Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [95]
But he felt that a naturalistic kind of introspection—an effort to observe our own thoughts and feelings as they actually seem to us— could tell us much about our mental life. This was, for him, the most important of investigative methods; he defined it as “looking into our own minds and reporting what we there discover.”17 (He was referring to the introspection of conscious mental processes; at the time, neither he nor most other psychologists were aware of how large a part of our mental processes takes place outside consciousness.)
Such introspection required both concentration and practice, because inner states follow each other rapidly and often are blended and difficult to distinguish from one another. Yet it was feasible, James said, likening it to sense perception. Just as with practice one can notice, carefully observe, name, and classify objects outside oneself, one can do so with inner events.
There was, to be sure, a classic question about how this was possible. The conscious mind can observe external objects, but how can it observe itself? Was there a second consciousness that could watch the first one? How could we know that such a second consciousness existed—could we observe it, too? And how? James had an answer to such perplexities: introspection is, in reality, immediate retrospection; the conscious mind looks back and reports what it has just experienced.
He admitted that introspection is difficult and prone to error. Who could be sure of the exact order of feelings when they were excessively rapid? Of the comparative strengths of feelings when they were very much alike? Or which is longer when both occupied but an instant of time? Who could enumerate all the ingredients of such a complicated feeling as anger?
But he said that the validity of some kinds of introspective reports could be tested and verified by at least half a dozen kinds of well-established experimentation. The duration of simple mental processes, for one, could be estimated introspectively and then verified by reaction-time experiments; the introspective report of how many digits or letters one could simultaneously keep in mind, for another, could be verified by apperception experiments.
And while introspective reports of the more complex and subtle mental states might be impossible to verify experimentally, James maintained that since those acts are introspectively observable, any straightforward account of them can be regarded as literal. In any event, “introspective observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always.”18
One other source of James’s psychological ideas—possibly the most important of all—was personal and nonscientific: his naturalistic, perceptive, and wise interpretation of human behavior, based on his own experience and understanding. Many of his major insights came from “psychologizing,” says the distinguished psychologist Ernest Hilgard in his authoritative Psychology in America:
To “psychologize” is to reflect on ordinary observations and then to offer a plausible interpretation of the relevant experience and behavior. Once expressed, such interpretations are often so plausible that detailed proof would seem irrelevant—or at least too tedious to be worth the effort. Shakespeare was such a “psychologizer” without making any pretense of being a psychologist. Among psychologists, James is the preeminent psychologizer. The consequence is that he encouraged a full-bodied, warm-hearted psychology that is impatient with the trivial—a robust and vital psychology facing courageously psychology