Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [102]
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