Principles of Psychology

"James coined the term ‘stream of consciousness.’ He had fascinating things to say about how our experience works in that stream-like manner, and how different parts of our experience come to the foreground, and then drift into the background as we move from thought to thought. He doesn’t actually use the term ‘stream of consciousness’ that much—he uses ‘stream of thought’ more—but he is credited with coining the term. He is an extraordinary psychologist and philosopher. He is probably the most influential psychologist of all time, if you look at the different streams of thoughts he influenced, unless we count Freud as a psychologist. As an empirical psychologist, thinking about cognitive mechanism, he is incomparable. He is not read as much as he should be. Every psychology student should read James. “William James is probably the most influential psychologist of all time” He is so big hearted, as a scientist. He writes about the mechanisms of the stream of consciousness in a beautiful, engaging, literary, rich way, but he doesn’t dismiss other aspects of experience. His famous work is on varieties of religious experience. Many people these days would just dismiss that as not something we should be studying as psychologists. James takes religious experiences seriously, as he takes a whole range of other experiences seriously. He also had very important things to say about the methodology of how we study the mind. It is an extraordinary work and compulsory reading for psychology students, even though this book is well over a hundred years old."

"He does, although he doesn’t mention the word ‘consciousness’ that much. He did coin the term ‘stream of consciousness’, though he talks much more about the ‘stream of thought.’ The whole book is two volumes – 1,400 pages – and the chapter on consciousness of self is over one hundred pages, and is absolutely amazingly wonderful. My first degree was heavily behaviourist with rats running in mazes and that kind of thing. Cognitive psychology was just beginning towards the end of my degree, and so I went into that and lots of information processing stuff. It was only ages later when I got interested in consciousness that I read my copy of James’s book. I must tell you that my copy is a first edition, previously owned by the British prime minister Arthur Balfour and has his annotations in pencil all over it. I bought it for £12.50 at the Society for Psychical Research in 1981. Out of all the books I own, this is my absolute treasure. “Out of all the books I own, this is my absolute treasure” When I finally came to read it, I read the entire thing from cover to cover, which took me a while. It is marvellous – fantastic. His thinking is so subtle. What I love about James is when we knows something for sure – some experiment or something – then he will tell you so; but when he doesn’t, he goes into these wonderful explorations never really coming to a conclusion. I find his thoughts on the self very hard to understand, but I love the idea that he says there are ‘thoughts’ and then there are big ‘Thoughts’ which is me and my being: the self who has these thoughts. The ‘Thought’ owns this thought, as it were, like a herdsman would have a herd of cows. But then your attention shifts and the first herdsman disappears. Soon another Thought arrives and takes over the same herd of cows, wrongly assuming it’s the same herdsman – the same ‘me’ – as before. We simply don’t notice these shifts and so the illusion of being a continuous self is made. He’s trying to draw out how the continuous self could be an illusion. And he’s struggling with this and giving these analogies, trying to understand it. I love that he doesn’t come down with a settled theory. He compares the automaton theory with the soul theory and while he does come down on one side in the end, he does it very cautiously and I just think it’s a wonderful show of someone brilliant putting what facts he can in, but then using them to struggle with the difficulty of the nature of mind, self, and consciousness. And sometimes when I’m smoking my evening joint and thinking about the nature of the universe, I think of him and Descartes and other wonderful thinkers who have struggled, and I think to myself ‘yes, it is this difficult. Keep going!’ I’m a very slow reader and so I can’t struggle with bad writing. I find it really hard to read fiction. I get so bored so quickly. There’s got to be something meaty and interesting and aggravating that will make me keep reading, because I find it such an arduous thing to do. With something like William James’s 1,400 pages, they kept me going! He lures you on from one thought to another and helps you to follow these complex ideas. It’s great. I would tell them to have a look at it and particularly that chapter on consciousness of the self. What I would do with that book now, confronted with it, is read the beginning and end of each chapter – he does summarise quite well and you will get the gist of it and get a feel for the period and what he knew. He does the most wonderful thing at the beginning of the book. In a sort of foreword, he starts out by telling you what psychology assumes and you can tell from the way he writes that he’s not entirely happy about this but he’s got to start somewhere. He writes: Psychology, the science of finite individual minds, assumes as its data (1) thoughts and feelings , and (2) a physical world in time and space with which they coexist and which (3) they know . He’s putting down there the whole dualist problem right at the beginning. He’s saying that psychology just assumes this duality between (a) thoughts and feelings and (b) the physical world. He puts these things so clearly and that makes me want to read more. So, I think I would say to a modern reader, read his two-page introduction and read the beginning and end of bits. It’s absolutely full of gems. But in the modern world, who is going to read 1,400 pages? Indeed, he says that in the little foreword. He says: The work has grown to a length which no one can regret more than the writer himself. The man must indeed be sanguine who, in this crowded age, can hope to have many readers for fourteen hundred continuous pages from his pen. If only he were here now. I’d love to show him the modern world and how busy we are…"

"William James wrote a wonderful summary of what was known and what questions were being asked at the dawn of psychology as a science in the 19th century. James is widely mis-cited and misunderstood as someone who advocated for a classical, common sense view of emotion. The irony is that he advocated for just the opposite. In the 19th century, psychology as a science was born when people started to use the methods of neurology and physiology to search for the physical basis of mental categories that came from mental philosophy. William James is sometimes considered the father of American psychology, primarily because he wrote extremely well, and he captured ideas that were in the zeitgeist at the time. He was just a really thoughtful, interesting thinker. James wrote that emotions occur when people perceive and make sense of the physical changes in their bodies. He wrote that each emotion has its own physical change. When James referred to “an emotion,” he was talking about an instance of emotion – one instance of fear has a different physical basis than another instance of fear. He was referring to Darwin’s notion of variation within a category. But for over a century, when people have read James, they misunderstood him, and assumed by “an emotion” James meant a category of emotion. So he has been cited over and over again as saying something that is exactly the opposite of what he actually did say. I discuss this in my book. “No actual family has 3.13 people in it last time I checked” Basically, James was saying that an emotion category does not have a physical essence. That there is variation in different emotion categories, like “the fear of getting wet is not the same as the fear of a bear,” or “surely there is no affectation of anger in the entitative sense,” meaning in the essential sense. James said that we should find that our descriptions of an emotion like anger has not “absolute truth” – that “they only apply to the average man.” What he means by this is also what Darwin said – we have a stereotype for a category – a perfect instance of anger where a person scowls and heart rate goes up and an aggressive action is taken, and so on, but this stereotype is an abstraction. The average US middle class family has 3.13 people in it, but no actual family has 3.13 people in it last time I checked. From James: “[E]very one of us, almost, has some personal idiosyncrasy of expression, laughing or sobbing differently from his neighbor, or reddening or growing pale where others do not.” Here James capturing beautifully the importance of variation. He also foreshadows many other insights that science has now shown to be true, like: there’s no special brain region or center for emotion. Emotions are created based on the all-purpose mechanisms that already exist in our brain. He also really takes on essentialism as a problem in psychology, in a way that’s really, really interesting. Here’s a quote that I particularly like: The cardinal passions of our life, anger, love, fear, hate, hope, and the most comprehensive divisions of our intellectual activity, to remember, expect, think, know, dream, with the broadest genera of aesthetic feeling, joy, sorrow, pleasure, pain, are the only facts of a subjective order which this vocabulary deigns to note by special words. What he means by that is: we assign words to certain categories of experience, and then we essentialise those categories, and that leads us to ignore the variation within the category. It leads us to believe that there’s something indelible and biologically unchanging about those categories, that there is some boundary in nature that the word reflects, and it’s absolutely not true. The fact that William James was saying this a 100-plus years ago is really remarkable. Yes. I would say, though, that when I was a graduate student I used to feel like William James was a bit of a projective test. Meaning: people read into James what they want. This is what the historian Kurt Danziger, in his book Naming the Mind , calls ‘presentism,’ the idea that you look at the past through the lens of the present, and see what you’re looking for. I stumbled onto James’s passages about emotion buried in The Principles of Psychology , and it led me to do a systematic study of exactly what James did and didn’t say about emotion. About the nature of psychological categories, mental categories, and so on. James himself was pretty consistent, it’s just that people have often misinterpreted him in interesting ways that reflect their own assumptions."