by Morton Hunt
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.54 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:
Our natural way of thinking…is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion. Commonsense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble.57
He based this on introspection; one had only to look searchingly within to perceive that one’s emotions develop their power from their physical manifestations:
Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we should not actually feel afraid or angry.58
Virtually the same theory was advanced at about the same time by a Danish physiologist, Carl Lange, whose work James acknowledged. Although he and Lange did not collaborate on the theory, it soon became known as the James-Lange theory, and is discussed, under that name, in today’s textbooks.
The theory has had a curious history. It immediately provoked much controversy and research, and eventually was shown to be faulty in a number of ways. Walter Cannon, a Harvard physiologist, demonstrated in 1927 that certain dissimilar emotions are accompanied by generally similar bodily reactions; the physical responses are not specific enough to account for the different emotions. Both anger and fear, for instance, are marked by a speeded-up heart rate and an elevated blood pressure. Moreover, said Cannon, visceral reaction times are slow but emotional reactions are often immediate; physical changes thus cannot always precede the emotion.59 Cannon concluded that an emotional stimulus activates the thalamus (more recent research has, instead, pinpointed the hypothalamus and limbic system); from the brain, messages go out both to the autonomic nervous system, generating visceral changes, and to the cerebral cortex, creating the subjective feelings of the emotion.
Yet the James-Lange theory is still highly regarded by psychologists. It was correct in postulating that emotions have physical causes, although more recent and more complex explanations are based on physiological research with animals and psychological research with humans; evidence from these studies indicates that the arousing stimulus activates autonomic nervous processes in the brain, sending signals both to the body and to the mind, while other evidence shows that the experience of emotion is often the joint result of physiological arousal and cognitive appraisal based on experience and the situation.60 Despite the James-Lange theory’s shortcomings, it has practical applications. To the degree that we control a physiological response to a stimulus, we govern the associated emotion. We count to ten to control rage, whistle to keep up courage, go running or play tennis to shake off depression. Many contemporary psychotherapists teach their patients to perform relaxation exercises to reduce anxiety or fear and to practice standing, walking, and talking in a confident manner to engender a feeling of confidence in themselves. In the 1980s the psychologist Paul Ekman and his colleagues at the University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco, showed that when volunteers consciously make facial expressions associated with certain emotions—surprise, disgust, sadness, anger, fear, happiness—they affect their heart rates and skin temperatures and induce in themselves a modicum of the appropriate emotion.61 The
Jamesian Paradoxes
Anyone who reads James’s psychological writings is bound to be frequently puzzled: James is always clear and persuasive, but often equally so on opposing sides of an issue. He is chronically self-contradictory, not out of muddleheadedness but because he is intellectually too expansive to be confined within a closed or consistent system of thought. Gordon Allport, a leading psychological researcher and theorist of several decades ago, summed up James’s chameleonlike qualities:
In the Principles alone, we find brilliant, baffling, unashamed contradictions. He is, for example, both a positivist and a phenomenologist. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, he points in the direction of behaviorism and positivism, although he seems more exuberantly natural on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, when he writes about the stream of consciousness, the varieties of religious experience, and the moral equivalent for war.62
Allport, however, found this inconsistency a virtue. He spoke of James’s “productive paradoxes”; seeing both sides of a question often laid open the kernel of a problem and left it ready for others to work on.63
But the result was that James’s influen
ce on psychology, though great, was fragmented; though pervasive, was never dominant. James avoided creating a system, founded no school, trained few graduate students, and had no band of followers. Remarkably, however, a number of his ideas became part of mainstream psychology, particularly in America. Wundt won out over James as far as laboratory methods and experimentation were concerned; James’s psychology, with its richness, realism, and pragmatism, won out over the Wundtian system.64 As Raymond Fancher has said:
James transformed psychology from a somewhat recondite and abstract science that some students avoided because of the difficulty of introspective methodology, into a discipline that spoke directly to personal interests and concerns. James’s characterization of psychology as a “nasty little subject” that excludes all one would want to know is nowhere more clearly belied than in his own textbooks on psychology.65
Outside the mainstream, James influenced psychology in two other respects, both of them practical. One: His suggested applications of psychological principles to teaching became the core of educational psychology. The other: In 1909, James, as an executive committee member of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, was largely responsible for getting the Rockefeller Foundation and similar groups to allocate millions of dollars to the mental hygiene movement, the development of mental hospitals, and the training of mental health professionals.
When the American Psychological Association celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary in 1977, the opening speaker, David Krech, spoke of William James as “our father who begat us.” Referring to the past three quarters of a century of work on questions James had raised, Krech said, “Even if I were to total up all advances in gains and achievements and multiply them by a factor of hope, the total would still not suffice as an adequate tribute to lay at James’s feet.”66
SEVEN
Explorer of the Depths:
Sigmund Freud
The Truth About Freud
More than any other figure in the annals of psychology, Sigmund Freud has been both extravagantly praised and savagely castigated for his theories, venerated and condemned as a person, and regarded as a great scientist, a cult leader, and a fraud. His admirers and critics agree that his impact on psychology, the psychotherapies, and the way human beings in Western society think about themselves has been larger than that of anyone else in the history of the science; for the rest, they seem to be talking about different people and different bodies of knowledge.
The sociologist and Freud scholar Philip Rieff said in 1959 that “the greatness of the man is beyond question, complementing the greatness of his mind,” and rated his writing “perhaps the most important body of thought committed to paper in the twentieth century.” But several years later a well-known scholar and humanities professor, Erich Heller, asserted in the Times Literary Supplement that Freud was one of the most overrated figures of our time, and Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar called psychoanalytic theory “the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the century.”
The political scientist Paul Roazen judged Freud to be “unquestionably one of the greatest psychologists of history” and “a great thinker,” and the theologian Paul Tillich considered him “the most profound of all the depth psychologists.” But an English scholar, E. M. Thornton, gathered up bits of evidence that, in her opinion, prove “that [Freud’s] central postulate, the ‘unconscious mind,’ does not exist, that his theories were baseless and aberrational,” that he formulated them while under the influence of cocaine, and that he was “a false and faithless prophet.”
Freud’s admirers, including the historian Peter Gay, author of a massive 1988 biography, see him as a brave and heroic fighter for truth. His detractors see him as a neurotic and ambitious egotist who sought notice by propounding fantastic theories. In two lengthy diatribes in The New York Review of Books in 1993 and 1994, and later in other writings, Frederick Crews, a professor of English literature, established himself as perhaps the most savage of the many Freud bashers, saying that as a therapy psychoanalysis is “indifferently successful” and “vastly inefficient”; that as an empirical approach to scientific knowledge it is “fatally contaminated” by assuming, in dialogue with patients, the very ideas it seeks to corroborate; that Freud himself was “indifferent to his patients’ suffering” and that they achieved only mediocre or negative therapeutic results; that he often sought to “nail” the patient “with hastily conceived interpretations which he then drove home unabatingly”; and so on and on.
Most historians of psychology credit Freud with a long string of influential discoveries, the most noteworthy being that of the dynamic unconscious. But Frank Sulloway, a historian of science, has learnedly argued that Freud’s concepts were largely “creative transformations” of ideas already extant in neurology and biology, and the scholar Henri Ellenberger has painstakingly made the case that Freud’s discovery of the dynamic unconscious merely crystallized and gave shape to diffuse ideas that had already been put forward by many of his predecessors and contemporaries.
Freud saw himself, and most of his biographers have seen him, as an outsider—an isolated Jew in anti-Semitic Vienna—courageously battling medical conservatives to bring humanity the benefit of his discoveries. His disparagers say that he exaggerated the anti-Semitism around him in order to present himself as an embattled hero and that in any case he got many of his ideas from his friend Wilhelm Fliess but passed them off as his own.
What is one to make of such contradictions?
But, then, what is one to make of a man who was himself a bundle of contradictions?1 Radical in his theories about human nature and a militant atheist, Freud was, except in his early years, a political conservative. He espoused liberated attitudes toward sexuality but was himself a model of decorum and sexual restraint. He claimed that he rid himself of his own neuroses through his famous self-analysis, but throughout his life suffered from assorted neurotic symptoms, among them migraine headaches, urinary and bowel problems, an almost morbid dislike of the telephone, a tendency to faint at times of intense interpersonal stress, and a pathological addiction to cigars. (He smoked twenty a day and could not stop even after he developed cancer of the jaw as a result.) He hated Vienna and was never part of its easygoing café society but could not bring himself to leave it for any more congenial place until 1938, when he moved to London after the Nazi takeover of Austria.
At times, he was unabashedly egotistical; he likened himself to Copernicus and Darwin, and told an admirer of one of his later works, “This is my worst book, the book of an old man. The genuine Freud was really a great man.”2 At other times he was unassuming and modest; late in life, in “An Autobiographical Study,” he wrote:
Looking back, then, over the patchwork of my life’s labors, I can say that I have made many beginnings and thrown out many suggestions. Something will come of them in the future, though I cannot myself tell whether it will be much or little. I can, however, express a hope that I have opened up a pathway for an important advance in our knowledge.3
He was surrounded by a large and loving family and a circle of devoted followers but over the years fought with a number of his closest friends and disciples. In his seventies he ruefully wrote:
I cannot count on the love of many people. I have not pleased, comforted, edified them. Nor was this my intention; I only wanted to explore, solve riddles, uncover a little of the truth.4
In photographs, Freud invariably looks formal and grave—impeccably dressed, neatly barbered, somber and unsmiling—yet his own writings and the reminiscences of those who knew him well attest that he was uncommonly witty and that he loved telling funny stories with a psychological point to them. An example from his study of humor, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious:
If [a doctor] enquires from a youthful patient whether he has ever had anything to do with masturbation, the answer is sure to be: “O, na, nie!” [German for “Oh, no, never”—but in German Onanie means “masturbation”].5
&n
bsp; And a longer joke, of the kind Freud enjoying telling and told well:
The Schadchen [Jewish marriage broker] was defending the girl he had proposed against the young man’s protests. “I don’t care for the mother-in-law,” said the latter. “She’s a disagreeable, stupid person.”— “But after all you’re not marrying the mother-in-law. What you want is her daughter.”—“Yes, but she’s not young any longer, and she’s not precisely a beauty.”—“No matter. If she’s neither young nor beautiful she’ll be all the more faithful to you.”—“And she hasn’t much money.”—“Who’s talking about money? Are you marrying money then? After all it’s a wife that you want.”—“But she’s got a hunchback too.”—“Well, what do you want? Isn’t she to have a single fault?”6
Evidently, the truth about Freud is, to say the least, no simple matter. But let us see what we can see.
The Would-Be Neuroscientist
One thing about Freud is obvious and indisputable: unlike the majority of noted psychologists of his time, he came from far outside the mainstream of his culture and in terms of background was most unlikely to become a towering figure in the discipline.
He was born in 1856 in Freiberg, a small town in Moravia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), the son of an impoverished itinerant Jewish trader in woolens, cloth, hides, and raw foodstuffs. At home, as a boy, he heard nothing of science, let alone modern psychology, and none of his ancestors had ever attended a university or even a gymnasium; by all odds, he should have become a small-time merchant like his father, Jacob.
For his first several years, he, his middle-aged father—who had been married before and raised another family—and his young mother lived in a single rented room that was soon further crowded by a baby sister. When Sigmund was four the family moved to Vienna, where, though his father’s business gradually improved, the family’s growth—eventually there were seven children—made for many hard years.