The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  Functionalism is a handy label, and accurate enough, except that it applies only to some parts of James’s psychology. He had no actual system and deliberately avoided presenting his ideas as a coherent whole because he felt that it was far too early in the development of psychology for an all-embracing grand theory. As Ralph Barton Perry said, James was an explorer, not a mapmaker. In Principles he presented material and theories about every psychological phenomenon from the simplest sensations to reasoning without trying to force everything into a unified framework.

  Yet he did have a strong viewpoint. The physiological psychologists of Germany said that mental states were nothing but physiological states of the brain and nervous system; James termed this “an unwarrantable impertinence in the present state of psychology.”23 He viewed mental life as real, and the physiological view that mind was nothing but physical reactions to outside stimuli as unworthy of belief or even debate:

  All people unhesitatingly believe that they feel themselves thinking, and that they distinguish the mental state as an inward activity or passion, from all the objects with which it may cognitively deal. I regard this belief as the most fundamental of all the postulates of Psychology, and shall discard all curious inquiries about its certainty as too metaphysical for the scope of this book.24

  The proper subject of psychology was, therefore, the introspective analysis of the “states of mind” that we are conscious of in daily life and of the functions they perform for the organism.

  (We will pass by what James had to say about physiological psychology in Principles, since there is little in those chapters that is distinctively Jamesian except for the lucid and often poetic prose.)

  The nature of mind: Although James rejected the materialism of physiological psychology, he could not accept the alternative of classic dualism, the theory that mind is a separate entity or substance parallel to and independent of the body. Not only was this wholly unprovable, but Fechner and Donders, among others, had already shown that certain physiological responses to stimuli caused certain states of mind.25

  James examined every major solution to the mind-body problem, found fault with each, and finally settled for a dualism of perspective. There are external objects, and our knowledge of those objects; there is a material world, and a set of mind states relating to them.26 The latter are not mere brain states caused by external things; they are mental states that can interact with one another and, within the realm of mind, obey their own causal laws.

  Whatever the ultimate nature of mental states, James said, psychologists should lay aside the whole mind-body question. Psychology was in no way ready or able to spell out the connections between physiological states and mental states, and its proper concern, for the present, was the description and explanation of such processes as reasoning, attention, will, imagination, memory, and feelings. From James’s time on, this would be the dominant view within many branches of American psychology—the study of personality and individual differences, educational psychology, abnormal psychology, child development studies, social psychology; everything, indeed, except experimental psychology, much of which would be behaviorist and anti-“mentalist” for many decades.

  The stream of thought: Using introspective analysis as the major approach to investigating the conscious mind, James asserted that the reality most immediately perceived by that method is the unbroken flow of complex conscious thought:

  Most books start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from those below it. But this is abandoning the empirical method of investigation. No one ever had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations. The only thing which psychology has a right to postulate at the outset is the fact of thinking itself. The first fact for us, then, as psychologists is that thinking of some sort goes on. I use the word thinking for every form of consciousness indiscriminately. If we could say in English “it thinks,” as we say “it rains” or “it blows,” we should be stating the fact most simply and with the minimum of assumption. As we cannot, we must simply say that thought goes on. 27

  James considered consciousness not a thing but a process or function. Just as breathing is what the lungs do, conducting conscious mental life is what the brain does. Why does it? “For the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.”28 Consciousness allows the organism to consider past, present, and future states of affairs, and, with the predictive power thus achieved, to plan ahead and adapt its behavior to the circumstances.29 Consciousness is “a fighter for ends, of which many, but for its presence, would not be ends at all.”30 The chief one is survival; that is its function.

  On further introspection, we notice that consciousness has certain characteristics. Of the five James named, the most interesting—because it contradicted traditional Aristotelian conceptions of thinking—is that each person’s consciousness is a continuum, not a series of linked experiences or thoughts:

  Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped in bits. Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A “river” or a “stream” is the metaphor by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. 31

  While the objects of our thoughts or perceptions may seem distinct and separate, our consciousness of them is itself a continuous flow; they are like things floating in a stream.

  The concept of the stream of thought (or, as it is better known, the stream of consciousness) struck a responsive chord among psychologists and became useful and important in both research and clinical work. It also was immediately taken up by a number of authors who sought to write in a stream-of-consciousness style, among them Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. (Stein actually studied under James at Harvard.)

  The self: Even breaks in consciousness, such as those occurring in sleep, do not interrupt the continuity of the stream; when we awaken, we have no difficulty making the connection with our own stream of consciousness, with who we were and are. But that is because of another major characteristic of consciousness: its personal nature. Thoughts are not merely thoughts; they are my thoughts or your thoughts. There is a personal self that separates one’s consciousness from that of others and that knows, from moment to moment and day to day, that I am the same I who I was a moment ago, a day, decade, or lifetime ago.32

  From the beginnings of psychology, thinkers had struggled with the problem of who or what knows that I am I and that my experiences have all happened to the same Me. What substance or entity, what watcher or monitor, accounts for the sense of selfhood and of continuous identity? James called this “the most puzzling puzzle with which psychology has to deal.”33

  The classic answer was the soul or transcendental self. But a century earlier both Hume and Kant had shown that we can have no empirical knowledge of such a self.34 Philosophers might still speculate about it, but psychologists could not observe or study it. Accordingly, the experimental psychologists of the nineteenth century did not even discuss the self, and the British associationists sloughed it off as no more than the connected chain of passing thoughts.

  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 no
t 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:

  The states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist; but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous.38

  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:

  We desire to feel, to have, to do, all sorts of things which at the moment are not felt, had, or done. If with the desire there goes a sense that attainment is not possible, we simply wish; but if we believe that the end is in our power, we will that the desired feeling, having, or doing shall be real; and real it presently becomes, either immediately upon the willing or after certain preliminaries have been fulfilled.40

  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.”41 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:

  The brain is an instrument of possibilities, but of no certainties. But the consciousness, with its own ends present to it, and knowing also well which possibilities lead thereto and which away, will, if endowed with causal efficacy, reinforce the favorable possibilities and repress the unfavorable or indifferent ones…If [consciousness] is useful, it must be so through its causal efficaciousness, and the automaton-theory must succumb to the theory of commonsense.47

  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:

  No class of [persons] have better sentiments or feel more constantly the difference between the higher and the lower path in life than the hopeless failures, the sentimentalists, the drunkards, the schemers, the “dead-beats,” whose life is one long contradiction between knowledge and action, and who, with full command of theory, never get to holding their limp characters erect.48

  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 behavio
r. 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:

  We pitch or catch, we shoot or chop the better the less tactile and muscular (the less resident), and the more exclusively optical (the more remote), our consciousness is. Keep your eye on the place aimed at, and your hand will fetch it; think of your hand, and you will very likely miss your aim.50