Chapter 6: William James

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Chapter 6 William James

• A History of Psychology
• (3rd Edition)
• John G. Benjafield

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William James (18421910)

• Family wealth liberal, democratic values
• Childhood family visited Europe often
• 1861-1869 studied at Harvard
• First atudied chemistry later medicine
• 1872 taught physiology at Harvard

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The Principles of Psychology

• 1878 began writing took 12 years to complete
• Each of its two volumes is almost 700 pages long
• Principles is a central work in the history of
  psychology

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Habit

• People are largely creatures of habit
• Formation of habits depends on plasticity
• Plasticity the ability of an organism to alter
  its behaviour as circumstances change
• Habit the great flywheel of society

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Habit Practical Suggestions

• Important to make automatic and habitual, as
  early as possibly, as many useful actions as we
  can
• When first acquiring a habit, be consistent
• Form useful habits

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James Approach

• Consider every issue in an open-minded fashion
• Introspection looking into our own minds and
  reporting what we there discover
• Not perfect, readily prone to error
• Indispensable source of data

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Phenomenology

• James as a precursor to phenomenology?
• Method that follows from Brentano and Husserl
• James did not impose a prior set of categories on
  experience
• Psychologists fallacy to confuse ones
  standpoint with that of the mental fact about
  which one is make a report
• Psychology a natural science
• Not an experimentalist but acknowledged
  experimental and comparative methods

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Use of Metaphor

• Characteristic feature of James method
• Not just a literary device
• Convey overall complexity without necessarily
  specifying precision
• Ex. The stream of thought

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The Stream of Thought

• ? only intellectual events
• Thought all of our experiences
• Later renamed the stream of consciousness
• Vs. train of thought or chain of thought

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The Stream of Consciousness

• Characteristics
• Every thought tends to be part of a personal
  consciousness
• With each personal consciousness thought is
  always changing
• Within each personal consciousness thought is
  sensibly continuous
• Consciousness always appears to deal with
  objects independent of itself
• It is interested in some parts of these objects
  to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or
  rejects all the while

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Consciousness is like a birds life

• alternation of flights and perchings
• Places where the stream flows at different rates
• Substantive parts places were the stream flows
  slowly
• Transitive parts places where the stream flows
  quickly
• Language better suited to describing substantive
  parts

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Fringe of Consciousness

• Stream of consciousness does not have a
  well-defined edge
• Difficulty to say where it ends and begins
• James discussed events beyond the fringe of
  consciousness
• Ex. Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon

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The Consciousness of Self

• Self divided into two parts
• 1. I knows things, including oneself
• Pure ego
• 2. Me what I know about myself
• Empirical self

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The Pure Ego

• Can we say anything about a self that exists over
  and above our experiences?
• James conclusion
• Nothing of the pure ego we can observe
• If it exists, pure ego cannot observe itself

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The Empirical Self

• Divided into three parts
• The Material Self
• All those things you would call yours
• The Social Self
• Tied to those occasions when other people
  recognize us
• The Spiritual Self
• A persons inner or subjective being (? Soul)

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Attention

• Descriptions of attention still cited by
  theorists 100 years after the publication of
  Principles
• Appreciated the complexity of attention
• Inattention the process by which we do not pay
  attention to what we are doing
• Very common
• Automatic Writing

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Memory

• Primary memory of the present moment
• Immediate memory
• Tends to be quickly forgotten without rehearsal
• Permits us to recall recent experiences
  immediately and accurately
• Secondary memory of the past

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The Emotions

• James-Lange Theory of Emotions
• Called Lange because similar viewpoint advanced
  independently by C.G. Lange
• The theory appears to have been systematically
  misinterpreted for decades
• Critic Walter B. Cannon

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Will

• 1870 James resolved bout of depression partly by
  choosing to believe in free will
• We cannot freely choose to do anything whatsoever
• But our will can make a difference when we are in
  conflict situation
• Preoccupaton with will power
• Supported self-help movements

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Other Topics in Principles

• Parapsychology
• Religious experience

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Distinctions between People

• Tough-mindedness tends to place great store in
  facts and is materialistic, pessimistic, and
  skeptical
• Tender-mindedness tends to believe in principles
  and is idealistic, optimistic, and religious

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James on Freud

• James met Freud in America in 1909
• I have always wished that I might be as
  fearless as he was in the face of approaching
  death
• The future of psychology belongs to your work