WILLIAM JAMES: BIOGRAPHY, FUNCTIONALISM, PRAGMATISM, CONTRIBUTIONS - PSYCHOLOGY - 2025

William James (1864 - 1910) was an American psychologist, philosopher, and physician. He is popularly known as the father of American psychology, as well as one of the forerunners of the functional approach to this science.

Also, along with Charles Sanders Peirce, James revolutionized the philosophy of his time since he opened the doors to pragmatism or practicalism. Under this approach, things make sense after knowing their usefulness.

William James (1880), by Houghton Library, via Wikimedia Commons

Although he studied medicine, he never dedicated himself to the professional practice of that career, but his interest was focused on the study of the mind.

Most of his life as a university professor was spent at Harvard, where he reached the milestone of being the first Professor of Psychology in the United States of America. Right there he ventured into other areas such as physiology or philosophy

It is believed that James' thinking was highly influenced by Darwinian theories during his formation and that they dominated both the world of science and philosophy at the time.

William James was born into a wealthy Swedenborgian family. His childhood was spent between constant changes and strong intellectual and spiritual pressure that was imposed by his father on all the James boys.

He was the only one of his siblings who excelled in science, but he was not the only prominent name in his family, since William was the brother of Henry James and Alice James, both prominent authors.

Although William James never considered himself a functionalist when it came to psychology, he expressed ideas such as the utility and purpose of human behavior, which is adapted to its environment.

Also his scheme of the functioning of the human psyche was widely adopted as a foundation by functionalist psychologists.

Biography

Early years

William James was born on January 11, 1842 in New York. He was the eldest son of Mary Robertson Walsh and Henry James Sr. This man was a wealthy member of the local intellectual elite, although he did not feel respected by those he considered his peers.

His father eventually became a follower of the theological current proposed by Emanuel Swedenborg, in which an iron rejection against ecclesiastical institutions was fed.

Furthermore, Swedenborg claimed that God had revealed to him how to correct the course that had been abandoned by the established churches and religions.

Due to the frequent moves of the James family, the children did not receive a constant formal education with a unique method. Despite this, her father encouraged the intellectual aspects of her children, whom she provided with a cosmopolitan vision of life.

Despite his fanaticism for religion, William James's father tried to get his children to enter important schools, to have first-rate tutors, and to always receive intellectual stimulation.

However, the pressure of Henry James Sr. on his children was more a burden than a blessing for young people who did not finish adjusting to a country, a school or a teacher when they had to pack to go to a new place.

Moving

William James' younger brother, Henry, was born on April 15, 1843, just over a year after the arrival of the firstborn. Almost immediately after that, his father decided to sell the house they owned in New York to move to a new environment.

After pondering the costs of living in the country in the United States, Mr. James decided that Europe would be a better choice. London was their destination for a short time, from there they went to France in January 1844.

The French experience was so traumatic for the whole family, that they soon returned to England, where they took a house in Windsor in which the children had space to play thanks to the extensive gardens, as well as being neighbors of the local royalty.

That year, Henry James Sr. began to develop severe bouts of depression and in 1945 they returned to the United States, just in time for Garth Wilkinson, the third son of the James, to enter the world in New York.

The next two years were divided between trips to the homes of the families of both William James parents in Albany and New York, since they did not have their own or rented homes.

At that time Robertson was also born (1846). This was the last male child in the family.

Back in the Big Apple

In 1847 the James finally decided to settle in Manhattan, where they rented a house. That year, William's sister Alice was born, who gained a great reputation as a writer after the posthumous publication of her diaries.

From this time, Henry James remembered his brother as a very precocious child, but also urged on the approval of his father and adults in general. To achieve this, he not only displayed his extraordinary talents, but copied the negative behaviors of his father.

In 1852 they attended the Vergnes language school, in which many young Cubans and Mexicans were enrolled. Later, Mr. James decided that the method was not the correct one to teach his children.

Then he transferred them to a smaller school run by Richard Pulling Jenks, there they received training in areas such as writing and drawing, the latter was of great interest to young William, but again his father was not comfortable with pedagogy.

In 1855 the family again moved to Europe. In England and France they continued to receive different tutors who were quickly dismissed by the patriarch of the family.

Knowledge without consistency

It is said that by that date, William and Henry James had already been to 10 different schools. In addition to the countless tutors who had wandered around his house in no time to leave a permanent influence on the children.

By this time, William was fluent in French and German. The boys lacked the coherence of a single system, but for their father raising children seemed like a constant experiment.

Between 1856 and 1857 William and his family were in Boulogne and there he attended the local school during that period of time. In 1858 the James returned to the United States and William was enrolled in a Rhode Island college. The boy at that time was already fluent in five languages.

The following year they returned to Europe and enrolled him in a school in Geneva. Because of the performance that William James demonstrated, he was offered to join the Societé des Zoffingue, which was a club where the best Swiss students joined.

In search of his vocation

From a very early age, William James was attracted to art, so between 1860 and 1861, after insisting a lot, his father allowed him to study in the workshop of the well-known American painter William Morris Hunt. James himself did not consider himself talented enough, so he retired.

In 1961 he opted for science and entered the Lawrence School of Science at Harvard University, where he began his higher studies in Chemistry.

Those years correspond to the outbreak of the American Civil War. Although William and Henry James did not participate because they had physical disabilities that prevented it, the two younger brothers Wilky and Bob did join the military.

In 1864 the Jamess moved to Boston, that's when William realized that his father's money was not as abundant as in the past and realized that in the future he would have to work to earn his livelihood and that of his family.

It can be said that the economic prospects prompted him to enter Harvard Medical School. The following year he began to have doubts about that choice and decided to take a year off.

Wandering intellectuality

Between 1865 and 1866 he participated together with Louis Agassiz in an expedition through Brazil. William considered that his real calling could be in the natural sciences and no one better than one of the most brilliant naturalists in the world to find out if he was correct.

After a period of calamities on the expedition, William knew that this was not the world he wanted to belong to and returned to Harvard to continue his career as a doctor, but his health prevented it.

In 1867 he moved to France and from there he went to Dresden in Germany where he studied with Helmholtz, Virchow and Bernard.

During his stay in Germany he became interested in philosophy, an area that never ceased to be among his intellectual priorities, although he also discovered the emergence of a science that attracted him powerfully: psychology.

Upon his return to the American continent, in 1869, he completed his career at Harvard, although he never practiced the profession of doctor. Then the intellectual differences with his father was a matter that tormented William James.

Depression and career beginnings

William by his training had a scientific approach to the issues of life, while Henrry James Sr., maintained his philosophical positions inclined towards theology.

This led the eldest son to develop a deep depression that kept him practically isolated for three years, which he lived in his parents' house without dedicating himself to anything in particular.

He believed that he would not be able to escape from the situation he was in, because he was aware of the periods of intense depression that had led to his father's disability and he believed that he had inherited this problem.

Everything changed when William James read Charles Renouvier and his approach to free will. He took that proposal as true and considered that if he did not want it, he would not have to become a replica of his father.

In August 1872 he was offered a position as professor of physiology and anatomy at Harvard, which he gladly accepted. He invested all his energy in that company to get good results.

However, the overwork to which he was subjected left him exhausted, so he joined his brother Henry on a trip to Europe in 1873. The following year he returned and resumed his courses at Harvard.

Psychology

In 1875 William James inaugurated the first university chair of "Experimental Psychology" in the United States of America. Before that, studies of the psyche had been framed in phrenology or the philosophy of mind.

During the following year James was promoted to the position of Assistant Professor of Physiology. Already then he had found a balance that allowed him to carry out his work in a suitable way, but without becoming excessively exhausted.

In 1879 he was appointed instructor of Philosophy, an area that he had been studying with novel approaches for years. Shortly after, he was promoted to assistant professor in the same subject.

Marriage

On July 20, 1878, William James married Alice Howe Gibbens. She was a Boston native school teacher, plus she played the piano and had received some recognition for it.

James had tried to delay meeting his future wife, but in doing so he fell in love and did not resist the union, which had been coordinated by his father.

When he proposed to Alice, William explained all his mental problems related to the episodes of depression, but she, far from moving away, gave him important support and they continued with their plans.

In fact, after the marriage William James began to improve every day and the couple became very close, especially since she was always willing to collaborate with him in any aspect.

In 1879 the first son of James was born whom they named Henry, like the father and brother of the American doctor. William had been completely delighted by the baby and expressed his desire to have more children in the shortest time possible.

Family Guy

In 1882 the mother of William James died, that loss was a hard blow for the family, especially for Henry James Sr., who died months later while his eldest son was in England.

That same year the second son of William and Alice was born, the little one was baptized with the name of his father. The third descendant of the couple was born in 1884, but died a year later from bronchial pneumonia.

Also in 1885 James was appointed Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Harvard. Shortly after the family moved to New Hampshire, where they had acquired a home of their own and where Margaret Mary (1887), the only daughter of the James, came into the world.

The James' home in Cambridge was completed in 1889 and they all moved into the new home. The following year William published The Principles of Psychology, which received generally good reviews, despite some experts like Wilhelm Wundt claiming that it was "not psychology."

That same year the last of the children was born, who was baptized as Alexander Robertson. Two years later, in 1892 James made a summary work of his previous work, known as Psychology: the short course.

Years of activism and prestige

At that time William James's sister Alice passed away in London. In July she began lecturing to Cambridge professors, making her the first to link psychology to education.

He was exhausted and took a year off in Europe, this time with his family and enrolled his children in a school in Florence.

Since returning to America, James began to worry about the growing uprooting he felt with his own land, which he tried to counter with harsh activism between 1894 and 1899.

He was a member of the American Psychological Association as well as the American Philosophical Association. In 1894 he met Sigmund Freud at Clark University during the Austrian's visit.

James continued to publish works and hold lectures and talks throughout the country. Another doctorate was awarded to him in 1896, on that occasion by Princeton.

Last years

In 1898 William James began to suffer from heart problems, so he moved to Europe while he recovered. Between 1901 and 1902 he gave lectures at the University of Edinburgh, from which he received another doctorate.

By 1902 James had returned home and a year later Harvard, his alma mater, in addition to the home of his teaching career, decided to award him an honorary doctorate. Then he went on a trip to Europe together with his brother Henry.

He attended the Fifth International Congress of Psychology in 1905. Then he moved to Stanford, where he taught for a semester at the university, long enough to experience the San Francisco earthquake.

The following year he had several lectures at the Lowell Institute and then at Columbia University. From there arose the foundations of one of his most important works: Pragmatism. On January 22, 1907, William James gave his last class at Harvard.

Death

William James passed away on August 26, 1910 in Chocorua, New Hampshire. People close to him anticipated his condition that led to fatal heart failure after a trip to Europe. James was buried in the Cambridge, Massachusetts Cemetery.

Between 1908 and 1909 the heart problems that had plagued him since 1898 had returned and after his trip he had remained in bed, from which he refused to ingest anything but milk.

Pragmatism

William James was one of the forerunners of this philosophy, along with Charles Sanders Peirce. For the followers of this current the truth depends on the practical or utilitarian value that some given element possesses.

The center of pragmatism or practicalism is the relationship between practical consequences with truth. It also proposes that acts are guided by thought and that truth is the consequence of a belief.

For James the truth could change depending on the frames of reference that each individual possesses. This is why although a reality must be verifiable, not necessarily what is real for some must be so for others.

Functionalism

Although James did not include himself in the group of functionalist psychologists, it was he who laid the foundations of this current with concepts such as his mental scheme.

In addition, by following the Darwinian current of natural selection, he assumed that, like other characteristics of organisms, behavior could adapt to the environment and conserve the one that provided the greatest benefits.

For James the mind should be studied as a whole and he considered that it was guided by a dynamic process in which the conscious and the subconscious interacted, both products of nature but the first personal and the second impersonal.

Other contributions to psychology

Theory of "I"

For William James there were two types of self:

The transcendental, which corresponds to the concept of ego that he related to the consciousness of one's own existence and the acts that an individual has performed.

Then there is the empirical self, which can be analyzed in the third person to describe events that happened to it. It is subdivided into three parts:

- Material self: it relates to possessions, including the body, clothing, money, or other possessions.

- Social self: way of presenting yourself to the different social relationships that you establish during your life. James believed that people could change their ways to adapt to the situation.

- Spiritual self: the center of an individual, consists mainly of the central beliefs that tend not to change.

Emotions

For William James, emotions were not triggered directly by stimuli, but rather a thread that began with a specific event, became a sensation and eventually became an emotion.

Instincts

The influence of Darwin's works was intense, especially early in the career of James, who claimed that humans, by their nature, had instincts, even more than other animals.

However, the complexity of the human psyche could make the experience prevail over the instincts, and a conflict of instincts could also be experienced, which forced one of them to be discarded.

Plays

- "The Dilemma of Determinism" - 1884.

- The Principles of Psychology - 1890, published in two volumes.

- Psychology: Briefer Course - 1892.

- The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy - 1897.

- Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine - 1897.

- The Will to Believe, Human Immortality - 1956.

- Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals - 1899.

- The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature - 1902.

- Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking - 1907.

- A Pluralistic Universe - 1909.

- The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism” –1909.

- Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy - 1911.

- Memories and Studies - 1911.

- Essays in Radical Empiricism - 1912.

- Letters of William James - 1920, published in two volumes.

- Collected Essays and Reviews - 1920.

- The Correspondence of William James - 1992/2004, published in twelve volumes.

References

1. En.wikipedia.org. (2019). William James. Available at: en.wikipedia.org.
2. Simon, L. (1999). Genuine reality. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.
3. Kallen, H. (2019). William James - Life, Works, Influence, & Facts. Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: britannica.com.
4. Hunt, M. (2007). The story of psychology. New York: Anchor Books.
5. Psychology.fas.harvard.edu. (2019). William James. Available at: psychology.fas.harvard.edu.
6. Plato.stanford.edu. (2019). William James (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Available at: plato.stanford.edu.