Taylor: William James and Jung

WILLIAM JAMES AND C. G. JUNG

EUGENE TAYLOR

Little known and scarcely written about is the significance William James had on the intellectual destiny of Carl Gustav Jung. Historical evidence indicates that James’s early influence on Jung played no small part in Jung’s thought and its subsequent evolution.

According to Jung’s own account, James’s writings helped to shape his earliest formulation of psychological types; James was the guiding spirit in the direction Jung took in diverging from Freud over the essential nature of psychic energy; he influenced Jung’s definition of science, and his views on the collective unconscious. Early on James impressed Jung with the importance of viewing personality as a holistic totality that quite transcends the bounds imposed on it by the rational mind. Let us now look at facts that will show the importance of James for Jung.

James and Jung: 1890–1910

After the publication of his Principles in 1890, William James turned his attention away from laboratory psychology toward psychotherapy and psychic phenomena.¹ His keen appreciation of the great power inherent in a non-traumatic exploration of the unconscious led him in 1892 to call for a greater emphasis on visual imagery as a tool for understanding nonverbal states of awareness,² in 1894 to present the work of Breuer and Freud to the American scientific public for the first time, and to suggest that their work was evidence that the American mental healers were practicing sound principles of psychotherapy.³ He would, first in 1894 and again in 1898, publicly defend the mental healing profession in the Massachusetts legislature against the attacks of the medical men.⁴ In 1896, he outlined the most recent advances in our understanding of a dynamic, individual psychology of the unconscious and demonstrated the workings of its more pathological manifestations in the social sphere, when he delivered his unpublished lectures on Exceptional Mental States before the Lowell Institute.⁵ Furthermore, in the Varieties (1902) he claimed that the unconscious was the doorway to religious awakening to profound mystical states whose truths could only be tested by their effects on the quality of our daily life. He then embarked on a final period of metaphysical cosmology wherein he challenged the notion that consciousness exists as an entity somehow independent of the mind that perceives it. This Jamesian notion of the unconscious was destined later to influence a great deal of twentieth-century culture.

By 1902, Jung had completed his medical studies and was first Assistant Physician under Bleuler in the Burghölzli clinic. In that year he delivered his inaugural dissertation, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena,⁶ before the faculty of medicine at the University of Zurich. As a practicing therapist and emerging scholar Jung reviewed the then current French, German and English sources on mental pathology, citing among others two cases of multiple personality from James’s Principles—the Rev. Ansel Bourne, a case of “ambulatory automatism” James had studied with Richard Hodgson of the English Society for Psychical Research, and the strange case of Mary Reynolds, communicated to James by his lifelong friend, the Philadelphia neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell.

Mary Reynolds was significant because the second personality to emerge became wiser and superior to the first or “normal” self, dominating the woman’s field of awareness for the final twenty-five years of an eventually productive and happy life. It was a clear example for Mitchell and James that all cases of double personality need not be confined to a pathological diagnosis, and that something wiser and far superior may emerge from within, a fact which Jung did not fail to emphasize in the analysis of his own case.

By 1904, Jung had published his Psychology of Dementia Praecox, in which he wholeheartedly espoused the psychoanalytic interpretation, and thereafter began regular correspondence with Freud.⁷ Meanwhile in America, James’s colleagues in the blossoming pre-analytic field of psychotherapy were becoming famous in their own right; among them Morton Prince for his work on multiple personality, Boris Sidis for the hypnoid strata, J. J. Putnam for his innovations in psychotherapy at Harvard Medical School, and L. Eugene Emerson for his work as the first Ph.D. clinical psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. These men formed a loose-knit coalition of innovators known as the Boston School of Psychotherapy,⁸ which came later to include such names as Isador Coriat, Richard Clark Cabot, and Rev. Elwood Worcester. Following James, each in some way supported a broader and more eclectic view of the unconscious than Freud’s.

Psychoanalysis, however, was more than in the air and Freud’s disciples were introducing his techniques to the Boston Group. Morton Prince launched the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1906 with the express purpose of providing a forum for the diverse views on the nature of the unconscious and methods of psychotherapy. He invited Sigmund Freud to contribute an article to the first issue, but Freud refused. Instead, J. J. Putnam wrote a paper on the use of analysis at Massachusetts General Hospital. Significantly, Jung also contributed articles to both the first and second issues, and from then on was either cited or reviewed in subsequent publications of the journal.

Shortly before Freud and Jung arrived for the famous Clark conference in 1909, a symposium was held in New Haven, Connecticut on the various methods of psychotherapy then flourishing in and around the Boston School.⁹ It was an unusual blend of religious, philosophical, medical, and psychological perspectives, and nearly the last of what was to be heard trom such a Jamesian outlook after the onslaught of Freud and his followers at Clark. Jung, however, turned out to be a distinguished exception.

Freud, Jung, and Ferenczi sailed together from Bremen in August of 1909, coming to America as honored guests of G. Stanley Hall’s twentieth-anniversary celebration of the founding of Clark University. Both Freud and Jung delivered major speeches and received honorary degrees. Such luminaries as William Stern, Adolph Meyer, E. B. Titchener, and Franz Boas attended; and William James came accompanied by his friend and personal physician, J. J. Putnam. It was here that James and Jung met briefly on two occasions and had a chance to converse about some of their mutual interests.

The James–Jung Meeting

Jung recounted his meeting with James in a letter to Virginia Payne in 1949. She was writing her doctoral thesis at the University of Wisconsin and had written asking Jung for his recollections. He mentioned some points about Freud, and then went on,

Two personalities I met at the Clark Conference made a profound and lasting impression on me. One was Stanley Hall, the President, and the other was William James whom I met for the first time then. I remember particularly an evening at President Hall’s house. After dinner William James appeared and I was particularly interested in the personal relation between Stanley Hall and William James, since I gathered from some remarks of President Hall that William James was not taken quite seriously on account of his interest in Mrs. Piper and her extra-sensory perceptions. Stanley Hall had prepared us that he had asked James to discuss some of his results with Mrs. Piper and to bring some of his material. So when James came (there was Stanley Hall, Professor Freud, one or two other men and myself) he said to Hall: “I’ve brought you some papers in which you might be interested.” And he put his hand in his breast pocket and drew out a parcel which to our delight proved to be a wad of dollar bills. Considering Stanley Hall’s great services for the increase and welfare of Clark University and his rather critical remarks as to James’s pursuits, it looked to us a particularly happy rejoinder. James excused himself profusely. Then he produced the real papers from the other pocket.
I spent two delightful evenings with William James alone and I was tremendously impressed by the clearness of his mind and the complete absence of intellectual prejudices. Stanley Hall was an equally clearheaded man, but decidedly of an academic brand.¹⁰

In 1958, the editor of Pantheon Books, Kurt Wolff, wrote to Jung inquiring, among other things, about Jung’s meeting with James. Jung replied,

As for my meeting with William James, you must remember that I saw him only twice and talked with him for little over an hour, but there was no correspondence between us. Apart from the personal impression he made on me, I am indebted to him chiefly for his books. We talked mostly about his experiments with Mrs. Piper (the medium), which were well enough known, and did not speak of his philosophy at all. I was particularly interested to see what his attitude was to so-called “occult phenomena.” I admired his European culture and the openness of his nature. He was a distinguished personality and conversation with him was extremely pleasant. He was quite natural, without affectation and pomposity and answered my questions and interjections as though speaking to an equal. Unfortunately he was already ailing at the time so I could not press him too hard. Aside from Theodore Flournoy he was the only outstanding mind with whom I could conduct an uncomplicated conversation. I therefore honour his memory and have always remembered the example he set me.¹¹

Of this same meeting with Freud and Jung, James wrote to his friend Theodore Flournoy,

How much of your interests and mine keep step with each other, dear Flournoy. “Functional psychology,” and the twilight region that surrounds the clearly lighted center of experience! Speaking of “functional” psychology, Clark University … had a little international congress the other day … I went there for one day in order to see what Freud was like, and met also Yung [sic] of Zurich, who professed a great esteem for you, and made a very pleasant impression. I hope that Freud and his pupils will push their ideas to their utmost limits, so that we may learn what they are. They can’t fail to throw light on human nature; but I confess that he made on me personally the impression of a man obsessed with fixed ideas. I can make nothing in my own case with his dream theories, and obviously “symbolism” is a dangerous method. A newspaper report of the congress said that Freud had condemned the American religious therapy (which has such extensive results) as very “dangerous” because so “unscientific.” Bah!¹²

James’s Wider Circle and Jung

Thus two great ships passed in the night; James at the end of a distinguished career, Jung at the beginning. While the meeting was brief and left at least a pleasant impression on James’s memory, the repercussions for Jung were to be subtle and yet far-reaching. Flournoy, for instance, was for Jung a “revered and fatherly friend,” who had translated the Miller fantasies, published it in his Archives de psychologie in 1906 where Jung first saw it, thus initiating Jung’s Symbols of Transformation. Jung was to write in 1936 that he owed it mainly to James and Flournoy that he “learnt to understand the nature of psychic disturbances within the setting of the human psyche as a whole.”¹³

Putnam also has been paid a debt of gratitude in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and though not printed in the final English edition, Jung’s eulogy praised Putnam for his “unflagging desire for objectivity,” his open-mindedness, and his readiness to give credit. Above all, during Jung’s stormy period of separation from Freud, it was Putnam who pointed out that the general hostility to Freud’s ideas was directed not only against the disreputable sexual theory, but against the point of view stressing the unconscious in general—that in fact the resistance was really to the unconscious, making the situation thoroughly complicated and obscure.¹⁴

It was also Putnam who had sent Fanny Bowditch Katz to be analyzed by Jung in 1911. Henry Pickering Bowditch had been a longtime friend and colleague of James at Harvard, providing James in the 1870s with laboratory space where James conducted experiments and lectured on physiological psychology to his students for college credit. Bowditch and James had also awarded Stanley Hall the first Ph.D. to be granted in psychology at an American university in Bowditch suffered a stroke in 1906 and died five years later in 1911, one year after James himself had passed away. During his last years Bowditch had been attended by his unmarried daughter Fanny, who at age 39, upon her father’s death, fell into an existential crisis.

She sought out Putnam for therapy and he advised her to move to Switzerland and begin analysis with Jung. She did so, participating in Jung’s early psychoanalytic seminars before the break with Freud in 1913, and undergoing therapy at the same time with Jung and a lay analyst. Jung’s successful handling of the transference that developed resulted in her terminating therapy, and in 1916 she married a successful psychiatrist from the Netherlands, J. Rudolph Katz. Living on into her nineties, she died in Massachusetts in 1963.¹⁵

Likewise, William McDougall, whom James visited at Oxford at the turn of the century, sought out Jung after World War I and underwent analysis for the sake of his own personal growth. In 1921, McDougall took over Munsterberg’s chair in psychology at Harvard, inherited from James, and held it until 1927 when he went on to Duke University to establish his famous institute for psychic research. Dr. and Mrs. Rhine followed him, Rhine eventually succeeding McDougall as chairman of the psychology department and the foremost exponent of psychic exploration in America.¹⁶

Henry A. Murray also chose to investigate the unconscious under Jung’s guidance. Murray had succeeded Morton Prince as professor of dynamic psychology and director of the Harvard psychological clinic. Prince, an ardent proponent of the Jamesian view of the unconscious, had at the end of his life given an endowment to Harvard for the express purpose of uniting academic and clinical psychology. Murray carried on the tradition, pioneering in projective methods for unconscious exploration in the manner of Jung’s earlier association experiments, becoming famous for, among other things, his construction of the widely used Thematic Apperception Test.¹⁷

The Jamesian milieu thus pervaded Jung’s clinical career. But as Jung himself has pointed out, it was James’s books that molded many of Jung’s later, basic intellectual formulations.

The Jamesian Legacy in Jung’s Works

First, James was a guiding spirit in Jung’s eventual break with Freud Jung’s famous re-interpretation of psychic energy, as oriented toward other spiritual motives than that of the purely sexual, was first published in 1911, and later reiterated in a series of nine lectures given at Fordham University in 1912. In his published introduction Jung endeavored to point out that,

It has been wrongly suggested that my attitude signifies a “split” in the psychoanalytic movement. Such schisms can only exist in matters of faith. But psychoanalysis is concerned with knowledge and its ever-changing formulations. I have taken as my guiding principle William James’s pragmatic rule: “You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed. Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid.”¹⁸

Jung took this quote from James’s 1907 edition of Pragmatism and used it to emphasize that while his own clinical experience diverged from Freud’s theories, Jung nevertheless remained a staunch exponent of psychoanalysis in the widest possible sense of its application. But by citing James as he did at such a crucial turning point, Jung essentially returned to the pre-1904 roots of his personal and professional destiny.

Second, James influenced Jung’s formulations of the theory of psychological types. Deriving inspiration from James’s discussion of analytic versus constructive kinds of thinking in the Principles, and James’s discussion in Pragmatism of “tender-” and “tough-minded” types of character, Jung cited James in numerous papers and addressed delivered between 1913 and 1917, culminating in Jung’s volume on Psychological Types published in 1920.¹⁹ There he devoted twenty-one pages to an analysis of James’s philosophical contribution to the type problem. His conclusion was that while James was a true pioneer, being the first to point out this most important distinction between inward versus outward orientation of psychic energy, his classification was too simple, for the one type too easily shaded into the other. A more precise, multidimensional conceptualization was needed, which Jung then presented as his introversion-extraversion model with the attendant functions of thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting.

Third, James had an impact on Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious. While Jung had chided both Freud and James for not going far enough in the actual postulation of a collective reservoir, he credited James with the earliest recognition of F. W. H. Myers’s work on the spectrum of the subliminal consciousness.²⁰ Citing Myers in 1888, James articulated Myers’s notion that the subliminal intelligence ranged from bestial and archaic, through the visible portion of the psychic spectrum, out to the farthest possible reaches of the divine and transcendent. Thus we see that Myers was actually a key source for James’s uniquely American pre-analytic definition of the unconscious and hence an important influence on Jung.

In this regard Jung variously cited James’s ideas on the “fringe” of consciousness; on the “bursting point” of unconscious contents into the field of conscious awareness; on the multidimensional quality of James’s notion of different “fields” of consciousness beyond the margin; and on the sense of a religious “presence,” which Jung interpreted as the operation of an unconscious complex containing elements of previously conscious experience welded in the unconscious to the power of archetypal motifs from the collective reservoir so far not confronted or given symbolization by rational everyday awareness.²¹

Concerning these “fields of consciousness,” Jung quotes James at length,

The important fact which this “field” formula commemorates is the indetermination of the margin. Inattentively realized as is the matter which the margin contains, it is nevertheless there, and helps both to guide our behavior and determine the next movement of our attention. It lies around us like a “magnetic field” inside of which our center of energy turns like a compass needle as the present phase of consciousness alters into its successor. Our whole past store of memories floats beyond this margin, ready at a touch to come in; and the entire mass of residual powers, impulses, and knowledge that constitute our empirical self stretches continuously beyond it. So vaguely drawn are the outlines between what is actual and what is only potential at any given moment of our conscious life, that it is always hard to say of certain mental elements whether we are conscious of them or not.²²

Elsewhere James did say that “There is a continuum of cosmic consciousness against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge, as into a mother-sea or reservoir,”²³; but Jung never cited this quote because it appeared late in James’s more obscure publications. It was enough that Jung caught the Jamesian spirit and sharpened his own ideas by contrast.

Fourth, James also influenced Jung’s attitudes toward science. Jung is fond of quoting “nichts als,” James’s famous “nothing but” phrase, which James had used in Pragmatism to contrast the spectacular rise of positivistic science with the decline in personal meaning and value.²⁴ Jung took it to denote the habit of explaining something unknown by reducing it to something apparently known and thereby devaluing it, a consistent tendency of both the extraverted scientific temperament, and the more orthodox institutions of rational Christianity. Jung also gave James credit as a pioneer in recognizing that science was in reality a plurality of principles, the only possible attitude one could take if science were not to get stranded.²⁵ James saw science pursued with the passion of a religion, an analogy which intrigued Jung immensely, hence he often quoted James’s “Our scientific temper is devout.”²⁶

Fifth, in both his letters and collected works Jung made frequent references to James’s interests and accomplishments. In 1928, Jung briefly compared James’s and Emerson’s American orientation as qualifying examples to Count Hermann Keyserling’s sweeping overgeneralizations in his Das Spektrum Europas.²⁷ In the introduction to Wilhelm’s translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower in 1929, Jung refers to James’s case of Leonora Piper, the psychic medium James discovered and brought to the attention of the Society for Psychical Research.²⁸ Again he refers to James’s case of Mrs. Piper in a letter to Fritz Künkel, the German psychotherapist, in 1946.²⁹ Jung also draws an analogy between his and James’s interpretation of the biblical problem of Job in a letter to Adolph Keller in 1956, praising James’s work.³⁰ And in his Tavistock Lectures, Jung drew examples from James’s famous theory of emotion, suggesting by his reference that James’s interpretation of emotional experience was articulated from an inner frame of reference, from the center of one’s experience of the emotion, and hence was a valid theory from that perspective.³¹

But his greatest tribute Jung delivered in 1936 at the Tercentenary exercises at Harvard University, where Jung received an honorary doctorate and delivered an address with the unassuming title “Factors Influencing Human Behavior.” In that lecture he outlined in its entirety the core and perimeter of his view of the psyche. It was a formidable task, tightly reasoned, comprised solely of conceptual ideas, and well delivered. Then, without mention of any other names throughout his talk, he suddenly ended by saying,

In my survey, far too condensed, I fear, I have left unmentioned many illustrious names. Yet there is one which I should not like to omit. It is that of William James, whose psychological vision and pragmatic philosophy have on more than one occasion been my guides. It was his far-reaching mind which made me realize that the horizons of human psychology widen into the immeasurable.³²

Thus did William James affect the life and thought of Carl Gustav Jung. But that influence did not augur well for Jung’s academic popularity, for just as James has not been read by most psychologists after 1890, Jung has not been taught with any emphasis in American psychiatry. James was rejected for his support of psychic research and mystical religious experience, Jung for his claim of a collective unconscious and its archetypal motifs. Both drew from and contributed to a definition of human potential as vital today as in their own time, but one which has been neglected by the conservative streams of educational thought in the history of psychology and psychiatry alike. As the details of their relationship suggest, a renewal of our appreciation for the wider frames they espoused may well radically transform our notion of what constitutes a knowledge of the whole person.

NOTES

1. The divisions of James’s career are not strict since he wrote on philosophical and literary themes throughout, but at various periods did tend to focus on physiological psychology, abnormal psychology and psychical research, psychology for teachers, psychology of religion, and social metaphysics. See Ralph Barton Perry’s “Annotated Bibliography,” in The Writings of William James, edited by John J. McDermott (New York: Random House, 1967); and “List of Courses Taught by William James at Harvard College, 1872–1907” in the hand of R. B. Perry, James Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard).

2. William James, Psychology: Briefer Course (New York: Henry Holt, 1892).

3. William James, “Notice of J. Breuer’s and S. Freud’s Über den psychischen Mechanismus hysterischer Phänomene,” Psychological Review 1 (1894): 199. See also B. Ross, “William James: A Prime Mover of the Psychoanalytic Movement of America,” in G. E. Gifford, Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, and the New England Medical Scene, 1894–1944 (New York: Science History Publications, 1978). Also E. I. Taylor, “William James on Psychotherapy, Psychical Research, and Religious Experience” (address delivered at the 87th annual convention of the American Psychological Association, New York, 1979).

4. William James, letter on the “Medical Registration Act,” Boston Transcript, 24 March 1894; and his letter on the “Medical Advertisement Abomination," Nation 3 (1894): 88–92.

5. William James, “Exceptional Mental States,” ms. notes, James Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University; and E. I. Taylor, “Reconstruction of William James’s unpublished Lowell Lectures of 1896 on Exceptional Mental States” (in preparation).

6. “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena” (1902), in C. G. Jung, CW 1.

7. The Freud/Jung Letters, edited by William McGuire (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1974).

8. See Nathan G. Hale, Jr. Freud and the Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), chap. 6. Also Morton Prince, Psychotherapy and Personality: Selected Essays, edited by Nathan G. Hale Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 12. At the same time, Adolph Myer, another relation to the Boston Group, was acquainting his staff at the New York Psychiatric Institute with Jung’s association experiments and Freud’s theories of dementia praecox. See James Jackson Putnam and Psychoanalysis, edited by Nathan G. Hale Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 16.

9. Psychotherapeutics: A Symposium (Boston and Toronto: Richard G. Badger, 1910).

10. C. G. Jung, Letters, 2 vols., selected and edited by Gerhard Adler (London: Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1973), 1: 531

11. Ibid., 2: 451–52.

12. Ibid., 2: 326–27; Jung, CW 9.1, p. 55.

13. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, editor’s typescript on deposit at Rare Books, Frances A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University. Referred to with permission.

15. Fanny Bowditch Katz Papers, on deposit at Rare Books, Frances A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University. By permission.

16. W. McDougall, “In Memory of William James,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 25 (1911): 11–29. See also McDougall’s references to Jung in History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 1, edited by Carl Murchison (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), pp. 191–223.