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Chapter 6: William James

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Title: Chapter 6: William James


1
Chapter 6 William James
  • A History of Psychology
  • (3rd Edition)
  • John G. Benjafield

2
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

3
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

4
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

5
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

6
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

7
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

8
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

9
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

10
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

11
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

12
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

13
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

14
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

15
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)

16
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

17
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

18
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

19
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

20
Other Topics in Principles
  • Parapsychology
  • Religious experience

21
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

22
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
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