Professional Documents
Culture Documents
(American) Psychology
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William James of Albany
(1771 - 1832)
Henry’s Grandfather - Irish-born.
Immigrated to the United States in 1789 (18 years old).
Started out as a clerk in a dry goods business.
Amassed the third largest fortune in the USA.
Investments in business, real estate, and the Erie Canal.
Had twelve children by three wives.
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William James of Albany
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Henry James Sr.
(1811 -1882 )
Henry Sr. was born in Albany to William's third wife.
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Rebellion
In 1828, Henry enrolled in Union College in Schenectady.
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William Sr.’s Revenge
William Sr. Died of Typhus in Albany in 1832 and left his
fortune ($3 million) to his son Robert.
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1835 to 1837 - Princeton Theological Seminary
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1838
Scottish sect that opposed the Presbyterian Church.
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In 1840, he married Mary Robertson Walsh.
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1842
1842 - Henry James attended a lecture of
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s.
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Swedenburg
Swedenburg follower told him “he was having what
Swedenborg called a “vastation” or complete empyting out
of all the contents of the ego self to prepare to receive true
spiritual insight.
Read Swedenburg! His life was transformed,
as he delved into spirituality. He read
Swedenborg constantly, even traveling
with a trunk of his books!
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William James’ Education
All five of the James children were educated at
home by tutors and travelled with the family.
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Henry’s Dream
Wanted his children to be nurtured to become
Artists through activities in order to stimulate
love, sensuality and personal ambition. What
Henry meant by artists was a free spirit,
inspired! They must find their “ideal selfhood”
and act “not in obedience to either physical or
social constraint, but in obedience to their own
ideas of goodness, truth, and beauty.”
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While he wanted Free Spirits –
he was very controlling!
Henry, feared the teenage years. Children were thought by
American culture to be rebellious and bad-mannered.
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William is very intelligent and very competitive with his
brother Henry.
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Civil War
April 1861
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Chemistry
1861- Enters Lawrence Scientific School,
Harvard University to study chemistry and
comparative anatomy.
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1864 - William enters Harvard Medical School.
- interrupted his medical studies twice
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1866 - resumes medical school . . . but had an assorted
ailments—back pain, weak vision, digestive disorders, and
thoughts of suicide—some or most of which were related to
his indecision about his future.
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1869 - James receives his MD from Harvard.
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In April of 1870, he recorded in his journal that he had come
to believe that free will was no illusion and that he could use
his will to alter his mental state:
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1872 - James was now 30, three years out of medical school, and
with no career prospects or plans except for a vague desire to
devote himself to philosophy.
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There were no professors of psychology in American
universities (except phrenology) before James began teaching
it in 1875 (3 years before Wundt’s lab).
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Alice Howe Gibbens, married William
James in 1878
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1890 – Principles of Psychology (2 volumes), chapters on habit,
attention, perception, association, memory, reasoning, instinct,
emotion, imagination, psychological methods, and even
hypnotism.
Jimmy
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Theory
Functionalism James opposed the structuralism focus on
introspection and breaking down mental events to the
smallest elements. Instead, James focused on the
wholeness of an event, taking into the impact of the
environment on behavior.
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The functionalists tended to use the term 'function' rather loosely.
It can refer to the study of how a mental process operates. This is
a major departure from the study of the structure of a mental
process, the difference between stopping a train to tear it apart to
study its parts (structuralism), and looking at how the systems
interact while it is running (functionalism).
The term 'function' can also refer to how the mental process
functions in the evolution of the species, what adaptive property
it provides that would cause it to be selected through evolution.
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Stream of consciousness
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Wrote considerably on the concept of pragmatism.
According to pragmatism, the truth of an idea can
never be proven. James proposed we instead focus on
what he called the "cash value," or usefulness, of an
idea.
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James-Lange Theory of Emotion The James-Lange theory of
emotion proposes that an event triggers a physiological reaction,
which we then interpret. According to this theory, emotions are
caused by our interpretations of these physiological reactions. Both
James and the Danish physiologist Carl Lange independently
proposed the theory.
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Influence on Psychology
In addition to his own enormous influence, many of
James' students went on to have prosperous and
influential career in psychology. Some of James'
students included Mary Whiton Calkins, Edward
Thorndike, G. Stanley Hall, and John Dewey.
In 1894 he was the first American to call favorable
attention to the recent work of relatively obscure
Viennese physician, Sigmund Freud.
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William was subject to recurring,
debilitating depressions
Periods of fatigue, insomnia and self-doubt.
Neurosis
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James and Spiritualism
• James was a founding member of the American Society
for Psychical Research
• Member of its Committee on Mediumistic Phenomena
He took a scientific approach to the study of spiritualism.
Debunked many mediums.
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Leonora Piper
William James’ White Crow
"If you wish to upset the
law that all crows are black
. . . it is enough if you
prove that one crow is
white. My white crow is
Mrs. Piper.”
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William James died of
heart disease at his
family's summer home
in New Hampshire in
1910.
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William James Quotations
Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the
outer aspects of their lives.
The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless
abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of
others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave
vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled
as long as life endures.
Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each
man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man
as he really is.
There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to
contradict other philosophers.
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Discussion
Other than the fact that William James was an
American, what other aspects of
his life and his vision for psychology are
characteristically American?
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