Doubt: A Psychological Exploration

Full text

“This is one of the most brilliant books I have ever come across. Its aim is
to address the question of what is doubt, not directly in any circumscribed
definitional standard, but by examining the powerful role it has had (and
continues to have) in human life. To do so, Geo Beattie takes the reader on a
narrative journey into the minds of some of the greatest writers and scientists
of history in order to cast light on how their doubts shaped their creative and
scientific accomplishments. He also looks at how doubt is harnessed maliciously
to spread conspiracy theories about such things as climate change. Written
in his usual accessible narrative style – let us not forget that Beattie is also an
accomplished novelist as well as a distinguished psychologist – this book will be
hard to put down. Its implications for grasping who we are as a species – we are
the only species that possesses doubt – and for harnessing or counteracting its
enormous power of control over human life, make it a must read for everyone.”
Marcel Danesi, PhD, FRCS, Professor Emeritus of
Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada
“Beattie brilliantly illustrates the science of doubt with fascinating case studies
from doubters like Kafka, to non-doubters like Picasso and how it can be
addressed therapeutically, as in Brendan Ingle’s boxing gym in Sheeld.”
Brian Butterworth, Professor Emeritus of Cognitive
Neuropsychology, University College London, UK
“Geo Beattie has written a brilliantly entertaining book about the little
considered phenomenon of doubt, focusing mainly but not exclusively on self-
doubt. Part memoir, part an examination of the psychology of doubt, and part
an examination of the role of doubt (or lack of it) in the lives of key historical
figures – Jung, Kafka, Picasso, Ernest Dichter (a psychoanalyst who devoted his
talents to promoting the consumption of cigarettes) and Alan Turing – the book
oers a wide-ranging and unique appreciation of the importance of doubt in
individual minds and in human aairs.”
Richard Bentall, PhD, FBA, Professor of Clinical
Psychology, University of Sheeld, UK

Doubt
Blending the latest academic research with case studies of famous figures, this highly
insightful book presents ‘doubt’ as a central concept for psychology. It is a concept
which has been oddly neglected in the past, despite its ubiquitous nature and
far-reaching influence.
Exploring everything from self-doubt and impostor syndrome to the
weaponisation of doubt with respect to climate change and the marketing of
cigarettes, bestselling author Georey Beattie navigates readers through the
various ways doubt can start and develop, changing the individual in the process.
Written in Beattie’s distinctive and engaging style, Doubt takes the reader into
the lives of transformational thinkers, artists, scientists and writers to explore
how and why doubt was crucial in their lives and how the likes of Kafka, Jung,
Picasso and Turing succumbed to doubt or learned to control it. Beattie argues
that doubt is central to the self; it can be either a safeguarding mechanism or a
distraction, rational or irrational, systematic or random, healthy or pathological,
productive or non-productive. The book helps readers to recognise how doubt
may have been operating in their own lives and to identify how and when it
has been used against us – for example, to prevent climate action – and at what
personal and societal cost.
Presenting a compelling case for why doubt cannot be ignored, this book is
of major interest to academics from a wide range of disciplines, including social
and cognitive psychology, clinical and counselling psychology, sport psychology,
sociology, business studies, politics, art and literature, as well as the general public,
who may well see something of themselves in its pages.
Georey Beattie is a prize-winning academic, author and broadcaster. He
received his PhD from Trinity College Cambridge and is now Professor of
Psychology at Edge Hill University, as well as Fellow of the British Psychological
Society, the Royal Society of Medicine and the Royal Society of Arts.

Doubt
A Psychological Exploration
Georey Beattie

Designed cover image: Getty Images
First published 2023
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Georey Beattie
The right of Georey Beattie to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
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recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Beattie, Georey, author.
Title: Doubt : a psychological exploration / Georey Beattie.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022026173 (print) | LCCN 2022026174 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032252056 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781032252049 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003282051 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Belief and doubt. | Self-confidence.
Classification: LCC BF773 .B423 2023 (print) | LCC BF773 (ebook) |
DDC 153.4—dc23/eng/20220825
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026173
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026174
ISBN: 978-1-032-25205-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-25204-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-28205-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003282051
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Joshua and Olivia Beattie and a future full of hope and
promise, and less doubt.

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2
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4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Contents
Acknowledgements x
Introduction: the nature and meaning of doubt 1
Alone in doubt 17
Jung’s dream 29
Feeling like a fraud 40
‘I, the King’ 57
The perils of a doubt-free life 75
Treating doubt the hard way 86
Manufacturing doubt 106
Our house is on fire 136
Concluding remarks 149
References 154
Index 160

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Edge Hill University for proving such a pleasant and
rewarding environment in which to work, especially John Cater, George
Talbot and Rod Nicolson. The Times/Sunday Times ‘Modern University of the
Year’ 2022 is the most recent accolade with so much more to come. This is a
university with real potential. The psychology department has a wonderfully
supportive academic culture, I have many great colleagues in the department
(including my closest colleague Laura McGuire), and I feel very fortunate to be
working there. My agent Robert Kirby from United Agents and I discussed the
concept of doubt before I began (he has a great sense of what should be pur-
sued), and I must thank him for his support over many years, as well as Eleanor
Taylor, my editor at Routledge, who is a pleasure to work with on my books.
I have written about smoking before in the chapter on conflicted habits in The
Conflicted Mind, also published by Routledge, and I thank them for permission
to use this material here.

1 Introduction
The nature and meaning of doubt
Doubt is a lack of confidence or uncertainty about something or someone,
including the self. It is central to science, the law, ethics, politics and phi-
losophy which all involve elaborate and often refined adversarial processes to
promote, consider and evaluate doubt in the light of the available evidence.
Descartes used Cartesian doubt, the process of being sceptical or doubting the
truth of one’s beliefs, as a methodological tool in his philosophical investiga-
tions. But it is also central to the self. It can be a safeguarding mechanism or
a distraction, it can be rational or irrational, systematic or random, healthy
or pathological. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is sometimes referred to as
a ‘disease of doubt’. According to Freud, obsessional neurotics have a ‘need
for uncertainty in their life, or for doubt’ (Freud 1909/1996: 232). They are
paralysed by ambivalence, immobilised by two instinctual impulses, love and
hate, directed at the same object.
In a famous letter to Lou Andres-Salome, Freud speculated on the aetiology
of doubt as a symptom in his famous case study of the ‘Rat Man’. This nick-
name, given to the lawyer Ernst Lanzer by Freud, related to Lanzer’s recurrent,
involuntary and nightmarish thoughts about rats which began after he heard an
account told to him by a fellow army ocer, concerning a particularly grue-
some torture method said to be used by the Chinese on prisoners. It involved a
rat being trapped in a pot and fastened to the rear of the prisoner; the rat would
then gnaw through the captive’s anus to survive. This was the indelible image
that Lanzer had in his head, and he developed obsessional thoughts about a simi-
lar fate befalling both his wife and his father. Freud’s hypothesis was that these
obsessional and gruesome thoughts resulted from a conflict between loving and
aggressive impulses towards both individuals. The obsessional symptoms meant
that the patient avoided resolving this conflict, subsequently failing to resolve
other dicult decisions between alternative positions and courses of action
throughout his life. It thus became a life marked by doubt and indecision. In
terms of its psychological origin, Freud hypothesised (in somewhat typical fash-
ion, it must be said) that the symptoms derived from the patient’s earliest sexual
experiences, in particular the harsh punishment he received by his father for
childhood masturbation (but see Mahony 1986). ‘The tendency to doubt ...
is the continuation of the powerful ambivalent tendencies in the pregenital
DOI: 10.4324/9781003282051-1

2 Introduction
phase, which from then on become attached to every pair of opposites that
present themselves’ (Freud and Andreas-Salome 1966/1972: 77). This is one
position on the nature and origin of doubt but not necessarily the one with the
strongest evidence.
Doubt is an instrument of rational thought – in science, law, philosophy,
everyday thinking on the one hand and on the other some sort of psychological
problem, perhaps even a symptom of major psychological dysfunction rooted
in the earliest stages of psychosexual development (at least according to some).
Doubt is clearly a very broad concept. Doubt is also a great driver, perhaps the
greatest driver of all, and a great inhibitor when it comes to human action. It
drives science, judicial decisions, philosophical understanding, progress, change,
positive action, but it can also inhibit decision-making and stop change and lead
to procrastination, worry, superstition and delay. It is internal and conscious (‘a
perception of indecision’) and therefore highly personal. It is often closed o,
something we often choose not to share with others, even those closest to us.
Imagine how your partner would feel if they knew about your doubts about
the relationship? Or vice versa – if you knew about their doubts?
Over the years, writers, novelists, biographers and historians seem to have
had as much or more to say about doubt than psychologists (with perhaps one
or two notable exceptions). It is a core part of our mental lives, and we enjoy
getting a glimpse of its structures and functions in literature, to understand
its complexity and deviousness (at times). Freud, as we have noted, viewed
doubt as a ‘symptom’, a mark of resistance, an indication to the analyst of the
significance of the repressed element to which it is related. Jung, also from a
psychoanalytic perspective, viewed it very dierently. He wrote in his letters,
‘Doubt and insecurity are indispensable components of a complete life’ (Jung
1951/1976). In this book we will consider amongst other things how doubt
fitted into Jung’s own life and why he viewed it in the way he did, but, of
course, many of the more ‘neurotic’ aspects of doubt will also be considered
in detail.
Many other psychologists ignore doubt completely; they talk more frequently
about perception of risk (which is not the same), uncertainty, anxiety, worry,
apprehension, self-ecacy, impostor syndrome and fear of failure, but they do
not link these up to talk about doubt itself – that core part of our mental life.
This is a shame. It is a major part of our everyday social experience, a major
part of who we are. And doubt is everywhere. From that nagging unpleasant
thought at the back of our minds when we’re having to choose a pair of socks
(but that might just be me) to that ‘Eureka!’ moment based on a process of more
prolonged and productive doubt when a solution suddenly pops into our head.
Without that process of conscious and reflective doubting the solution might
never have arisen. From the child crying for its mother, seeming to ‘doubt’
whether she’ll ever return (at least inferred on the basis of the surprise when
she sees her mother again, although admittedly it is very odd to talk about the
experience of doubt in pre-linguistic infants), to Jesus himself, abandoned on
the cross, his anguish bathed in doubt (although I’m starting to doubt whether

3 Introduction
that’s a good example because it might oend some Christians). But that is the
breadth of the subject.
Doubt can seemingly start in one place in time, in one modality, and spread
across time and across the whole functional architecture of the brain, from a
slight feeling of unease to major discomfort, and then to active thinking about
the potential source or target of the doubt, gradually becoming part of how
we deal with the world, and thereby part of our personal and social identity.
Doubt doesn’t have to work in this linear way with emotion arising first, lead-
ing ultimately to cognition and conscious awareness. With doubt, cognition
and emotion are intimately connected, one or other can take precedence. We
can also often notice our doubting, and this may be important to how we view
ourselves. Many from both inside and outside psychology suggest that the
roots of doubt can usually be traced to our earliest socialisation experiences,
if not necessarily critical moments in our psychosexual development (as Freud
hypothesised), particularly our interactions and relationships with parents.
Others suggest that doubt can arise from a range of important interactional
and emotional experiences throughout the course of one’s life. There are great
thinkers, artists and writers on both sides of the argument, as we will see, so it’s
probably best to start with an open mind.
We know that Kafka suered from extreme self-doubt and clearly believed
that he understood where all this doubt and self-doubt originated from. The
author of such classics of literature as The Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle
and regarded by writers like Auden, Nabokov and García Márquez as one of
the principal figures of twentieth-century literature, was crippled with doubt
throughout his life. He wrote a letter to his father in November 1919, explain-
ing why even as a child on passing his examinations and even being awarded
prizes for his work, he had always felt like ‘an embezzling bank clerk who, still
at his job and trembling at the thought of being discovered, takes interest in the
petty routine business of the bank that he still has to see to’ (Kafka 1919/2011:
55). This is what we would now call ‘impostor syndrome’. He describes how
he was drowning in self-doubt, tormented by his thoughts, fantasies and dreams.
Fantasies since he was a child that after he had passed his school examinations
that he would inevitably be caught out – discovered by his teachers to be ‘the
most incapable and ... the most ignorant of all’ so that they would ‘instantly
spew me out, to the jubilation of all the righteous, now liberated from this
nightmare’ (Kafka 1919/2011: 54). Fantasies and thoughts that never left him.
Kafka makes the origin of this self-doubt clear in his great accusatory letter–
it derives, he writes, from the emotional abuse that he, a ‘timid child’, suered
at the hands of his overbearing father, Hermann, a self-made man with an
‘unlimited confidence in your opinion’ in Kafka’s accusing words. ‘It is only as a
father that you were too strong for me, especially since my brothers died young,
my sisters only arrived much later, so that I had to endure the first knock or two
all alone, and for that I was much too weak’ (Kafka 1919/2011: 9–10). He cites
his father’s chronic disapproval, his ‘belittling judgments’, his indierence to his
son’s intellectual and creative interest, his threats, his dismissive attitude to his

4 Introduction
son’s work, the absence of love as the sources of his own doubting, which left
him unable even to think properly – ‘it was almost impossible to endure this and
still work out a thought with any measure of completeness and permanence.’
He was intimidated by his father both physically and mentally:
I remember, for example, how we often undressed together in the same
changing room. I was skinny, weakly, slight; you were strong, tall, broad.
Even in the changing room I felt pitiful, and what’s more, not only in your
eyes, but in the eyes of the entire world, for you were for me the standard
by which everything was measured.
(Kafka 1919/2011: 15)
In terms of the father’s behaviour, Kafka writes that ‘Your extremely eec-
tive rhetorical child-rearing devices, which never failed with me, at least were
abuse, threats, sarcasm, spiteful laughter and strangely enough – self-pity’ (Kafka
1919/2011: 23). You can also see the prototype of the Kafkaesque situation in
what he said he had to endure:
I was forever in disgrace: either I obeyed your orders, that was a disgrace, for
they were, after all, meant only for me; or I was defiant, that was also a dis-
grace, for how dare I defy you; or I could not obey because I didn’t have, for
example, your strength, your appetite, your skill, even though you expected
it of me as a matter of course; and that was the greatest disgrace of all.
(Kafka 1919/2011: 20)
This is clearly a double bind (Bateson 1973) – the impossible situation where
any response gets punished. Not a double bind in the ‘classic’ sense of an utter-
ance with two simultaneous (and objectively observable) contradictory channels
of communication, usually involving the verbal and nonverbal channels where
any possible response gets punished. In Bateson’s words, ‘A secondary injunc-
tion [often communication through nonverbal means like posture, gesture or
tone of voice] conflicting with the first at a more abstract level, and like the
first enforced by punishment or signals which threaten survival’ (Bateson 2000:
207). Rather it is a double bind realised over time involving the interpretation
of multiple communications (sometimes just involving contradictory verbal
statements alone) resulting in the feeling that no rational response is possible
(Beattie 2021) and that any response inevitably leads to punishment – disgrace
or worse in this case. Kafka hesitated in this relationship with his father, both
literally and metaphorically:
I acquired in your presence – you are, as soon as it concerns your own mat-
ters, an excellent speaker – a hesitant, stammering manner of speaking, and
even that was too much for you, eventually I kept silent, at first perhaps out
of spite, and later because I could neither think nor speak in your presence.
(Kafka 1919/2011: 22)

5 Introduction
The doubt spread to every aspect of his existence. ‘I lost confidence in my
own abilities. I was unsteady, doubtful. The older I got, the more material
you could hold against me as proof of my worthlessness; gradually, in a certain
regard, you began actually to be right’ (Kafka 1919/2011: 23). He even had
doubts about his own body, and this seriously aected his health:
But since there was nothing at all I was certain of, since I needed a new
confirmation of my existence at every instant, since nothing was in my
very own indubitable sole possession, determined unambiguously only by
me, in truth a disinherited son, naturally I became unsure of even the thing
nearest to me, my own body.
(Kafka 1919/2011: 23)
This was the foundation for ‘every form of hypochondria’ that Kafka devel-
oped, a range of anxieties about his digestion, about his hair falling out, about
his spinal curvature and on and on, until he finally succumbed to a genuine
illness, the tuberculosis that killed him at forty. He died of starvation in the
end as the condition of his throat, tightened and closed by tuberculosis, made
eating too painful. This has not stopped some psychologists from suggesting
that the starvation was a form of anorexia, forgetting for a moment the pain of
swallowing that he was experiencing at this time.
Kafka was thirty-six years old when he wrote the famous letter. He gave the
letter to his mother Julie to pass on to his father, but she returned the letter to
her son unread by the intended recipient, perhaps feeling that the letter would
not accomplish what her son hoped for, and that he would be crushed again.
It had taken Kafka thirty-six years to explain to his father how his father’s
behaviour made him feel and to confess his inhibited and secret self-doubts, the
doubts that only leaked out through his avoidance behaviours towards his father,
his neuroses and his hypochondria. But, of course, these doubts underpinned
his art (which his father had always summarily dismissed). The writing was his
‘attempts at independence, attempts at escape, with the very smallest of success’
(Kafka achieved little success in his own lifetime). The doubts, articulated and
explained, hold the key to understanding what it is liked to be trapped in a
complex and contradictory ‘Kafkaesque’ situation. By giving us a word for it,
unintentionally of course, he changed our views of the absurd, complex, bizarre
and illogical; he allowed us to name it and thereby recognise and report it.
His father never read or heard the confession. I’ve always thought that was
a real pity. Hearing about doubt and understanding it may help us understand
each other, it may help us connect and feel less alone, even in disintegrating or
dysfunctional relationships like this one.
There has been such emphasis in the past few decades on the articulation
and sharing of emotional experiences and their importance for our mental and
physical well-being (Pennebaker 1989, 1993, 1995, 1997, 2000, Lee and Beattie
1998, 2000). But we can express emotions whilst keeping our doubts covered
and closer to our chest. Doubts reverberate inside, they resonate and grow.

6 Introduction
We feel like frauds, impostors, cheats, and we never tell anyone. We doubt the
ecacy of the Covid-19 vaccine, and we’re frightened to admit it – we just stay
quiet and don’t get vaccinated. Easier that way. I stop in the changing room
of my gym, and turn around four times to check my locker, doubting that I
had picked all my belongings up. Somebody notices this odd action. I see him
looking. ‘I’ve left things behind before,’ I say. This is not true, but I must explain
myself. I always check like this. My own personal doubts have become public
and need to be explained, they have become obsessive, odd.
The American Psychological Association defines doubt as ‘a lack of con-
fidence or an uncertainty about something or someone, including the self ’ –
they remind us that doubt is a ‘perception’ but typically ‘with a strong aective
component’. I know that feeling intimately, many of us do, but perhaps not
everybody. Some seem immune to doubt. I have experienced that aect many
times. It’s an unsettling sort of feeling that comes from nowhere; it can be very
intense. I hesitate in choosing between alternatives, endlessly weighing up the
pros and the cons, until eventually arriving at what always seems to be the
wrong choice. Anticipated negative feeling, remorse even, is part of it. It hap-
pens even in the most trivial of situations.
I stand in the supermarket with two tins of peas, one in each hand. I read the
labels carefully, noticing the slight dierence in price, the brand, the environ-
mental consequences, imagining the colour on the plate, the taste, the texture. I
stand in the same spot for several minutes. They’re peas for goodness’ sake! Can
you really suer from buyer’s remorse with peas? I can see some of the other
customers looking at me. My hands move up and down, it looks to others as if I
might start juggling. I’m weighing the tins of peas up, metaphorically, trying to
decide. My inner voice is starting to leak out onto the aisles. I notice that. This
is not a good situation. A grey-haired pensioner walks past slowly, using her
trolley as support. It squeaks loudly. She stops by the tinned peas. She notices
my hand movements; we make eye contact. ‘What do you think?’ I ask, sens-
ing my opportunity. She looks at me a little surprised, puzzled even. I suspect
that she’s never been confronted like this before. Maybe she thinks that I work
here, doing some sort of market research into peas and that I’d just forgotten my
uniform. But she’s got time to spare; she pauses. ‘The ones on the left,’ she says,
humouring me, and then grabs a dierent tin of peas from the shelf and moves
on. She glances back as if she wants to get away from me. I feel embarrassed.
My dilemma is almost resolved, but not quite. Why did she buy the other peas,
if she was that certain and so quick in her decision? I choose the ones that she
picked up, go along to the end of the aisle and then stop abruptly, and return
to select one of the previous tins, based on price alone. And that night, I notice
that they didn’t really taste like peas in the end, and I feel myself punished again.
My partner stares at me; it’s all in that look. Why did you buy those peas?
Doubt has all these components – an awareness of the situation and the
underlying dilemma, strong aect and sometimes a distinct emotional forebod-
ing, hesitation and in public places embarrassment – regret and anticipated
regret, a certain lack of fluidity in many situations. A disruption in life. I want

7 Introduction
to know why some people do not suer from it when it comes to monumental
decisions, and yet there I stand weighing up the pros and cons of tins of peas
in public.
So, where do my personal doubts and self-doubts come from? This has puz-
zled me for many years. I didn’t seem to inherit it or learn it from my family in
some form of imitative learning. My family were always very decisive; indeed,
my brother was very impulsive and confident, they suered from few doubts
(although his impulsivity eventually led him to dying in a climbing accident in
the Himalayas, which may have been significant for me certainly later in my
life – he was thirty-years old when he died, I was twenty-six), and they were
astounded by my early indecision which seemed to get worse as I went through
secondary school. I became a doubter. After all, deliberating like this in a super-
market over a tin of peas can have psychological consequences. When you find
yourself unable to decide, and the doubt arises, and you become overly aware
of that prolonged state of hesitation and prevarication, what happens when it
comes to your next important decision? Do you repeat the process? Do you
need to go through the same process to deal with the uncertainty and anxiety?
Do you become more comfortable with it, no matter how it looks to outsiders?
Does it become a coping mechanism? Do you allow it to become a habit? Does
it become part of how you see yourself? Does it become part of your identity?
It certainly has for me, and because of that I’m extremely interested in the
process. I do seem to suer from severe doubt that has generalised and spread. I
have doubts about myself and my ability to do the simplest things, like changing
a fuse, opening a tin can, or changing the oil in my car (my father was a motor
mechanic, so the last one is quite odd). I stand helplessly waiting for someone
to help. I have doubts about my ability to make the right decisions. Other
psychologists might want to label this (prematurely in my mind) as just low
self-esteem or just low self-ecacy – a person’s belief or lack of belief that they
can be successful when carrying out a particular task. They might say that this
should be the starting point of any psychological quest. Just try to understand
why you feel so inadequate, they might say, and so ineectual. But I don’t think
that I have low self-ecacy about many things – I don’t think that I won’t suc-
ceed when I carry out an academic task, for instance, although strangely doubts
creep in when I haven’t been tested at this for a period. I need to be tested
regularly, and that then makes the doubt disappear temporarily. I prayed a lot
about passing exams when I was at school, that too may be important. It was
almost superstitious behaviour. It didn’t matter what neighbours told me about
my ability, or what my grades were at my posh grammar school with a Royal in
the title (‘that’s a great school,’ my mother would say, ‘they know what they’re
doing – if you weren’t as clever as the nobs, they’d let you know alright’). The
doubts would still arise. My inner voice would remind me of how long it was
since I passed my last examination. That was always the focus – the gap since I
was last tested. Six months is a very long time for the maturing brain, my inner
voice would say, your brain may have stopped developing just after that last
exam. It might have stopped working; it might have seized up. I worked harder

8 Introduction
because of that doubt. It was an uncomfortable feeling, but it may have been
adaptive in this instance. Many people would describe me as a ‘workaholic’.
Seeking reassurance through regular eort. Workaholics sometimes seem to
achieve a lot; I want to understand how important doubt is as the propellant
for all this activity.
Doubt in a variety of forms remains to be uncovered, explored and charted –
where doubts come from, how they develop, what they do, how they encourage
us to grow and develop or alternatively how they might suppress or destroy us,
how they can be used against us.
I have always seen doubt as an aiction, a very personal aiction that needs
to be explained somehow. Like most people, psychologists and the public alike,
when we suer from something that we see as an undesirable characteristic, we
search for early manifestations and possible influences. But to understand these
influences, you need some context. Psychological analyses often tend to very
abstract with little connection to individuals and their lives – with some notable
exceptions, of course (although the ‘Rat Man’ may be a little too exotic for
many people’s taste). The analyses are too often independent of the individual
person, but they do sometimes need to be rooted in a description of the cir-
cumstances and the life of the individual – they need context and an idiographic
rather than nomothetic approach. I will hypothesise about the origins of doubt
within certain individuals, and why some people suer unduly from it, and
some apparently not at all. I say ‘apparently’ because it may still have been there
in the shadows. Like a forensic detective I will peer behind the curtains to see
what clues I can find. Doubt, after all, can be displayed in action, and hesitation,
as well as in articulated thoughts which may be concealed from us. I need to
locate doubt, and its presence (or apparent absence) within the lives of individu-
als, including some famous people – great thinkers, artists and scientists. None
of us are immune to doubt it seems. But how did doubt fit into their lives? How
did they master it? Why was Picasso so supremely confident? The painter who
signed his portrait ‘I the King’. Why did doubt not inhibit him? Or did it? Was
it there somewhere in the shadows? Or Alan Turing? How did he overcome
doubts about his ability, and at what cost? Jung explicitly suered from doubt,
but in his view ‘suering’ might not be quite the right word. He thought that
it was an indispensable component of a complete life. Why was that? Is doubt
of the restricting kind all down to overbearing parents with dismissive gestures,
and contradictory or implied messages that undermine sense of self or are there
other origins, indeed multiple alternative origins? And what are they and how
do they aect us? And is absence of doubt all down to the earliest childhood
experiences of love, support and armation or lack thereof, as Kafka suggested,
or is it more complex than that? And how do some people keep doubt in check,
whereas others let it take over their lives, their whole lives?
Doubt is more than a symptom of something. It is very much alive, and part of
us. It needs to be considered, analysed and understood. It can shape lives. But is
doubt always bad? Or is Jung correct? There are many great doubters in religion,
history and culture, some good, some not so good, perhaps I’d simply joined

9 Introduction
them. There’s Doubting Thomas for one. They used to snarl his name in our
church because of his lack of faith. But I thought that it was a little unfair, why is
blind faith so good? He just wanted to see the evidence for himself in the form of
the wounds on Christ’s body before he could believe in the resurrection. Or the
dithering Grand Old Duke of York, plagued by doubt in the form of procrasti-
nation, marching his men to the top of the hill, and marching then down again.
The Grand Old Duke of York was reputedly Prince Frederick, the Duke of York
and Albany, who procrastinated against the French in the Napoleonic Wars and
then retreated (although the hill in the town of Cassel isn’t much of a hill in
very flat Flanders). Then there’s René Descartes, known to most for his maxim
cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’). He argued that if he doubted, then
something or someone must be doing the doubting, which proves his existence –
in other words, doubt is an important, indeed essential human process (and a
critical method for philosophy). In the case of Descartes and Doubting Thomas
doubting would seem to be a good thing; direct empirical evidence is crucially
important for science, understanding and even belief. But doubt can also be a
bad thing, an obstacle, the doubt that leads to procrastination and delay as in the
case of the Grand Old Duke. The doubt that reminds you in your everyday life
of future rejection and remorse, the doubt that inhibits, the doubt that prevents
you reaching your full potential. This acts as a reminder that there are dierent
kinds of doubt with dierent kinds of developmental history. I unfortunately am
a bit of a mixture. I procrastinate about even very simple things, this marks me
out, but these days I like to think that I also use doubt to challenge orthodoxy
in dierent areas of my academic work.
But can we change our doubting habits? We live in this great therapeutic
age where everything, it seems, can be modified, if you just want it enough
and have access to the right interventions, the right role models and incentives.
What role models are out there, and what can we learn from those who have not
been inhibited by self-doubt? I watched one celebrated boxing trainer remove
doubt from his fighters with the most unconventional of practices. He made
them sing nursery rhymes in front of their fellow boxers, and practice forward
flips over the ropes into the ring. It seemed to be eective – he removed doubt
from a whole gym full of confident ‘cocky’ fighters and managed to produce
one of the most arrogant and doubt-free world boxing champions of all time
(Motormouth, as Naseem Hamed was known, would certainly have given
Muhammed Ali a run for his money).
But how do those who achieve great things in their life deal with their
doubts without ‘therapeutic’ interventions like this? There is a very long list to
choose from – in the arts, in science and literature, in many of the great men
and women who have transformed all our lives. Did they manage to achieve
all that they did because they had no self-doubt? Where did their confidence
in their ability come from? How did they manage any slight doubts? What are
the downsides of an absence of doubt, if any? Do we need doubt? Or is it like
anxiety, stress and depression that we need to rid ourselves o through individ-
ual-based therapy (even very unconventional ‘therapy’ like that of the boxing

10 Introduction
trainer) – some form of cognitive behavioural therapy for a better and happier
life? Indeed, if we teach people to deal with depression, stress and anxiety, will
it just obliterate doubt? Is doubt just some sort of epiphenomenon that sits on
the shoulders of these mental ailments to give us something to occupy our time,
while these other powerful stressors do their harm. And what about doubt in
things like climate change or Covid-19? What doubts drive belief that climate
change is a Chinese hoax to cripple the American economy?
Or what about the opposite – people who seem immune to doubt? People
who clearly should have doubts but don’t – like George W. Bush before the inva-
sion of Iraq with no doubt about Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruc-
tion’ or the righteousness of his own cause (Suskind 2004). Or people who
report close encounters with aliens (but otherwise seem quite normal). Why
don’t they have serious doubts about what has happened to them? A number of
years ago, I found myself standing in a council flat in Sheeld talking to a very
ordinary couple who had not one but several encounters with aliens. I wanted
to hear their detailed account – I was interested in any indicators of doubt and
uncertainty in how they talked about it, in their hesitations in speech (Beattie
1983), their smirks, their slips and nonverbal leakage (Beattie 2016), where they
might reveal that they just enjoyed telling tall tales to gullible strangers like me.
But I must say that I saw and heard no sign of any of these. It was all so matter-
of-fact – like a visit to the shops, which it was in a way. This couple seemed to
be very normal, indeed painfully normal, on any criterion except for their alien
encounters. There was no hysteria in their account, no real excitement, and no
sign of any obvious psychological disturbance. It was like an everyday experience
told in a matter-of-fact way without any uncertainty or doubt.
‘The first time I saw aliens,’ the wife Jean explained nonchalantly, whilst sit-
ting in her front room,
was in 1979 in Gleadless in Sheeld [a working-class district of Sheeld]
when I was on my way up to the chip shop. I was going up for two fish
suppers at about nine o’clock at night and I bumped into a neighbour of
mine, Ken and we just stood chatting for a bit. Then I just happened to
look up into the sky and there it was. The spacecraft was a saucer shape,
like they are.... There were two people inside – beautiful looking people.
Both had blond hair and very pale complexions. I could see right into the
spaceship. It had neon lights just like my kitchen. After a couple of seconds,
the UFO just vanished.
She glanced at me to check how the account was going down. ‘Oh,’ is all I
could think of to say, trying not to leak too much information. She poured me
another cup of tea.
‘But that was only the first time,’ continued Jean enthusiastically.
The aliens returned a few months later and came right into my house this
time when I was ill with cancer. They knew, you see. I felt this hand go

Introduction 11
onto the top of my head, and I felt these vibrations. They were curing
me – they were reassuring me, curing my fear of cancer. When I went
into hospital, I had no fear. The doctors couldn’t believe how well I was
coping with it. They were amazed. I couldn’t tell them that it was because
of the aliens.
Her husband Tom nodded away in the background, backing up her every
word, without saying anything. Tom himself had no direct experience of aliens,
and he clearly felt that he was missing out. I could see it in his face. But then
fate intervened, and he was given his chance. He said that he saw a spacecraft
through some trees in Clumber Park when he and his wife were driving down
to Skegness for the weekend. Again, he told the story in a flat, matter-of-fact
way. ‘The spacecraft was only fifty feet away. I saw the lot. It was black and shiny,
just as if it had come out of a car wash.’
But Jean wouldn’t let him stop near the spacecraft. This was something of
a sore point between them and he’s never quite forgiven her for it. ‘It was an
opportunity of a lifetime that I missed there,’ he said wistfully. ‘An opportunity
of a lifetime,’ he repeated. He threw Jean a look. It was as close to a ti as any-
thing I had seen that day.
‘I hope they come back,’ Tom said, staring straight at me defiantly. ‘I’d go
with them.’
Jean said that he should be more careful ‘because they might want to experi-
ment on you’.
‘I don’t care,’ said Tom. ‘What’s there to lose in the end.’
The problem was that I don’t think that she wanted to share her alien experi-
ences with him; I could sense it. She wanted to feel special. It felt a bit like there
had been some emotional ‘infidelity’ going on in the background (with the
aliens that is). ‘But nothing too physical,’ she said reassuringly. But she seemed
to be thinking of all those good vibrations.
I, of course, had one obvious question for them both. I asked them directly
whether they had any doubts about what they had experienced. Could they
perhaps have been mistaken? Could it have been some sort of dream or delu-
sional fantasy? I elongated ‘fantasy’ as if I didn’t really want to say it or finish the
word. They were not looking pleased.
If aliens are so common in Sheeld, I continued, why don’t others report
sightings as well. There was no pause, no hesitation. Jean was straight in – she
had a ready-made answer to this one, she seemed to be in charge here. She was
both fluent and confident.
A lot more people than you think have seen aliens, but they don’t want to
talk about it. Take Ken, for example, because he had learning diculties,
he thought that people would just laugh at him, so he kept quiet.
Tom just nodded quietly and then made a blowing noise, as if the truth is hard
to bear and even harder to hold in.

12 Introduction
‘And what attracts the aliens to Sheeld in the first place?’ I asked. ‘Why are
the skies above Sheeld filled with alien spacecraft? Why Sheeld?’ I was at
my cynical best.
Jean had a theory, not a tentative theory nor a guess nor some speculative
hypothesis, but one that made great sense to her and that precluded any doubt.
They probably use the Pennines to guide them in their travels when they’re
visiting the United Kingdom, the Pennines run right down the middle of
the country, which is very handy when you’re heading south. And then
the aliens just see the lights of Sheeld on the left-hand side, and they
decide to pop in for a closer look. They’re just curious like everybody else.
If you’d been travelling through the darkness of space for months on end
and you saw the lights of Sheeld, all lit up, wouldn’t you not want to go
and have a bit of a gander?
There was a logic to it, or perhaps more accurately a partial logic, based on
the assumption that the aliens were nosy buggers just like the rest of us. They
may have had their mission in the darkness of endless space, but they could be
distracted by a few streetlights and Sheeld market all lit up at night.
Jean sat silent after telling me these secrets about our extraterrestrial friends,
and how they navigate and how they think, and how their attention is limited
like everyone else’s. She had made the supernatural mundane and ordinary. And
doubt itself was seemingly eradicated in her account by rooting the supernatural
experience of the visiting aliens in the mundane details of everyday life (Beat-
tie 1986; Woott 1992), a narrative constructed to normalise the couple, with
trips to the chip shop and weekends in Skegness, and ready explanations as to
why other witnesses like Ken would not come forward (Beattie 1998a). And any
doubt, of course, by either her or her husband, would destroy the account – it
would become a fantasy, a tall tale, a story rather than a reliable account of an
actual experience. Instead, it was rock solid and frighteningly mundane. But a
lot of work must go into this. It must be that mundane to signify a normal and
very average life, a life not full of fanciful ideas or thoughts. I was told that the
aliens had the same lights in their spacecraft that Jean had in her own kitchen.
But these mundane details are essential to build an account of ‘what really hap-
pened’ and for Jean to represent herself as a genuine witness (Potter 1996) – she
had seen the lights in the spacecraft so clearly that she could describe them,
indeed recognise them. She presumably would know that this would sound
ridiculous, but she risks this dilemma of ridicule for the sake of detail. Any
genuine account needs detail. This was a modern-day religious miracle, with
aliens instead of angels, in one of the poorest council estates in Sheeld – aliens
had come to cure the sick and take the fear of death away. Like all miracles, it
needed specifics.
I found the story odd and their certainty about what had happened to them
odder still. I wanted that old nagging doubt to appear in this story in order to
connect with them as fellow human beings confronted with odd perceptions,

Introduction 13
and ‘something’ that may or may not have been out of the ordinary. How can
anyone not have doubt that Sheeld is the capital of alien visitations, and that
alien spacecraft have the same lights that you can get in the market in Sheeld?
What psychological processes underpinned this? Cognitive dissonance might
well have had some role to play here. Leon Festinger developed his classic theory
of cognitive dissonance in the 1950s to explain what happens when cognitions
(opinions, beliefs, knowledge) and knowledge of one’s own actions and feelings
conflict with each other. This conflict sets up a state of cognitive dissonance
characterised by a degree of discomfort that people try to resolve (Festinger
1957). Sightings of aliens outside a chip shop in Sheeld reported to friends
and neighbours are likely to produce some discomfort (certainly initially), and
Festinger suggested that when we are in a state of cognitive dissonance like this,
we find ways of reducing the discomfort either by changing our underlying
beliefs or opinions (‘it never happened’), or by acquiring new information to
make the beliefs more plausible (Jean had been reading about other alien visita-
tions, mainly in the United States) and proselytising about the experience. In
Festinger’s words – ‘If more and more people can be persuaded that the system
of belief is correct, then clearly it must, after all, be correct.’ Jean had become
more committed to her belief about what had happened to her through repeated
telling of the story. It was also now part of who she was, part of her self-identity.
I am also reminded of Festinger’s ethnographic research on a doomsday
cult in Chicago as the cult waited for the end of the world in a great flood
scheduled, according to the cult’s extraterrestrial messengers (‘The Guardians’)
for the 21st December 1954 (Festinger et al. 1956). Festinger described how
this cult reacted when the prophecy failed (as the world from their point of
view unfortunately didn’t end). Many members of the cult had given up their
secure jobs and families to join – they were fully committed to their beliefs. In
Festinger’s words:
The dissonance is too important and though they may try to hide it, even
from themselves, the believers still know that the prediction was false, and all
their preparations were in vain. The dissonance cannot be eliminated com-
pletely by denying or rationalizing the disconfirmation. But there is a way in
which the remaining dissonance can be reduced. If more and more people
can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must, after
all, be correct. Consider the extreme case: if everyone in the whole world
believed something there would be no question at all as to the validity of this
belief. It is for this reason that we observe the increase in proselyting follow-
ing disconfirmation. If the proselyting proves successful, then by gathering
more adherents and eectively surrounding himself with supporters, the
believer reduces dissonance to the point where he can live with it.
(Festinger et al. 1956: 27–28)
This might explain why Jean and Tom were so keen to talk about their expe-
riences with aliens to everybody, including cynical researchers like myself. It

14 Introduction
was a way of dealing with cognitive dissonance and the disappointment (after
all the aliens never came back to see them in Gleadless after the first few visits),
and to keep the beliefs in place and doubt at bay. Many local people were per-
suaded of their story because of the level of detail and mundane, ordinariness
of the whole thing (but some were not) – they were ‘gathering adherents and
eectively surrounding [themselves] with supporters’, in Festinger’s words. So
cognitive dissonance may be one mechanism that operates when doubts may
arise, but there may be other ways of dealing with it, as we will see.
But their accounts of their experiences with aliens also remind us that there
are clearly marked individual dierences in the experience and expression of
doubt and that the narratives we tell about our lives and our perceptions can
act as buers to the world, and that convincing narratives may end up help-
ing to convince the person generating the narrative as much or more than the
audience itself through the reduction of dissonance (Beattie 2018a). From this
perspective language use and thinking are intimately connected. We persuade
ourselves as well as others, and language has a critical role to play in this.
I wanted to move beyond words at the end of my interview with Jean and
Tom. As I left, Jean drew the spacecraft for me – at my request. It was an oval
shape with two drivers. Both had familiar haircuts. There was a light on the
top. It could have been done by a five-year-old.
‘Is this it?’ I asked.
‘That’s it,’ said Tom.
Jean looked pleased with her eorts. She was spreading the word to a cynical
world. A world full of doubt. My world.
This book must be a journey, and a very personal journey at that. I need to
dig below the surface, doubt and doubting may not be obvious on the surface.
It’s not with me. I’ve learned to cover up my doubting to colleagues and friends,
not like when I was a boy, but it occasionally slips out, like all great uncon-
scious processes, or processes not fully subject to conscious control, like in the
supermarket that day with the tins of peas. And then when I stand there, frozen
by doubt, weighing up the alternatives, people often think that I’m joking or
performing for their amusement. They think that it’s a play for their attention.
I’ve learned to disguise my doubting, if not to defeat it.
Doubt is a thing that people rarely talk about. I want to bring it into the
open. I want to understand it, where it comes from and what it does. And ulti-
mately, whether it’s constructive or destructive. And if it is destructive, what it
destroys, apart from our confidence and our ability to connect to others. I want
to understand how doubt develops and what feeds it, how it’s bound up with
other psychological anxieties and insecurities. I want to understand whether
it’s useful, and if so for what, or whether it just inhibits and distracts. I want to
understand how some people overcome their doubts or help others to. I want
to understand doubts about things which have very serious consequences, like
why some people, including former presidents of the United States, doubt
climate change or the nature of the Covid-19 pandemic when, seemingly, the
evidence is there right in front of them. I want to understand why, for years,

Introduction 15
smokers doubted the medical evidence about the deadly eects of smoking, and
what makes some politicians so sure that they’re right with no apparent doubt
about their position or their beliefs. I want to know how doubt inhibited great
thinkers, how they dealt with them or lived with them, or whether they were
the spur that they needed to push them on to greatness. I explore how doubt
can be used by the merchants of doubt out there in the commercial world using
subtle and not so subtle techniques to manipulate us. I want to understand why
so many have doubts about climate change despite all the scientific evidence
to the contrary.
The journey will be important to me. I want to understand how doubt sits
within an individual, what reinforces it or keeps it at bay. I want to explore
this private world of doubt both in myself and in others. I want to see it for
what it is.
• Doubt is a lack of confidence or uncertainty about something or
someone, including the self.
• Doubt is central to science, the law, ethics, politics and philosophy
which all involve elaborate and often refined adversarial processes
to promote, consider and evaluate doubt in the light of the available
evidence.
• Doubt is also central to the self.
• Doubt can be a safeguarding mechanism or a distraction.
• Doubt can be rational or irrational, systematic or random, healthy
or pathological.
• Doubt is an instrument of rational thought – in science, the law,
philosophy and everyday thinking.
• Doubt has been viewed by some (including Freud) as a symptom
of major psychological dysfunction, indeed an enduring form of
neurosis rooted in the earliest stages of development.
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder is sometimes referred to as a ‘disease
of doubt’.
• Doubt is a great driver, perhaps the greatest driver of all, and a
great inhibitor when it comes to human action.
• Doubt drives science, judicial decisions, philosophical understanding,
progress, change, positive action but it can also inhibit decision-
making and stop change and lead to procrastination, worry, super-
stition and delay.
• Doubt is internal and conscious (‘a perception of indecision’) and
therefore highly personal.
• Jung wrote that ‘Doubt and insecurity are indispensable components
of a complete life.’
• Franz Kafka suered from extreme self-doubt and believed that his
overbearing father was the cause of this.

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