The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [91]
“I am filled with confusion,” Lombroso wrote. Unwilling to concede, he decided, like the Neapolitan doctor before him, to seek help.
“IT SEEMS TO ME,” William James once wrote to a colleague, “that Psychology is like Physics before Galileo’s time—not a single elementary law yet caught a glimpse of.”
That lack of knowledge had prompted his book—and enormously delayed it. But, finally, after twelve years of work, on September 25, 1890, James’s publisher, Henry Holt, released a fat, two-volume set titled The Principles of Psychology. (He would later release a condensed, one-volume version, leading psychology students to call the long version the “James” and the short version the “Jimmy.”)
In The Principles of Psychology, James had set himself the daunting task of supplying those missing elementary laws, trying to give shape to this still amorphous science, a discipline that had arisen as traditional religion and philosophy no longer seemed adequate to explain human behavior. A thoroughgoing scholar, literate in four languages (English, French, German, and Italian), he drew on a wide range of other, longer-established disciplines and ideas. First, he applied his training as a biologist and a physician. The book laid out causes and effects of behavior as delineated by modern science, based on a developing understanding of the nervous system as it processed reasoning, memory, association, and emotion. He enriched it with lessons from philosophy—the idea of self, the concept of truth, the necessity of moral behavior.
Just as its author’s free-ranging mind reveled in the messy complexity and contradictions of human behavior, so did The Principles of Psychology. In writing it, James also allowed himself to be guided by his own observations of the relationships between mind and body, between individuals, between self and society.
“No one,” he wrote, “ever had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree.”
He was the first psychologist to propose a feedback mechanism between emotions and physical sensations related to them. “Objects of rage, love, fear, etc.,” he wrote, “not only prompt a man to outward deeds, but provoke characteristic alterations in his attitude and visage, and affect his breathing, circulation, and other organic functions in specific ways.” He also believed that emotion could be as easily triggered by memory or imagination as by the event itself, a concept that would decades later form the foundation of post-traumatic stress disorder. Or in James’s words, “One may get angrier in thinking over one’s insult than at the moment of receiving it.”
Our individual reactions, he said, could never be separated from the broader fabric of human life. The intensity of response to James’s hypothetical insult, whether that response were delayed or immediate, would depend on the relationship in question. One person created countless different relationships in this life, each based on the perception of him by another and by his response to that perception, so that “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.” Going a risky step further, James also suggested the possibility of another series of relationships, those that operated outside the observable limits of material reality.
Although he never intended Principles of Psychology as a reply to Huxley’s agnosticism, James’s book did present an alternative vision. It offered a world less mechanical, more infused with human possibility—including the possibility of psychic phenomena.
In this landmark psychology text, James discussed trance personalities, telepathy, spirit possession, even Leonora Piper. He didn’t, as Alfred Russel Wallace