The Story of Psychology (30 page)

James, however, felt that “the belief in a distinct principle of self-hood” was an integral part of the “common sense of mankind,”
³⁵
and found a way to restore to psychology a meaningful—and researchable— concept of self. We are all conscious of our individual identity, we think
of certain things as
me
and
mine;
these
feelings
and the
acts
associated with them can be investigated and thus are the “empirical self.”

The empirical self has several components: the material self (our body, clothing, possessions, family, home); the social self or selves (who we are and how we behave in relation to the different people in our lives—an anticipation of social psychology, which would not emerge as a specialty for decades); and the spiritual self, a person’s inner or subjective being, his entire collection of psychic faculties or dispositions. All these can be explored by introspection and observation; the empirical self is, after all, researchable.

But this still leaves unsolved that most puzzling puzzle of all. What accounts for the sense of me-ness, selfhood, and identity, the sure knowledge that I am who I was a while ago? James identified such thoughts as belonging to the “pure Ego,” a wholly subjective phenomenon, and suggested that its perception of continuing personal identity arises from the continuity of the stream of consciousness: “Resemblance among the parts of a continuum of feelings (especially bodily feelings)… constitutes the real and verifiable ‘personal identity’ which we feel.”
³⁶

This being so, James said, psychology need not postulate a watcher or soul that observes the knowing mind and maintains a sense of identity: “[The soul] is at all events needless for expressing the actual subjective phenomena of consciousness as they appear.”
³⁷
He stated this powerful conclusion even more forcefully in Jimmy:

Will:
Some commentators say that James’s most valuable contribution to psychology was his theory of the will, the conscious process that directs voluntary movements.
³⁹

Much of James’s discussion of the will in
Principles
was neurophysiological, dealing with how the will generates the nerve impulses that produce the desired muscular movements. But the far more interesting question he took up was how we come to will any act in the first place. The key factor, in his view, was a supply of information and experience about our ability to achieve a desired end:

How do we sense that the end is in our power? Through experience; through the knowledge of what different actions of ours would achieve: “A supply of ideas of the various movements that are possible, left in the memory by experiences of their involuntary performance, is thus the first prerequisite of the voluntary life.”
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Infants trying to grasp a toy make numerous random movements of their arms and hands, and sooner or later connect with the toy; they eventually become capable of willing the proper movement. In analogous fashion, adults accumulate a vast repertoire of ideas of different actions and their probable consequences; we walk, talk, eat, and perform myriad other activities by willing the appropriate actions and achieving the desired ends.

Much of the time we will our routine actions unhesitatingly, because we feel no conflict about what we want to do. But at other times conflicting notions exist in our mind: we want to do A but we also want to do B, its contrary. In such cases, what determines which action we will? James’s answer: we weigh the possibilities against each other, decide to ignore all but one, and thereby let that one become the reality. When we have made the choice, the will takes over; or perhaps one could say, Choosing which idea to ignore and which to attend to
is
the act of willing.
⁴²

James gave one of his inimitably personal examples. He is lying abed of a chilly morning, he says, knowing how late he will be if he does not get up and what duties will remain undone, but hating the way getting up will feel and preferring the way staying in bed feels. At last he deliberately inhibits all thoughts except that of what he must do that day— and lo and behold, the thought, made the center of his attention, produces the appropriate movements and he is up and out of bed.
⁴³
“The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most ‘voluntary,’ is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind… Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will.”
⁴⁴

Sometimes making the choice is instant and simple, sometimes protracted and the result of deliberation, reasoning, and decision making. Whatever the process, in every case the mind is a cause of behavior, an
intervenor in cause-and-effect relationships, and not an automaton responding passively to outside influences. Voluntary action implies
freedom
of the will.

James himself, as we know, had come to believe in free will during his emotional crisis; that belief had enabled him to climb out of his Slough of Despond. But he still had to reconcile that belief with the basic tenet of scientific psychology: All behavior is, or ultimately will be, explicable, and every act has its causes. If every act is the result of determinable causes, how can there be any freedom for us to choose one of several possible, not wholly determined, futures? Yet we all experience what feels like freedom of will every time we make a decision to do, or not to do, anything, however trifling or however weighty.

James was utterly candid: “My own belief is that the question of free-will is insoluble on strictly psychologic grounds.” The psychologist wants to build a science, and a science is a system of fixed relations, but free will is not a fixed and calculable relationship; it is beyond science and so is best left to metaphysics. Psychology will be psychology, whether free will is real or not.
⁴⁵

But he insisted that a belief in free will is pragmatically sensible and necessary. He developed his philosophy of pragmatism after turning away from psychology, but its seeds exist in
Principles.
James’s pragmatism does not say, as crude oversimplifications of it aver, that “truth is what works”; it does say that if we compare the implications of opposed solutions to a problem, we can choose which one to believe in and act on.
⁴⁶
To believe in total determinism would make us passive and impotent; to believe in free will allows us to consider alternatives, to plan, and to act on our plans. It is thus practical and realistic:

As solid and enduring as these observations are, some parts of James’s discussion of will sound curiously old-fashioned today. In his discussions of “unhealthiness of will,” the “exaggerated impulsion” of the alcoholic or the drug user, or the “obstructed will” of the immobilized person, one
hears genuine compassion for people in a diseased state—and overtones of moralistic disapproval:

James’s psychology of will was an important feature of American psychology for some years, but during the long reign of behaviorism—from about 1920 to the 1960s—the topic all but disappeared from American psychology; there was no place in that deterministic system for any behavior initiated by the organism itself. Nor has will come back into fashion since then, at least not under that name; the word does not even appear in the index of many a contemporary psychology textbook.

Yet James’s psychology of will is, in fact, part of the mainstream of modern psychology under other names: “purposive behavior,” “intentionality,” “decision making,” “self-control,” “choices,” “self-efficacy,” and so on. Modern psychologists, especially clinicians, believe that behavior is, or eventually will be, wholly explicable, yet that human beings can to some degree direct their own behavior. If psychologists have not yet been able to answer how both these notions can be true at the same time, they often settle for William James’s own conclusion: the belief that we cannot affect our own behavior produces disastrous results; the belief that we can, produces beneficial results.

The unconscious:
James’s psychology was concerned almost entirely with conscious mental life; in some parts of
Principles
one gets the impression that there are no unconscious mental states and that whatever takes place in the mind is, by definition, conscious. But in a number of places James took a different view of the matter.

In discussing voluntary acts, he carefully distinguished between those which we perform by consciously commanding muscular movements and those others—the great bulk of voluntary acts—which, long performed and practiced, immediately and automatically follow the mental choice as if of themselves. We walk, climb stairs, put on or take off our clothing, without thinking of the movements that are necessary: “It is a general principle in Psychology that consciousness deserts all processes
where it can no longer be of use.”
⁴⁹
In many kinds of familiar activity, we actually do better when not thinking about the movements required:

James thus anticipated modern learning research, which has shown that with practice, complex voluntary movements such as those of piano playing, driving, or playing tennis become “overlearned” and are largely carried out unconsciously as soon as the conscious mind issues a general order.

He also recognized that when we do not attend to experiences, we may remain mostly unconscious of them even though they have their normal effect on our sense organs: “Our insensibility to habitual noises, etc., whilst awake, proves that we can neglect to attend to that which we nevertheless feel.”
⁵¹

James was well aware of the role of the unconscious in particular phenomena of abnormal psychology, citing, among other examples, cases of hysterical blindness reported by the French psychologist Alfred Binet: “M. Binet has found the hand of his patients unconsciously writing down words which their eyes were vainly endeavoring to ‘see.’ ”
⁵²
But with his focus on conscious mental life, James could not conceive of knowledge as ever being entirely unconscious; he felt that somehow, somewhere, all knowledge was conscious. He followed another French contemporary, Pierre Janet, in holding that such seemingly unconscious knowledge was the result of a split personality; what the primary personality was unconscious of was “consciously” known to the split-off secondary personality.
⁵³

James explained certain aspects of the hypnotic state the same way, in particular post-hypnotic suggestion, in which the patient, given an instruction during the trance, carries it out after being awakened but remains completely unaware of having been told to do so.
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The split-personality hypothesis was awkward, limited, and unverified by empirical evidence, but in presenting it, James was at least recognizing, well before the unconscious was generally accepted as a reality, that certain mental states occur outside primary consciousness.

In the years after the publication of
Principles
, James expanded his
view of the unconscious, relying on it to account for dreams, automatic writing, “demoniacal possession,” and many of the mystical experiences reported in
The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Unlike Freud, who was beginning to publish his own views about the unconscious, James did not consider the unconscious a source of motivation or the mind’s way of banishing impermissible sexual wishes from awareness.
⁵⁵
Yet as early as 1896 James spoke of the possible usefulness of Freudian discoveries for the relief of hysterical symptoms, and after hearing Freud’s Clark University lectures in 1909 he said, “I hope that Freud and his pupils will push their ideas to their utmost limits… They can’t fail to throw light on human nature.”
⁵⁶

Emotion:
One minor theory advanced by James became more famous and led to far more research than any of the foregoing large-scale theories. This was his theory of emotion, which was as simple as it was revolutionary. The emotion we feel is not what causes such bodily symptoms as a racing heart or sweaty palms; rather, the nervous system, reacting to an external stimulus, produces those physical symptoms, and our perception of them is what we call an emotion. This statement is so intriguing and persuasive that it deserves to be quoted at length: