Born on this Day: William James (11 January 1842 – 26 August 1910)

An effective way to flag up fundamental difficulties with the often taken-for-granted notion that science has disenchanted the world is to demonstrate that several ‘founding fathers’ of science entertained rather strong interests in the occult. Standard histories of psychology feature William James at Harvard and Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig as founders of the modern psychological profession. Whereas Wundt’s deep aversion to anything smacking of magic is well known, his American counterpart James sought to include open-minded yet rigorous studies of trance states and associated alleged occult phenomena, such as telepathy and even spirit communication, as legitimate areas of psychological research.

In print, James first expressed dissatisfaction with fellow scientists who usually dismissed the widely claimed phenomena of spiritualism with little more than a scoff in 1869, and his own first informal experiments with spiritualist mediums date back to at least 1874. 1883 saw the beginnings of James’s lasting friendship and collaborations with representatives of the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR), followed by his involvement in the foundation of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) in 1884, and his discovery of the Boston trance medium Leonora Piper in the year after.

James’s serving as SPR President in 1894 and 1895 significantly coincided with his 1894 Presidency of the American Psychological Association, a date that also marked the concluding phase of a long collaboration with SPR colleagues including Henry and Eleanor M. Sidgwick of Cambridge University on the Census of Hallucinations. This was an international survey of ‘telepathic’ hallucinations, which was commissioned by the International Congress of Psychology at its first session in 1889.

James remained fairly active in psychical research until his death in 1910, and unmistakable expressions of his conviction that studies of occult phenomena were a scientific urgency are really not hard to find in his now canonical writings. However, the first complete collation of his texts specifically dedicated to alleged psychic phenomena appeared only in 1986, as part of the Works of William James.

James’s birthday suggests itself as an occasion to provide links to previous Forbidden Histories posts related to James and his heterodox preoccupations.

Forbidden Histories of William James

An early post is my review of the late Eugene Taylor’s reconstruction of James’s Lowell Lectures on ‘exceptional mental states’. Along with similar talks and courses, this public lecture series delivered by James in 1896 shows that his research on psychic phenomena cannot be disentangled from his views on their implications for a psychological understanding of mental operations of the ordinary waking self in their relationship with sleep, trance, and other altered states of consciousness. A milestone in the historical understanding of James’s preoccupations with altered states, psychic phenomena and mystical experiences between the Principles of Psychology (1890) and the Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Taylor’s reconstruction also shows James as a still rather lone voice doubting that hallucinations and trance states were inherently morbid.

Next in line, Alicia Puglionesi’s guest post, “Amateurs, Empiricism, and the Tedium of Psychical Research” touches on James’s involvement in the early phase of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR). The summary of my conference paper on James and the ASPR stresses that in its early phase (i.e. between 1884-1889), its goals should not be viewed, as it is routinely done by historians, as identical with those of the English SPR. American psychological colleagues of James, including G. Stanley Hall and Joseph Jastrow, joined the ASPR not to promote but to prevent open-minded research in the vein of James and his British colleagues. Like James’s German counterpart Wilhelm Wundt, Hall and Jastrow in fact argued that belief in the very possibility of psychic phenomena indicated mental disease.

Letting James speak for himself, I reproduced his entry on telepathy in Johnson’s Universal Cyclopædia (1895). Neatly documenting James’s stance on the question of psychic phenomena at the time, his entry also provides a concise overview of experimental work on telepathy in England, France and Germany since about 1880, and includes a reference to James’s experiences with Mrs. Piper.

James’s integrative psychological approach to occult phenomena is also mentioned in my outline of a planned annotated guide to library and archival holdings at the University of Cambridge. There I refer to a letter to James from his friend and fellow psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers (the inventor of words like ‘telepathy’ and ‘subliminal’), in which he encourages James to have Harvard students replicate  experiments in the exploration of hidden partitions of the mind through ‘crystal-gazing’. (This was a method famously used by John Dee to communicate with supposed spirits, while Myers promoted it to experimentally induce hallucinations as vehicles for the recovery of buried memories and other subliminal material).

Finally, my last piece on James and psychical research tries to make sense of the fact that the first incomplete collation of James’s unorthodox texts was not published in the original English, but in a French translation.

Obviously, there is much more where this came from. In fact, apart from trying to finally get my book manuscript on the co-emergence of modern psychology and psychical research out of my hair, last year I wrote a chapter on James’s psychical research for the upcoming Oxford Handbook of William James [update 11 January 2021: the chapter is now out and can be downloaded here].

If you don’t want to miss any updates of research on the ‘occult’ James and other founding figures of modern sciences, make sure to subscribe to Forbidden Histories.

Andreas Sommer

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