17. Hitting Bottom

THE EARLY MONTHS OF 1870 mark the low point of William James’s early life. His back gave out in January on his twenty-eighth birthday, bringing with it what he called a “moral collapse.” On the first of February he “about touched bottom.” On the ninth of March he learned that Minnie had died the day before. On the twenty-second he wrote his moving apostrophe to her. And sometime this spring, most likely between Minnie’s death and the end of April, James experienced his worst crisis of all, a terrible moment of unstringing fear that became a defining moment in his life. If he noted it in the diary he kept for recording his troubles, the entry has disappeared (many pages were cut out of this intriguing diary), but he wrote a vivid account of it many years later.¹

“Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects,” James wrote,

 

I went one evening into a dressing room in the twilight to procure some article that was there: when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them enclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely nonhuman.

 

As often happens when James recounts a dream or describes an essentially imaginative experience, things merge into one another. “This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other,” he went on. “That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him.” James moved easily toward the Other, toward the troubling, like the children of the Plains Indians who were taught to move toward, not away from, the first sounds of trouble. “There was such a horror of him,” James continued, “and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear.” The experience was eerily similar to his father’s vastation, and, also like his father’s, this was a life-altering moment. “After this,” he said, “the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since.”²

The experience not only changed James, it changed his view of other people. “It was like a revelation,” he said, “and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since.” James added that while the vividness of the experience faded, he was nevertheless “unable to go out into the dark alone” for months, that he dreaded to be left alone, and that he concealed his condition from his mother. Then he struck off in an entirely different direction. “I have always felt that this experience of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing.” And he expanded on the point in terms that remind us again of his father but that had their most recent echoes with Minnie: “I mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful that if I had not clung to scripture texts like ‘the eternal God is my refuge,’ etc., ‘Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden,’ etc., ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ etc. I think I should have grown really insane.”³

We do not know when James first wrote this experience down; it first appears in print in 1902, in his chapter on the sick soul in The Varieties of Religious Experience. But what matters as much as the exact sequence of William’s troubles this spring is the terrible compounding of them. Between 1868 and 1873, we cannot trace in James’s inner life a plain pattern of collapse after which he slowly but surely climbs out of his depression into a steadily more active and happy life. The pattern is rather one of crash, resolution, and only partial recovery, followed by another downward spiral, which is halted painfully by new resolutions followed by uncertain, easily sidetracked recovery, then down again, and so on around the whole discouraging circle.

The central, extended account given above may have been one specific event, but there were others quite like it, though none so vividly and memorably told. When William wrote his description of his own vastation, he footnoted his father’s similar experience, which had occurred around the same age. It is interesting—perhaps even suspicious—that James left no record of the experience at the time, unless he wrote it and then cut it out of his diary. He was generally all too ready, as his mother noted, to dwell on every last detail of his troubles, and it is possible that he wrote a diary account that is now missing. Still, in the case of major problems, as with his back trouble in 1866, James had the same impulse to concealment as his brother Henry.

Two more things about this experience stand out. One is the turn to biblical texts as a defense against a feeling of impending madness. James was not at the time much of a churchgoer or Bible reader, though he was becoming more and more interested in religious questions in early 1870. Rereading his father’s works, exploring Buddhism and the Upanishads, shaken terribly by Minnie’s death and by her urgently religious correspondence, James seems to have recognized genuine religious feeling in himself this spring. The above account, with its headlong, AA-like narrative, may well have been the hour at which religion finally struck for him, just when the clock had pointed to despair.

Notable too in the above account is the clarity, almost the sunshine, of hindsight. James says his own case had “the merit of extreme simplicity.” In layman’s language, he called it an incident of “sudden fear”; it was probably what would now be called a panic attack. In the medical language of the time, James called it an “acute neurasthenic attack with phobia.”⁴ Neurasthenia, also called nervous exhaustion or nervous prostration, was a new diagnosis in 1870. It was the specialty of Dr. George Beard, who wrote an article on it, published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal on April 29, 1869, well before his widely noticed book American Nervousness appeared in 1881.

Beard understood neurasthenia to be a “large family of functional nervous disorders that are increasingly frequent among the indoor classes of civilized countries, and that are especially frequent in the northern and eastern parts of the U.S.”⁵ Beard thought neurasthenia to be most prevalent in “brain-working households,” he thought it was transmittable, and he considered it to be an essentially American disease.⁶ Since the main symptom was understood to be the depletion of a person’s nervous energy, which was then widely assumed to be finite, the generally prescribed treatment was rest and a proper diet. William James suffered from chronic neurasthenia for years—his fear episode was an example of the acute form of the disease—with the added problem that his eyes were affected (as his father’s had been after his experience), making it impossible for him for years at a time to read for more than three or four hours a day.

Yet he did read—often was read to—and his reading was sometimes quite literally lifesaving. If the sudden spasm of identification with the green-skinned idiot was representative of the worst of William’s bad moments, an episode toward the end of April illustrates his peculiar absorptive resiliency, his uncanny ability to pick up redemptive ideas from his reading. Perhaps it was grasping at straws, but it served him, and sometimes the straw turned out to be a solid plank. On the last day of April 1870, six weeks after the death of Minnie Temple, he wrote in his diary: “I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s 2nd Essay and saw no reason why his definition of free will—the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”⁷

William had first read the work of Charles Renouvier (1815–1903) in October 1868, toward the end of his Wanderjahr. Renouvier was a neo-Kantian, but it was his “vigor of style and compression, going to the core of half a dozen things in a single sentence,” that first drew William’s admiring attention. The first work of Renouvier’s that William read was a hundred-page summary of nineteenth-century French thought. Renouvier gave a great deal of space to the development of positivism, to Comte and his followers, but he treated it as something already past its prime, on the defensive, and sustaining itself only with difficulty.⁸

Positivism, priding itself on equating knowledge with measurement and on having built itself on what were understood to be physical laws governing everything from matter to human society, was, for Renouvier, a new dress for the old doctrine of determinism. But his great point is just the opposite, that humans are free. Renouvier is elegant and urbane, has a highly developed sense of irony and a wry appreciation of how proponents of one kind of belief can end up adopting the views of opponents—a sort of Stockholm syndrome for intellectuals. “The same persons,” he writes, “who valiantly won religious liberty for themselves in the sixteenth century became the ardent proponents of an omnipotent deity and absolute predestination, and those who defended ecclesiastical government and constraint of conscience acknowledged a certain moral freedom for humans in their dealings with God. The Protestants and the Jansenists [predestinarian Roman Catholics] fought against free will, and the Jesuits defended it. In freeing oneself from one authority, it is natural to look, by way of compensation, for support and certitude from another; in putting up with one aspect of authority, it is natural to seek emancipation—even if only the shadow of it—from another.” For Renouvier the path to freedom began with Kant’s critical philosophy, which, he said, “has its center in morals, and, within morals, its center in freedom... It leads and subordinates everything to the recognition of human freedom.” Renouvier’s clinching argument in the 1867 piece, repeated in the essay on freedom James read in April 1870, is the argument James seized on. “This recognition,” writes Renouvier, “is itself a free act, and critical philosophy demands that each of us perform this act.”⁹

Somehow James recognized that perception alone was not enough, that perception was not helpful unless it led to action. In the diary entry for April 30, 1870, James goes on in a sort of dialogue with himself:. “For the remainder of this year, I will abstain from the mere speculation and contemplative grubelei [brooding, with overtones of grubbing in a pit, mine, or grave] in which my nature takes most delight, and voluntarily cultivate the feeling of moral freedom, by reading books favorable to it, as well as by acting.” He determined to try this course until January, when he thought he might “perhaps return to metaphysic study and skepticism without danger to my powers of action.”

In attempting to reroute his energies from speculation to action, James already understood the power and importance of habit, as both inertia and momentum. “Recollect,” the new Willy sternly warns the old Willy, “that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action—and consequently accumulate grain on grain of wilful choice like a very miser—never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number.” He felt that he was making a beginning. “Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate initiative which Bain posits as needful for the acquisition of habits,” and he repeats the original insight. “Not in maxims, not in anschauungen [perceptions, opinions] but in accumulated acts of thought lies salvation.”¹⁰

This is a substantial diary entry, quite enough for a single day, one might think, but James does not stop here. Taking himself at his word, he pushes himself on to further acts of thought, the first a repudiation. “Hitherto,” he writes, “when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, without carefully waiting for contemplation of the external world to determine all for me, suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into.” In a flash, like a person impulsively jumping a brook, James is on the other side. “Now I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power.” Not only must he act, he must believe in his actions. And in order to believe, he must reformulate the question for himself. Resiliency, the ability, even when down—especially when down—to regroup and move forward, is the central fact of the inner life of William James. “My belief to be sure can’t be optimistic,” he concludes, “but I will posit it, life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world. Life shall be built [on] doing and creating and suffering.”¹¹

Optimism is a temperamental possibility as well as an explanatory style, and therefore it is a temptation for many people. James is unusual in trying to find for himself a personal starting point that excludes what Walt Whitman once called “mere optimism.” In one way, this is the Stoic turn: do not concern yourself with things that are beyond your control; concentrate on those things that are under your control. But there is more than Stoicism here. (Indeed a Stoic might well include suicide as something under one’s control.)

This is one of the first of James’s great psychological insights. Almost one hundred years later, in 1968, Erik Erikson said that James’s “formulation for a self-governing as well as a resisting aspect of the ego” is “a principle dominant in today’s ego psychology.” He calls attention to the way James insists on “the inner synthesis which organizes experience and guides action.”¹² Erikson goes further than this. He cites Henry Senior’s report on another, slightly later moment when William told his father that he had “given up the notion that all mental disorders require to have a physical basis.” Taken together, says Erikson, these two insights “are the basis of psychotherapy, which, no matter how it is described and conceptualized, aims at the restoration of the patient’s power of choice.”¹³

This is a sweeping claim, but there is, to be sure, a not yet exhausted force in James’s spare phrasing of “the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world.” But even more interesting, and certainly harder to explain, is the fact that James reached and formulated this general, not to say abstract, truth out of private troubles, in a heave of will, a practical effort to change his own life.