Biography: William James was the first of five children born into what became a prominent and closely linked family. His younger brother was Henry James Jr., the novelist. Their father, Henry Sr., was a wealthy man who moved his family nearly constantly around New England and Europe. Thus, William James attended schools in Europe, usually in short stints, in Geneva, Paris, and Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, becoming fluent in German and French.
At the age of 16 and back in Newport, Rhode Island, he studied painting with the artist William Hunt while attempting to pursue a career in art, a choice contrary to his father’s wishes. His study of art was briefly interrupted by another yearlong stay in Geneva, but resumed upon his family’s return to Newport. James, of his own volition, finally abandoned painting as a potential career in 1861 when he enrolled at the Lawrence Scientific School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, part of Harvard University.
James’ father believed that none of his children should attend any college, but may have struck a deal with his son to keep him from fulfilling his 90-day enlistment in the Newport Artillery Company, thus keeping him out of the American Civil War (Richardson, 2006). At Lawrence, he met a young chemistry professor, Charles Eliot, who later became Harvard’s president and a major influence on James’ career. In 1864, James enrolled in Harvard’s medical school but did not complete his degree until after five years of discontinuous study. An early interruption occurred when he accompanied the famous naturalist, Louis Agassiz, on a scientific expedition to the Amazon River. He took sick while on the expedition. He spent another year in Europe attempting to recover his health and to study at the University of Berlin with Hermann Helmholtz. James’ health was a lifelong problem and concern to him. After receiving his medical degree he again fell ill, suffering from depression. He never practiced medicine, nor had he, up to this point in his life, ever held any paying job. Eliot, by now Harvard’s president (and James’ neighbor), offered him his first employment, teaching comparative anatomy and physiology for one term. James accepted the position; from that point onward he and Harvard were yoked for life.
James Becomes a Psychologist
Eliot re-appointed James, who accepted the position but only after spending another year abroad in Europe. James took to teaching easily; his constant travels along with the many prominent people he had met were natural assets in the classroom. When he returned to Harvard in 1874 he taught comparative anatomy but also taught, for the first time in the United States, a graduate course in psychology. The following year James taught a new course, physiological psychology, setting up a small teaching lab for the course. Thus, he and Wundt were each performing psychology experiments, the first in the world, at about the same time. James had convinced Eliot that the physiological psychology course belonged at Harvard and that it should be positioned between offerings from the departments of biology and philosophy. James based his course on several new and converging scientific disciplines: evolution, psychophysics, and archeology.
Throughout his life, James sought to include data from as many disciplines as possible under the umbrella of psychology. For example, in his later years he explored the nature of religious thought and often attended séances in order to investigate the possibility of paranormal psychology. When first teaching physiological psychology James used Spencer’s psychology textbook. He soon realized, however, that he needed to write his own textbook. He believed it would take him two years to write his text, Principles of Psychology, but it took him 12 long years. But, when it finally appeared it firmly established him as the principal spokesperson for American psychology.
Much happened to James and to American psychology during those 12 years. For one, he married Alice Howe Gibbens. That change in status required both of them to adapt to each other, but they eventually settled into a mutually agreeable domesticity. Her presence also seemed to moderate the number and frequency of the assaults on his health. James took another trip to Europe some eight years before Principles of Psychology appeared. It was during that trip that he met many early European psychologists including Ewald Hering, Carl Stumpf, Ernst Mach, Jean Martin Charcot, and Wilhelm Wundt.
When he returned to Harvard he taught courses in psychology and philosophy. In 1889, he became Harvard’s first professor of psychology, but was still a member of the department of philosophy. By then, psychology departments were being founded at many American universities; mostly by the students of Wundt and by other European psychologists. James convinced Eliot that Harvard, too, needed a professor of psychology in order to keep up with the times. Eliot agreed and appointed James. In addition to his teaching duties, James also continued to run Harvard’s psychology laboratory. Many of the empirical results from James laboratory research eventually were published in his Principles of Psychology.
FYI: Harvard’s Department of Psychology-James, however, was always a member of Harvard’s department of philosophy. Harvard did not establish a department of psychology until 1934. Also, when Hugo Münsterberg succeeded James as director of the Harvard psychology laboratory James voluntarily reverted to being a professor of philosophy. He did so in order to give Münsterberg the freedom to run things his own way without interference from another “psychologist.”
The Principles of Psychology
By the time The Principles of Psychology appeared it was in competition with texts newer than Spencer’s. While there was much praise for the style and content of James’ text, there was also criticism. Wundt, for one, dismissed it as literature, not science. James’ student, G. Stanley Hall, called it “impressionistic,” and an anonymous reviewer for the journal Science (1890, p. 207) wrote:
"It is not, and makes no pretence of being, a systematic work. The topics most liberally treated are such as the perception of space, perception of time, perception of “things,” perception of reality, the stream of thought, association, attention, imagination, self-consciousness, the emotions, the will, necessary truths; though the more concrete problems of the functions of the brain, habit, discrimination and comparison, memory, instinct, hypnotism, are by no means slighted."
In the long run, though, James’ texts have endured the test of time. His prose remains readable and lively, and most of the topics he covered are still part and parcel of psychology today. In his own time, The Principles of Psychology elevated James to the lofty status among psychologists that he still enjoys today. The completion of the two texts, however, had a perverse effect on the remainder of James’ professional life and interests. After their publication he became more and more interested in philosophy. He, along with his Harvard friend and colleague, James Sanders Peirce, turned their efforts toward developing pragmatism, a new approach to philosophy. James, it seems, was content to leave further progress in psychology to others.
FYI: the “James” and the “Jimmy”-Readers often refer to books by the author’s name. So it was with The Principles of Psychology and Psychology: Briefer Course. James’ first textbook ran well over 1000 pages while the revised text had some 400 pages. Thus, students called the earlier, longer one the “James” and the later, shorter one the “Jimmy.”
Marginal definition: pragmatism-the approach to philosophy developed by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and, later, John Dewey that argued that truth is always a practical compromise between empiricism and idealism.
FYI: James’ Neologisms-You may not realize it, but you likely have used a word or a phrase first coined by James and used in his text. He was the first to use the following words and phrases
- hegelism,
- time-line,
- pluralism
- the bitch-goddess success,
- stream of consciousness...
- moral equivalent of war,
- healthy-minded,
- and live-option.” (Richardson, 2007, p. 306).
Jamesian Psychology
A comprehensive system of “Jamesian psychology” never really existed. Furthermore, James never had any formal training in psychology. Instead, he cobbled together a psychology derived from his training and interests in biology, psychophysics, experimental psychology, archeology, religion, mysticism, and even parapsychology. Those interests along with his extensive travels and his ability to read and speak German and French made him the ideal ambassador to bring psychology to America.
His wide view of what the discipline of psychology should ultimately include contrasted severely with the narrower and more strictly experimental views of most American psychologists who had received their training in Europe. Indeed, by the end of James’ life the historical phase where American students sought training in psychology abroad had all but ended. American students were studying at home, in laboratories and departments that were busily at work creating a distinctly American brand of psychology, functionalism. James, strictly speaking, was a functionalist but he did not participate heavily in the later development of that school of thought. By the time the functionalist school was in full bloom James had already turned his attention fully toward philosophy. Yet it will pay dividends to look at James’ psychology a little more deeply before looking at the development of the discipline under his successors.
James came to his functionalism early when he was reading Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Darwin had equated animal structures with biological functions, and consequently, with their survival. Similarly, James thought that the same type of functional relationship might hold between mental events and the survival of organisms. Such an approach, however, required introspection as a method. James embraced introspection as necessary for a complete psychology. Much like Wundt, James saw the necessity and potential for the new experimental methods in psychology but believed that they could not provide the answers to all of the questions he was interested in. James also believed that consciousness, too, was functional and adaptive. Furthermore, it could not be studied in isolation. Instead, it had to be studied as part of an ever-expanding “stream of consciousness,” one that changed constantly, and that could be pushed in new directions through the action of the self via the will.
Thus, James helped give rise to a new kind of psychology, one based on phenomenology. That underlying philosophy served as the midwife for many new areas of psychology including, “Freud’s psychodynamic theories...personality research; social, clinical, and child psychology; abnormal psychology; and educational and school psychology” (Pajares, 2003, p. 48). After writing The Principles of Psychology, James reviewed the newly emerging French psychology that was studying subconscious thought and psychopathology. He corresponded with Pierre Janet, one of Freud’s teachers. James wrote the first review of Freud’s work to appear in the United States and met with Freud and Jung during their visit to America in 1908.
James practiced what he preached, the establishment of a complete psychology, one that included experimental methods as well as yet-to-be developed methods for studying topics unapproachable by experimentation. Psychology’s path in America after James did not follow his model. Instead, American psychologists, by and large, stuck to experimental methods alone and began to use those methods on animals as well as humans. By the third decade of the 20th century American psychology bore little resemblance to James’ model.
By 1891 James was spending up to four hours a day in the Harvard psychology laboratory supervising as many as 80 students. He always complained about having to spend that much time there, and often characterized lab work as boring, although much of the material in his texts had come from his own, original work in that laboratory. That year, Eliot allowed James to recruit a replacement for himself in the Harvard psychological laboratory. James successfully recruited a younger, German psychologist, Hugo Münsterberg, whom he had first met in Paris at the first International Conference of Physiological Psychology three years earlier. Münsterberg accepted a three-year probationary appointment. Although he returned to Germany after his initial stay at Harvard, he returned a few years lager and remained there until his premature death in 1916.
Marginal definition: functionalism-an early school of thought in American psychology that sought to discover ways to improve the match between organisms, their minds, and their environments.
Marginal definition: phenomenology-the philosophical system that examines conscious experience itself directly, intentionally, and from one’s own point of view.