William James on Exceptional Mental States

Eugene Taylor, whose death in January 2013 was a heavy blow to history of psychology and William James scholarship, was one of the few modern historians to fully acknowledge and try to make sense of James’s by no means casual occupation with spiritualism, telepathy and other unorthodox areas of inquiry. The main fruits of Taylor’s attempts to repair major historiographical shortcomings in James scholarship were two books. The first, William James on Exceptional Mental States, is a reconstruction of a lecture series held by James in 1896, years after the ‘father’ of the modern psychological profession in America had announced his official departure from psychology. In his second book, William James: On Consciousness Beyond the Margin , Taylor picked up the thread and provided a more general study of the centrality of the unorthodox and exceptional in the formation of James’s psychological and philosophical ideas.

As a somewhat belated nod of gratitude to Eugene, who cheerfully guided my work in the James papers at Harvard in 2009 and 2012, I’m posting a previously unpublished review of the Lowell Lectures, which I wrote about a year before I first met him.

William James on Exceptional Mental States. The 1896 Lowell Lectures, reconstructed by Eugene Taylor. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983, ISBN 0-684-17938-5, xviii + 222 pp.

William James (1842-1910) was undoubtedly one of the most versatile and independent thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Far less known than his ‘classical’ writings, such as The Principles of Psychology, Pragmatism and The Varieties of Religious Experience, are James’s works in psychopathology and psychical research. In fact, James scholars have typically failed to assess the impact of these more exotic but interconnected interests on the formation of his main works in psychology and philosophy, which remain topical up to the present day.

James’s open-minded but critical engagement with the ‘occult’ was never tacit. He published extensively on psychical research, called himself “one of her foster-fathers”(James, 1896, p. 649), and tirelessly advocated its relevance for nascent scientific psychology in many of his writings and in letters (see, for example, see Murphy & Ballou,1961, and James, 1986). Yet, James’s long-standing interest in the problems of mental healing, telepathy and trance mediumship has been passed over by most of his biographers in seemingly embarrassed silence (see, for instance, the assessment by Ford, 1998).

That this curious neglect translates almost directly to a lack of historical interest in James as a psychopathologist is one of the implicit lessons of the present volume. It documents the significance of James’s involvement with the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR, whose President James became in 1894) for his ideas from about 1883, most notably studies in automatisms, hypnotism and subliminal cognition as pioneered by James’s British friends Edmund Gurney and Frederic W. H. Myers. Taylor traces how studies of trance mediumship, hypnotism, hallucinations in the sane and James’s resulting belief in the reality of telepathy decisively informed his views on mental phenomena commonly labelled ‘unconscious’ (James preferred ‘extra-marginal’, or Myers’s term, ‘subliminal’), and how they differed from other, now popular ideas (particularly those of Sigmund Freud), which were just beginning to form.

The core themes underlying and connecting each of the eight lectures on topics as seemingly disparate as ‘Dreams’, ‘Witchcraft’, and ‘Genius’ lie in James’s appeal to the relativity of the morbid, and a concession to the prevalence of psychopathological nuclei in all of us. For James, “health is basically an affair of balance”, and he captures his philosophy of psychiatry thus:

“Hypnotism equals sleep. Hysteria with all its symptoms equals hypnotism. Double personality simply concerns the buried idea that collects experiences until it assumes an apparently independent form. Demon possession equals an optimistic mediumship. Witchcraft is explained simply as mass hysteria over neurotic symptoms. And finally, we know that insane genius, while perhaps more romantic, now flattens out” (p. 163).

The book has only minor flaws, mostly spelling errors (particularly of foreign book titles). These aside, Taylor’s reconstruction of James’s Lowell Lectures is a major contribution to the history and historiography of psychopathology and the ‘occult’. Moreover, it should be compulsory reading for clinicians, who typically demonstrate next to no familiarity with the history of the contested question of the relationship between mental health and exceptional experiences.

Literature
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Ford, M. (1998). William James’s psychical research and its philosophical implications. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 34, 605-626.

James, W. (1896). Psychical research. Psychological Review, 3, 649-652.

James, W. (1986). Essays in Psychical Research (Burkhardt, F. H., & Bowers, F., eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press [Buy on Amazon] [Search on Abebooks].

Murphy, G., & Ballou, R. O. (Eds.). (1961). William James on Psychical Research. London: Chatto and Windus [Buy on Amazon] [Search on Abebooks].

Taylor, E.  (1983). William James on Exceptional Mental States. The 1896 Lowell Lectures. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons [Buy on Amazon] [Search on Abebooks].

© Andreas Sommer

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