William James: life and work of the father of psychology in America.

We review the life and work of a pioneer in the study of psychology.

Psychology has given birth to a large number of theories and theoretical models that seek to explain human behavior.

They are concrete proposals that in most cases only seek to explain a small part of human behavior. only seek to explain a small part of the set of issues that psychology can explain, since that psychology can explain, since they are based on the work that a multitude of researchers have been doing months, years and decades ago. However, this whole web of proposals had to start at a point where practically nothing was known about how we behave and perceive things.

What was it like to face the study of psychology in those years? What was it like to have to lay the foundations of modern psychology?

To answer these questions, it is useful to look back at the life and work of William James. William Jamesa philosopher and psychologist who set out to investigate one of the most basic and universal concepts in the study of the mind: consciousness. consciousness.

Who was William James?

The life of William James began like that of any representative of the American upper classes. He was born in the year 1842 in New York, in the bosom of a well-to-do family, and the fact that he could count on his parents' considerable economic resources allowed him to be educated in good schools, both in the United States and in Europe, and to soak up the different philosophical and artistic trends and currents that characterized each place he visited. His father, moreover, was a famous and well-connected theologian, and the bourgeois culture that enveloped the whole family probably helped William James to be ambitious when it came to setting life goals.

In short, William James had everything to become a well-positioned person: material resources and also the influences of the New York elites related to his relatives accompanied him in this. However, although in 1864 he began studying medicine at Harvard, a series of academic hiatuses and health complications meant that he did not complete his studies until 1869 and, in any case, he never practiced as a physician..

There was another field of study that caught his attention: the binomial formed between Philosophy and Psychology, two disciplines that in the 19th century had not yet been completely separated and that at that time studied matters related to the soul and thought.

The William James psychologist is born

In 1873, William James returned to Harvard to teach psychology and philosophy.. Certain things had changed since his medical degree. He had subjected his life experience to philosophical examination, and he had taken such pains to do so that he felt he had the strength to become a teacher even though he had received no formal education in the subject.

However, despite not having attended philosophy classes, the subjects he was interested in were of the type that had marked the beginnings of the history of the great thinkers. Since he could not base his studies on previous research in psychology because it had not yet been consolidated, he focused on the study of consciousness, he focused on the study of consciousness and emotional states.. That is, two universal subjects intimately linked to philosophy and epistemology, since they are present in all our ways of interacting with the environment.

Consciousness, according to James

When it came to the study of consciousness, William James encountered many difficulties. It could not be otherwise, since, as he himself acknowledged, "it is very difficult to even define what consciousness or being conscious of something is, it is very difficult to even define what consciousness is, or to be conscious of anything.. And, if one does not know how to delimit the object of study, it is practically impossible to direct research on it and make it reach a successful conclusion. That is why James' first great challenge was to explain what consciousness is in philosophical terms in order to be able to test its mechanisms of operation and its verifiable foundations.

He managed to approximate an intuitive (though not entirely exhaustive) idea of what consciousness is by drawing an analogy between consciousness and a river. This is a metaphor for describing consciousness as if it were an incessant flow of thoughts, thoughts that are an incessant flow of thoughts, ideas and mental images.. Once again, at this point the intimate connection between William James' approach to psychology and philosophical themes can be seen, since the figure of the river had already been used many millennia before by Heraclitus, one of the first great thinkers of the West.

The precedent of Heraclitus

Heraclitus was faced with the task of defining the relationship between "being" and change that are apparently part of reality. All things seem to remain and exhibit qualities that make them stable in time, but at the same time all things change. Heraclitus argued that "being" is an illusion and that the only thing that defines reality is constant change, just like a river that, although it appears to be a single thing that remains, it is still a succession of parts of water that never repeat themselves.

William James thought it useful to define consciousness as if it were a river because he thus established a dialectic between a stable element (the consciousness itself, what we want to define) and another that is constantly changing (the content of this consciousness). He thus emphasized the fact that consciousness is composed of unique and unrepeatable units of experience, linked to the here and now, and that they lead from a "unique and unrepeatable unit of experience" to a "unique and unrepeatable unit of experience".and leading from one "stretch" of the flow of thoughts to another part of it.

The nature of consciousness

That implied recognizing that there is little or nothing in consciousness that is substantive, that is, that can be isolated and storable for study, since everything that passes through it is bound up with context.. The only thing that remains in this "stream" is the labels we want to put on it to define it, that is, our considerations about it, but not the thing itself. From this reflection William James comes to a clear conclusion: consciousness is not an object, but a process, in the same way that the functioning of an engine is not in itself something that exists separately from the machine..

Why does consciousness exist, then, if it cannot even be located in a given time and space? To enable our body to function, he said. To allow us to use images and thoughts to survive.

Defining the stream of thoughts

William James believed that in the stream of images and ideas that constitute consciousness there are transitive parts y substantive parts. The former constantly refer to other elements of the stream of thoughts, while the latter are those in which we can dwell for a time and feel a sense of permanence. Of course all these parts of consciousness are transient to a greater or lesser extent. And, most importantly, they are all private, in the sense that other people can only know about them indirectly, through our own consciousness of what we experience. other people can only know them indirectly, through our own consciousness of what we experience..

The practical consequences of this for research in psychology were clear. This idea implied admitting that experimental psychology was incapable of fully understanding, through its methods alone, how human thought works, although it can help. To examine the flow of thoughts, says William James, one must begin by studying the "I," which appears out of the stream of consciousness itself..

This means that, under this view, studying the human psyche is tantamount to studying such an abstract construct as the "I." This idea did not please experimental psychologists, who preferred to focus their efforts on studying testable facts in a laboratory.

The James-Lange Theory: Do we cry because we are sad or are we sad because we cry?

Having made these basic considerations about what consciousness is and what it is not, William James could begin to propose concrete mechanisms by which our flows of thought guide our behavior. One of these contributions is the James - Lange Theory, devised by him and Carl Lange almost at the same time, according to which emotions arise from the awareness of one's own physiological states.

Thus, for example, we do not smile because we are happy, but we are happy because our consciousness has been informed that we are smiling.. Similarly, we do not run because something has frightened us, but we feel frightened because we realize that we are running away.

This is a theory that goes against the conventional way in which we conceive the functioning of our nervous system and our thoughts, and the same was true at the end of the 19th century. Today, however, we know that William James and Carl Lange are most likely only partly right.We believe that the cycle between perception (seeing something that frightens us) and action (running) is so fast and with so many neural interactions in both directions that we cannot speak of a causal chain in only one direction. We run because we are scared, and we are also scared because we run.

What do we owe to William James?

William James' beliefs may seem outlandish today, but the truth is that many of his ideas have been the principles on which interesting proposals have been built that are still valid today. In his book The Principles of Psychology (Principles of Psychology), for example, there are many ideas and notions that are useful for understanding the functioning of the brain. there are many ideas and notions that are useful to understand the functioning of the human brain, even though it was written at a time when the synaptic spaces that separate neurons were just being of the human brain, even though it was written at a time when the existence of the synaptic spaces that separate neurons from each other was just being discovered.

Moreover, the pragmatist approach he gave to psychology is the philosophical foundation of many psychological theories and therapies that place more emphasis on the usefulness of thoughts and affective states than on their correspondence with an objective reality.

Perhaps because of this union between psychology and the philosophical current of American pragmatism (which would later (which later would also define the behaviorist B. F. Skinner) and for the fact of being one of the pioneers in American lands, William James is considered the father of Psychology in the United States and, much to his regret, the one in charge of introducing in his continent the Experimental Psychology that in Europe was being developed by Wilhelm Wundt.

In short, although William James had to face the costly mission of contributing to establish the beginnings of Psychology as an academic and practical field, it cannot be said that this task was not very grateful to him. He showed real interest in what he was investigating and was able to use this discipline to deploy exceptionally sharp proposals about the human mind. So much so that, for those who came after him, there was no choice but to take them at face value or strive to refute them.