Father of Modern

(American) Psychology1

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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SwedenburgSwedenburg 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 WarApril 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 GibbensIt 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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TheoryFunctionalism 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 PsychologyIn 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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 Grave of William James in the James family plot at Albany Rural Cemetery in Menands, N.Y.

William James died of heart disease at his family's summer home in New Hampshire in 1910.

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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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