A Sustaining Zeitgeist 341AN ARTISTIC SCIENCE?
William James (1842–1910), like many of the other early
psychologists such as Wundt, had originally trained to be a
physician. For 12 years, he labored to produce a psychology
text that would serve to help him appraise the field, and in
1890 his magnum opus, Principles of Psychology,was pub-
lished. It quickly became a classic, and despite the early stage
of development of scientific psychology when it was written,
much within it would be of interest to clinicians today. There
was a chapter on the unconscious mind and the evidence for
its existence: that ideas or thoughts that are seemingly forgot-
ten must be existing somewhere if they can be recalled;
sleepwalkers who have no memory for what they did; our
ability to sense the boundaries of our beds while asleep and to
awaken close to a desired time; posthypnotic suggestions and
movements carried out automatically by hysterics. In con-
trast, the unconscious mind as it would soon be conceived by
Freud affected human functioning all through the day and
night, in dreams as well as in neurotic symptoms, in daily
accidents and thoughts and memory lapses and decisions.
There was a lengthy discussion of the Self, which in
James’s view was the sum total of all that the person owned:
a Material Self consisting of the person’s clothing, property,
body, and family; a Social Self composed of the many roles
people played in different kinds of interactions; and a Spiri-
tual Self, consisting of the person’s conscience and will, val-
ues, and psychological faculties. And there was often conflict
between these different aspects of self, which had to be re-
solved by simply deciding what should be given expression
and what should be suppressed. According to James, it was
simply impossible to give expression to all aspects of oneself.
James had a much more rational view of human behavior
than Freud. In his own life, prior to becoming a psychologist,
James had overcome feelings of depression by sheer strength
of resolve. He asserted that people could control their emo-
tions if they determined to do it and by exhibiting character-
istics of the feeling they wished to have. In other words, to be
happy, smile and act happy, and you will begin to experience
happiness... or as Shakespeare eloquently put it in Henry V
in exhorting troops to do battle bravely: “Stiffen the sinews,
summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favor’d
rage” (act 3, scene 1).
An equally straightforward approach was recommended
to build good habits and break bad ones. Just go to it, and
allow no exceptions to the doing of the habit you wish to
achieve and immediately stop doing the habit you want to
break. For James, it made no sense to try to gradually wean
yourself from doing what you supposedly wanted to stop
doing.
Similarly, James argued in his discussion of the self that
people had it in their power to raise their self-esteem. He rea-
soned that our feelings about ourselves are determined by our
accomplishments divided by our aspirations. If we wished to
feel better about ourselves, we could raise our self-esteem by
achieving more of our goals or—and this was the easier
course—by lowering our aspirations and pretensions.
These practical suggestions made sense to James, who
was shortly to become a leading proponent of pragmatism, a
philosophical system that stresses that the value or merit of a
truth or undertaking lies in its practical consequences. How-
ever, in the opinion of those who favored psychology as a
“pure” science, these practical matters were totally extrane-
ous to the field. James was not so sure psychology was
headed in the right direction, and in 1907 he became a pro-
fessor of philosophy. Within six years, a movement called be-
haviorism was launched against the prevailing psychology of
Wundt and introspection.
It was in 1913 that John B. Watson proclaimed psychol-
ogy to be “a purely objective experimental branch of natural
science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of
behavior.” Using as his model the reflex, Watson argued that
all psychology needed to be concerned about were stimuli
and responses: given the stimuli, to determine the responses;
given the responses, to discover the stimuli. Research using
introspection was best avoided, and psychologists should en-
deavor to put their findings to practical use (Watson, 1913).
In 1915, Watson became president of the American Psycho-
logical Association (APA), while the numbers of psycholo-
gists who regarded themselves as behaviorists grew with
each year. Their focus was not on sensation or perception but
on learning, and they were not averse to seeing the process of
learning in all areas of human functioning.A SUSTAINING ZEITGEISTAnother way of looking at the fact that Witmer was success-
ful when he approached his university looking for funds for a
psychology clinic and when he contacted a philanthropist for
money to start a journal in clinical psychology is to say the
zeitgeist was favorable. We have already considered a num-
ber of events that during the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies prepared the way for the development of this field, and
here we shall note others that promoted its advance during
the early part of the twentieth century.
However, it would be incorrect to suggest the going was
smooth and easy. The APA, founded in 1892 with 31 mem-
bers, had only about 300 by 1917; its purpose was solely to
promote the advance of psychology as a science, and it was