Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [92]
But a loving and permissive father can wield distressing influence over a child. At seventeen William James wanted to become a painter, but Henry James, Sr., who wanted him to seek a career in the sciences or philosophy, disapproved and took the family to Europe for a year as a distraction. Only because William persisted was he reluctantly allowed to study with an artist in Newport. After half a year William decided he was not gifted, perhaps more because of guilt feelings than a lack of talent, and, obeying his father’s wishes, entered Harvard and began the study of chemistry.
But the detailed laboratory work tried his patience and he soon switched to physiology, then the vogue, what with the pioneering work in Europe of Müller, Helmholtz, and Du Bois-Reymond. After a while, however, because the family fortune was dwindling and William realized he would someday have to earn his own living, he switched to Harvard Medical School. Medicine, too, failed to arouse his enthusiasm, and he took off much of a year to travel to the Amazon with Louis Agassiz, the eminent Harvard naturalist, hoping that natural history might be his true love. It proved not to be; he hated collecting specimens.
He resumed medical school but was beset by assorted ailments—back pain, weak vision, digestive disorders, and thoughts of suicide—some or most of which were exacerbated by his indecision about his future. Seeking relief, he went to France and Germany for nearly two years, took the baths, studied under Helmholtz and other leading physiologists, and became thoroughly conversant with the New Psychology.
Finally he returned and at twenty-seven completed medical school. He made no effort to practice because of his poor health, but spent his time studying psychology, sunk in gloom about his prospects and troubled by the profound differences between his scientific views of the mind and the world and his father’s mystical and spiritual ones. In 1870, at twenty-eight, after nearly a year in these doldrums, he had an abrupt emotional crisis very much like his father’s. Many years later he described it in Varieties of Religious Experience in the guise of a memoir given him by an anonymous Frenchman:
I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since.11
In his mature years William diagnosed his father’s crisis as an outbreak of long-repressed hostile feelings against his tyrannical father, but never suggested an explanation of his own crisis. Jacques Barzun has offered a hypothesis: “One may plausibly surmise that it was the intolerable pressure of not being able to rebel against a father who exerted no tyranny but that of love.”12
The attack left James incapacitated for many months. During this period he was particularly troubled by the German physiologists’ mechanistic vision of the world, the scientific equivalent of the Calvinistic determinism his own father had rebelled against. If mechanism gave a true