renaissance drama, she has always cultivated her curiosity about the human mind, despite her experience with lab animals at Swarthmore. She is also a trained psychoanalyst.

After earning her doctorate at Yale, Skura took a teaching position at Bridgeport University in Connecticut. It was then, at the nearby Psychoanalytic Institute, that she trained as a psychoanalyst. Later she gave up the security of Bridgeport for a more challenging, although insecure, teaching position at Yale.

Skura can trace her career decisions to her childhood. Her father was the oldest son of an immigrant Jewish family that expected him to be a doctor and her mother was a doctor’s daughter, so medicine was very much a part of the family.

Skura grew up in Brooklyn, where her father practiced medicine. He was well-known and respected, she said. For a time, the family lived behind her father’s office where he treated patients.

"You could hear everything,” Skura said. “You could hear all the kids screaming. A lot went on in a doctor’s office. I just knew I wasn’t going to have any part of that.”

Skura admits there was some pressure to become a medical doctor, but instead she became a scholar with many articles and books to her credit, including “The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process” (Yale University Press, 1981), which applied psychoanalysis to the works of William Shakespeare.

Now, though her curiosity leads her to study the minds of English men and women from as early as 1550, she may help open wider the door into our minds.