The Story of Psychology (28 page)

As a result, William James attended schools in the United States, England, France, Switzerland, and Germany, and was also privately tutored; became familiar with the major museums and galleries in every city the family visited; acquired fluency in five languages; met, listened to, and talked to such frequenters of the James household as Thoreau, Emerson, Greeley, Hawthorne, Carlyle, Tennyson, and J. S. Mill; and through his father’s influence became widely read and well versed in philosophy. Not that Henry James, Sr., was a taskmaster or disciplinarian; for his time, he was an unusually permissive and loving father, who encouraged dinner table arguments by the children about every kind of issue and, to his friends’ horror, allowed his children to attend theater.

But a loving and permissive father can wield distressing influence over a child. At seventeen William James wanted to become a painter, but Henry James, Sr., who wanted him to seek a career in the sciences or philosophy, disapproved and took the family to Europe for a year as a distraction. Only because William persisted was he reluctantly allowed to study with an artist in Newport. After half a year William decided he was not gifted, perhaps more because of guilt feelings than a lack of talent, and, obeying his father’s wishes, entered Harvard and began the study of chemistry.

But the detailed laboratory work tried his patience and he soon switched to physiology, then the vogue, what with the pioneering work in Europe of Müller, Helmholtz, and Du Bois-Reymond. After a while, however, because the family fortune was dwindling and William realized he would someday have to earn his own living, he switched to Harvard
Medical School. Medicine, too, failed to arouse his enthusiasm, and he took off much of a year to travel to the Amazon with Louis Agassiz, the eminent Harvard naturalist, hoping that natural history might be his true love. It proved not to be; he hated collecting specimens.

He resumed medical school but was beset by assorted ailments—back pain, weak vision, digestive disorders, and thoughts of suicide—some or most of which were exacerbated by his indecision about his future. Seeking relief, he went to France and Germany for nearly two years, took the baths, studied under Helmholtz and other leading physiologists, and became thoroughly conversant with the New Psychology.

Finally he returned and at twenty-seven completed medical school. He made no effort to practice because of his poor health, but spent his time studying psychology, sunk in gloom about his prospects and troubled by the profound differences between his scientific views of the mind and the world and his father’s mystical and spiritual ones. In 1870, at twenty-eight, after nearly a year in these doldrums, he had an abrupt emotional crisis very much like his father’s. Many years later he described it in
Varieties of Religious Experience
in the guise of a memoir given him by an anonymous Frenchman:

In his mature years William diagnosed his father’s crisis as an outbreak of long-repressed hostile feelings against his tyrannical father, but never suggested an explanation of his own crisis. Jacques Barzun has offered a hypothesis: “One may plausibly surmise that it was the intolerable pressure of not being able to rebel against a father who exerted no tyranny but that of love.”
¹²

The attack left James incapacitated for many months. During this
period he was particularly troubled by the German physiologists’ mechanistic vision of the world, the scientific equivalent of the Calvinistic determinism his own father had rebelled against. If mechanism gave a true picture of the mind, then all his thoughts, desires, and volitions were no more than the predetermined interactions of physical particles; he was as helpless to determine his actions as the epileptic patient in the asylum.

Finally, like his father, he was freed from his depression by reading— not Swedenborg but an essay on free will by Charles Renouvier, a French philosopher. As James wrote in his diary:

His will to believe in free will worked; he slowly began to recover, although all his life his health remained fragile and he continued to have minor bouts of depression. He spent the next two years reading widely in physiological and philosophical psychology and regaining his mental health. In 1872, nearing thirty, he was still financially dependent on his father and had no plans for his future when Harvard’s president, Charles Eliot, a neighbor—the James family had been living in Cambridge for some time—invited him to teach physiology at Harvard. He accepted, and remained there for the next thirty-five years.

But not as a professor of physiology. Within three years he began offering courses in physiological psychology and performing demonstrations for students in his little laboratory in Lawrence Hall. He continued to read omnivorously, forming his own lofty conception of psychology, and during the next three years presented some of his ideas so brilliantly in articles and book reviews that the publisher Henry Holt offered him a contract for a textbook of the new scientific psychology. James signed, apologizing that he would need two years. He took twelve, completing the task in 1890, but he produced a work that was successful far beyond the publisher’s hopes.

The year James began the book, 1878, was a landmark in another way. At thirty-six, he married. Despite his belief in free will, he seems to
have been something less than a free agent in his choice of mate. Two years earlier his father had come home from a meeting of the Radical Club in Boston and announced that he had met William’s future wife, Alice Gibbens, a Boston schoolteacher and accomplished pianist. Although William dragged his feet about meeting her, once he did so the die was cast. After a prolonged courtship, Alice became his dutiful, strong wife and helpmeet, mother of his five children, amanuensis, and lifelong intellectual companion. She appreciated his genius and understood his emotional needs and temperamental volatility, and despite many a spell of tension and many a battle, particularly before William’s long trips—he needed periods of apartness—they were a devoted and loving couple.

Once he was married, James’s remaining nervous and physical symptoms diminished; although his health was always imperfect, he went at life with a zest and energy he had never shown before. He was at last an independent man with his own identity, home, and income, free to pursue his own goals. Two years later Harvard recognized his special interests and abilities by making him an assistant professor of philosophy (his larger view of psychology fit more comfortably in that department than in the department of physiology), and in 1889 changed his title, finally, to professor of psychology.

There were no professors of psychology in American universities before James began teaching the subject in 1875. The only forms of psychology then taught in the United States were phrenology and Scottish mental philosophy, an offshoot of associationism used chiefly as a defense of revealed religion. James himself had never taken a course in the New Psychology because none was available; as he once jested, “The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.”

But within two decades at least two dozen American universities were offering instruction in psychology, three psychology journals were being published, and a professional psychology society had been founded. There were several reasons for the efflorescence: the desire of many university presidents to emulate the success of the German psychological institutes, the arrival in America of psychologists trained by Wundt, and, most of all, James’s influence, exerted through his teaching, his dozens of well-received articles, and his masterwork,
Principles of Psychology.

James introduced experimental psychology to America. He began giving laboratory demonstrations to students at least as early as Wundt, and he and his students started performing laboratory experiments about the same time as Wundt and his students, if not earlier. Ironically, while James made much of the value of experimentation, he himself found it boring and intellectually confining. He usually spent no more than two hours a day in the laboratory, told a friend that “I naturally hate experimental work,” and said of the Leipzig style of laboratory work, “The thought of psycho-physical experimentation and altogether of brass-instrument and algebraic-formula psychology fills me with horror.”
¹⁴

Yet he believed in it and had his students perform a broad array of experiments. They whirled frogs around to explore the function of the inner ear; did the same to human deaf mutes to test James’s hypothesis that, since their semicircular canals were damaged, they should be less subject to dizziness than normal people (he was right); carried out reflex experiments on frogs’ legs, and reaction-time and speed of nerve-conduction experiments on human subjects; and, venturing far beyond Wundtian physiological psychology, did studies of hypnosis and automatic writing.

Although James hated to do experiments, he forced himself to when it was the best way to prove or disprove a theory. While writing the chapter on memory for
Principles
, he wanted to test the ancient belief still held by “faculty” psychologists that memory, like a muscle, can be strengthened by exercise, and that memorizing anything would therefore improve the memory not just for the memorized kind of material but for every kind. James was skeptical and used himself as his experimental subject. Over an eight-day span he memorized 158 lines of “Satyr,” a poem by Victor Hugo, taking an average of fifty seconds a line to do so. Next, working twenty minutes daily for thirty-eight days, he memorized the entire first book (798 lines) of Milton’s
Paradise Lost.
If the exercise theory were correct, this prolonged effort should have greatly strengthened his memory. He then went back to “Satyr” and memorized another 158 lines—and found that it took him seven seconds longer per line than the first time. Exercise hadn’t increased the strength of his memory; it had diminished it, at least temporarily.
¹⁵
(He had several associates repeat the experiment, with roughly similar results.) A psychological theory accepted for two thousand years, and believed today by many laypeople, had been disproven.

But James’s own experiments were only one source, and a minor one,
of his ideas about psychology. He drew upon all his reading in both philosophical and physiological psychology; spent half a year in Europe in 1882–1883 visiting universities, attending laboratory sessions and lectures, and meeting and talking to dozens of leading psychologists and other scientists; corresponded regularly with many of them; and gathered reports and clinical studies of abnormal minds, and of normal ones under hypnosis, drugs, or stress.

He derived many of his major insights and hypotheses from another and very different source: introspection, of a kind quite unlike that practiced by Wundt and his students. In James’s opinion, any effort to seize and isolate individual elements of a thought process by means of Wundtian introspection would be doomed to failure:

But he felt that a naturalistic kind of introspection—an effort to observe our own thoughts and feelings as they actually seem to us— could tell us much about our mental life. This was, for him, the most important of investigative methods; he defined it as “looking into our own minds and reporting what we there discover.”
¹⁷
(He was referring to the introspection of conscious mental processes; at the time, neither he nor most other psychologists were aware of how large a part of our mental processes takes place outside consciousness.)

Such introspection required both concentration and practice, because inner states follow each other rapidly and often are blended and difficult to distinguish from one another. Yet it was feasible, James said, likening it to sense perception. Just as with practice one can notice, carefully observe, name, and classify objects outside oneself, one can do so with inner events.

There was, to be sure, a classic question about how this was possible. The conscious mind can observe external objects, but how can it observe itself? Was there a second consciousness that could watch the first one? How could we know that such a second consciousness
existed—could we observe it, too? And how? James had an answer to such perplexities: introspection is, in reality, immediate retrospection; the conscious mind looks back and reports what it has just experienced.