Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [101]
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 behavior. 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
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