Father of Modern
(American) Psychology
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William James of Albany
(1771 - 1832)
Henry’s Grandfather - Irish-born.
Immigrated to the United States in 1789 (18 years old).
Started out as a clerk in a dry goods business.
Amassed the third largest fortune in the USA.
Investments in business, real estate, and the Erie Canal.
Had twelve children by three wives.
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William James of Albany
His sons described him as emotionally distant, absorbed
with work, authoritarian, moralistic, and patriarchal.
Presbyterian - Protestant work ethic
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Henry James Sr.
(1811 - )
Henry Sr. was born in Albany 1811 to William's third wife.
Suffered severe burns resulting in leg amputation.
Used a wooden leg.
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Rebellion
In 1828, Henry enrolled in Union College in Schenectady.
Rebelled against his father (spending freely, drinking,
gambling, inattention to studies, and defiance of his father's
work ethic).
He left school to write for a Unitarian paper.
Returned to graduate in 1830.
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William Sr.’s Revenge
William Sr. Died Typhus in Albany in 1832 and left his
fortune to his son Robert.
Left an estate estimated at $3 million
Henry's hired a lawyer and broke the will.
Became an independently wealthy man.
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1835 to 1837 - Princeton Theological Seminary
Prepared for the ministry but left without a degree
Could not accept all the doctrines, especially
Predestination.
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1838
Scottish sect that opposed the Presbyterian Church.
What specifically interested Henry James Sr. was its egalitarian
message.
. . .as to the matter of acceptance with God, there is no
difference betwixt one man and another; — no difference
betwixt the best accomplished gentleman, and the most
infamous scoundrel; — no difference betwixt the most virtuous
lady and the vilest prostitute...
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In 1840, he married Mary Robertson Walsh.
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1842
1842 - Henry James attended a lecture of
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s.
Emerson came to James’ home, and met baby
William (born January 11, 1842) whom he
called a young “philosopher to be.”
1844 – The James’ go to Europe where Henry
experiences a spiritual crisis that lasts 2 years!
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Swedenburg
Swedenburg follower told him “he was having what
Swedenborg called a “vastation” or complete empyting out
of all the contents of the ego self to prepare to receive true
spiritual insight.
Read Swedenburg! His life was transformed,
as he delved into spirituality. He read
Swedenborg constantly, even traveling
with a trunk of his books!
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William James’ Education
All five of the James children were educated at
home by tutors and travel with the family.
Attended, museums, art Galleries and Theaters.
Their father refused to let them join a church.
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Henry’s Dream
Wanted his children to be nurtured to become
Artists through activities in order to stimulate
love, sensuality and personal ambition. What
Henry meant by artists was a free spirit,
inspired! They must find their “ideal selfhood”
and act “not in obedience to either physical or
social constraint, but in obedience to their own
ideas of goodness, truth, and beauty.”
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While he wanted Free Spirits –
he was very controlling!
Henry, feared the teenage years. Children were thought by
American culture to be rebellious and bad-mannered.
He considered that the U.S. population treasured rebellion and
dissent, therefore, he decided to move the family to Europe
where such behavior by youth was not as readily accepted.
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William is very intelligent and very competitive with his
brother Henry.
He is Artistic.
1860-1861 - Studies painting with
William Morris Hunt, Newport, R.I.
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Civil War
April 1861
William at nineteen was at the exact age at which young men
were joining the Union army. Many of their friends his two
youngest brothers and a few of their cousins were joining.
William, instead, went to Harvard. William had a wooden leg.
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Chemistry
1861- Enters Lawrence Scientific School,
Harvard University to study chemistry and
comparative anatomy.
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1864 - William enters Harvard Medical School.
- interrupted his medical studies twice
1865-1866 - Joins Louis Agassiz on an expedition to
the Amazon.
- In 1837 Agassiz was the first to scientifically
propose that the Earth had been subject to a
past ice age.
- anti-Darwin Creationist.
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1866 - resumes medical school . . . but had an assorted
ailments—back pain, weak vision, digestive disorders, and
thoughts of suicide—some or most of which were related to
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 (Wundt).
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1869 - James receives his MD from Harvard.
For almost three years after graduation, James lived in the
family home. William was much given to illnesses which
could not be fully explained. He was often miserable.
In 1870, at 28 , after nearly a year in this depression , he had
an “abrupt emotional crisis."
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In April of 1870, he recorded in his journal that he had come
to believe that free will was no illusion and that he could use
his will to alter his mental state:
"I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I see no reason
why . . . . Free Will — 'the sustaining of a thought because I
choose to when I might have other thoughts' — need be the
. . . an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present —
until next year — that it is no illusion.”
"My first act of free will," he wrote, "shall be to believe
in free will."
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1872 - James was now 30, three years out of medical school, and
with no career prospects or plans except for a vague desire to
devote himself to philosophy.
Harvard president Charles Eliot, a neighbor and former teacher of
James, offered him a post at Harvard teaching physiology for the
modest sum of $600 per year.
Within three years of arriving at
Harvard, he began offering courses
in physiological psychology and
performing demonstrations for
students in his little laboratory.
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There were no professors of psychology in American
universities (except phrenology) before James began teaching
it in 1875 (3 years before Wundt’s lab).
James had never taken a course in the New Psychology
because there were none. He once jested, 'The first lecture in
psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.‘
•James introduced experimental psychology to America.
•Began giving laboratory demonstrations to students at least
as early as Wundt.
•He and his students started performing laboratory
experiments about the same time as Wundt and his students,
if not earlier.
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"I naturally hate experimental work,"
"The thought of psycho-physical experimentation and
altogether of brass-instrument and algebraic-formula
psychology fills me with horror."
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Alice Howe Gibbens, married William
James in 1878
My dear Miss Gibbens
It seems almost a crime to startle your unconsciousness in the
manner in which I am about to do; but seven weeks of insomnia
outweigh many scruples, and reflecting on the matter as
conscientiously as I can, it seems as if this premature declaration
were fraught with less evil than any of the other courses possible
to me now.
To state abruptly the whole matter: I am in love, und zwar [it’s
true] (– forgive me — ) with Yourself.
My duty in my own mind is clear. It is to win your hand, if I can.
What I beg of you now is that you should let me know
categorically whether any absolute irrevocable obstacle already
exists to that consummation. I mean literally absolute, and shall
strictly so interpret your reply…
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1890 – Principles of Psychology (2 volumes), chapters on habit,
attention, perception, association, memory, reasoning, instinct,
emotion, imagination, psychological methods, and even
hypnotism.
Jimmy
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Theory
Functionalism James opposed the structuralism focus on
introspection and breaking down mental events to the
smallest elements. Instead, James focused on the
wholeness of an event, taking into the impact of the
environment on behavior.
Psychology is the study of mental activity (e.g. perception,
memory, imagination, feeling, judgment). Mental activity is to
be evaluated in terms of how it serves the organism in
adapting to its environment .
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The functionalists tended to use the term 'function' rather loosely.
It can refer to the study of how a mental process operates. This is
a major departure from the study of the structure of a mental
process, the difference between stopping a train to tear it apart to
study its parts (structuralism), and looking at how the systems
interact while it is running (functionalism).
The term 'function' can also refer to how the mental process
functions in the evolution of the species, what adaptive property
it provides that would cause it to be selected through evolution.
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Stream of consciousness
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."
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Wrote considerably on the concept of pragmatism.
According to pragmatism, the truth of an idea can
never be proven. James proposed we instead focus on
what he called the "cash value," or usefulness, of an
idea.
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James-Lange Theory of Emotion The James-Lange theory of
emotion proposes that an event triggers a physiological reaction,
which we then interpret. According to this theory, emotions are
caused by our interpretations of these physiological reactions. Both
James and the Danish physiologist Carl Lange independently
proposed the theory.
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Influence on Psychology
In addition to his own enormous influence, many of
James' students went on to have prosperous and
influential career in psychology. Some of James'
students included Mary Whiton Calkins, Edward
Thorndike, G. Stanley Hall, and John Dewey.
In 1894 he was the first American to call favorable
attention to the recent work of relatively obscure
Viennese physician, Sigmund Freud.
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William was subject to recurring,
debilitating depressions
Periods of fatigue, insomnia and self-doubt.
Neurosis
Was always seeking out new treatments.
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James and Spiritualism
• James was a founding member of the American Society
for Psychical Research
• Member of its Committee on Mediumistic Phenomena
He took a scientific approach to the study of spiritualism.
Debunked many mediums.
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Leonora Piper
William James’ White Crow
"If you wish to upset the
law that all crows are black
. . . it is enough if you
prove that one crow is
white. My white crow is
Mrs. Piper.”
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William James died of
heart disease at his
family's summer home
in New Hampshire in
1910.
Grave of William James in the James family plot at Albany Rural
Cemetery in Menands, N.Y.
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William James Quotations
Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the
outer aspects of their lives.
The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless
abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of
others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave
vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled
as long as life endures.
Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each
man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man
as he really is.
There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to
contradict other philosophers.
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