51. Abnormal Psych 1

THE COUNTRY TO WHICH William James returned in September 1893 was far from placid. The Pennsylvania militia had been called out to put down the 1892 strike at the Carnegie steel plant in Homestead. Federal troops had been called into Idaho to protect silver mines, the mine owners, and their strikebreakers from angry miners. In March 1893 Grover Cleveland was sworn in as president. By fall there was spreading financial panic.

The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 mandated that the national government buy four and a half million ounces of silver a month and turn it into money. A gold reserve of a hundred million dollars was supposed to back this open-ended, essentially unlimited coining of silver. Business interests, the sound-money people, the people who always opposed the printing of money as a solution, feared a devalued currency and worked to protect the dollar by stopping the buying and coining of silver. While Congress debated, the gold reserve fell to eighty-one million dollars; confidence fell with it, and the result was “the worst financial depression [the country] has ever known,” James told his friend Carl Stumpf with some exaggeration. But the Gibbenses’ finances crumbled; Alice’s legacy lost two thirds of its value.

Along with the depression and the labor troubles went other changes. The four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to Hispaniola was celebrated at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the “White City” on the lakefront, made mostly of wood and plaster done up to look like marble. The previous year, 1892, had witnessed the Portland Deliverance, in which the annual General Assembly of the Presbyterians declared the Bible to be “without error.” This was a major step toward, if not the actual start of, the modern fundamentalist movement in America.¹ Now, just a year later, in September, one of the most visible of the events under the aegis of the Columbian Exposition was the convening along the lakefront of the World’s Parliament of Religions. This harbinger of a new religious pluralism drew “together the widest spectrum of speakers and participants ever assembled from the religious traditions of the world.”²

The rising national pride so evident at the Chicago exposition induced imperial stirrings. Americans in Hawaii overthrew the monarchy there and clamored for annexation. President Cleveland alienated a portion of his own party by refusing to go along with annexation. The Chinese Exclusion Act was found to be constitutional and was extended for ten years. A large tract of land between Kansas and Oklahoma was bought from the Cherokees by the federal government and opened to homesteading. Patriotism and jingoism became hard to tell apart. Katharine Lee Bates wrote “America the Beautiful,” and Francis Bellamy, who had left the Baptist ministry for a career in advertising, thought up the Pledge of Allegiance and published it on September 8,1892, in The Youth’s Companion.

Upon his return, James was immediately caught up “in the gigantic wheels of the [Harvard] machine,” and, as he wrote his brother in London, it was at first “quite a pleasant sensation” after the dolce far niente of the fifteen-month sabbatical. But his good mood quickly faded as he fell into what he called a “really awful melancholy.” He complained of “a curious sense of incapacity, a sere-and-yellow-leafiness.” James felt that he had forgotten everything he knew about psychology; each lecture seemed “a ghastly farce.” Again and again he referred to his condition as “melancholy.”

By December it lifted. He had undergone eighteen treatments with a Miss Clarke, who apparently practiced a kind of mind cure that involved massage. James now considered that he had suffered “a new kind of melancholy,” the proof of which was that he was now, in his recovered state, experiencing a refreshing kind of sleep he had not known for many years.³

His ailments were a trial not only to him but to those around him. His friend Myers, who was trying to persuade James to shoulder the presidency of the Society for Psychical Research, began a letter to him, “I am very sorry that you are feeling ill: but a touch of something is mixed with my sympathy that I may as well have out—It seems to me that your mental and physical disorganisation and decay is never by any chance perceptible to anyone but yourself,” with much more in the same vein.⁴ Myers’s fatherly hectoring worked: James took the job.

He was also closely involved in the planning of a new journal, to be called the Psychological Review, which was to make up for Hall’s journal, which James now thought a “little inadequate back-shop sectarian affair.”⁵ He was extremely busy teaching, with three courses, one a general psychology course, another a course in cosmology, and the third a brand-new offering in “mental pathology,” in which he took up “general psycho-pathy, cranks and geniuses, morbid impulses... systematized delusions... hysteria... double personality and other trance states... the history of witchcraft... classic types of insanity... [and] criminological literature.”⁶ This interest in what would today be called abnormal psychology would be an important part of James’s teaching, reviewing, and public lecturing over the next three years.

James’s long-standing but newly focused curiosity about sleep and hypnotic states gains a sharp interest for us when we recall that the standard history of “dynamic psychology,” with its central emphasis on psychoanalysis, describes its subject as an arc of development from mesmerism to hypnosis to psychoanalysis.⁷ Rapport in mesmerism and in hypnosis is the same thing as transference in psychoanalysis. All three phenomena depend on the existence of subliminal or subconscious or split or dissociated selves, and James’s new interest in abnormal psychology, or “exceptional mental states,” was concentrated on his intense attraction to dissociated personality. With his two big psychology books behind him, James was becoming less and less interested in laboratory psychology and increasingly drawn to clinical, therapeutic psychology.

James’s life and that of his friends and family tossed up new conundrums, strange evidences of buried selves. In January 1894 came the news, devastating for Henry, hard to believe for William, of the apparent suicide of Constance Woolson in Venice. Woolson, a successful American novelist and short story writer, had long enjoyed an intimate, and for the most part concealed, friendship with Henry. “For my part,” William wrote, “however gloomy to think of are the sufferings which must precede suicide, I think such an act as hers must have had an element of triumphant feeling about it. It is strange to me to hear you and KPL [Katharine Loring] write of her morbidness, when what struck me most about her during the short time I saw her was her gaiety.” Harry replied that William’s impression was natural enough and shared by many, but that there was another Constance Woolson under the cheerful one, that her gaiety was “a purely superficial and social, a purely exterior manifestation... a cheerfulness which was really intensely mechanical and which left her whole general feeling about life, her intimate melancholy, utterly unexpressed—any more than the flower pot in the window of a room expresses the figure lying on the bed.”⁸

In January 1894 James read and reviewed with great admiration Pierre Janet’s État Mentale des Hystériques. Janet’s work, James told a friend, “seems to outweigh in importance all the ‘exact’ laboratory measurements put together,” and had “opened an entirely new chapter in human nature,” leading “to a new method of relieving human suffering.”⁹ As we saw, James and Janet had met in 1889, when they attended the First International Congress of Physiological Psychology and the overlapping First International Congress of Experimental and Therapeutic Hypnotism, both in early August. Janet had presented his thesis work—essentially his book L’Automatisme Psychologique—at the latter convention. James was much struck with Janet’s description of “hidden selves” and discussed it in The Principles of Psychology, published the following year.

Pierre Janet, whose uncle Paul was a well-known philosopher, came from a well-off aristocratic Parisian family. At fifteen he had suffered a depression and a religious crisis. He attended the École Normale Supérieure at the same time as Émile Durkheim, and in 1882 heard the famous lecture by Charcot that rehabilitated hypnosis. Janet was, like James, a professor of philosophy with a major interest in psychology. When the two met, Janet was thirty and just beginning his medical studies. He was slender, stood five feet five inches, wore pince-nez and a beard, and lived in a splendid apartment at 54 Rue de Varenne. His consulting room was small and held an antique desk and satin-covered chairs and a divan. A Boston visitor observed that he had a “staccato personality... He tended to make short sharp chopping gestures with his extended hands in order to emphasize his point.”¹⁰

James was very enthusiastic about the new book, saying it “set the seal on the revolution which during the last decade has been going on in our conceptions of hysterical disease.” Pointing out that “hysteria is now allowed to be a male complaint” as well as a female one, James gave this summary of Janet’s work: “In the constitution called hysterical the threshold of the principal consciousness is not fixed but moveable. It can be shifted by physical and moral shocks and strains so that sensations and ideas of which the patient ought to be fully aware become ‘subliminal’ or buried and forgotten... The nucleus of these subconscious fixed ideas usually consists of reminiscences of the shock by which the mind was originally shattered.” These suppressed—Freud would say repressed—shocks become associated with suppressed strata of personality, sometimes appearing as multiple personalities or split consciousness or dissociated personalities (all these terms occur in James’s writing between 1893 and 1895).

Where earlier investigators often wished to prove the existence of such personalities or states of personality by means of automatic writing or hypnosis, Janet sought to cure the affliction. Building on the by now well-established fact that people under hypnosis tend to be suggestible, Janet went after the subconscious “fixed ideas” of a patient one by one. His patient “Marcella” had hallucinations that reproduced earlier painful experiences. “As each one was removed by suggestion, a deeper and older one came to the surface and worked itself off until with a final outbreak of suicidal frenzy, the girl got entirely well.” Mesmeric healing had given way here to hypnotic healing. With Janet we are on the threshold—as Henri Ellenberger remarks—“of all modern dynamic psychology.”¹¹

The same issue of the Psychological Review that contained James’s review of Janet also had a brief review by James of the short paper by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud that is usually identified as the starting point of the psychoanalytic movement.¹² James was probably led to Breuer and Freud by Janet, who concluded his État Mentale des Hystériques with a long, laudatory account of this paper, published in 1893 as “On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena.”¹³

James was acutely aware that a word such as “hysteria” was an easy label to slap on any conduct one might consider pathological. “The name hysteria, it must be remembered,” he wrote at about this time, “is not an explanation of anything, but merely the title of a new set of problems.”¹⁴ What had cheered James about Janet, and now about Breuer and Freud, was the emphasis on a possible cure, a novel method of treatment. “Hysteria for [Breuer and Freud] starts always from a shock and is a ‘disease of the memory,’” James reported. This brief review is the first known mention of Freud by an American, and while Breuer and Freud’s paper probably meant less to James than Janet’s work or Myers’s, he understood what was happening and gave a capsule description of what would soon become known as the psychoanalytic treatment. “Certain reminiscences of the [initial traumatizing] shock fall into the subliminal consciousness, where they can only be discovered in ‘hypnoid’ states. If left there, they act as permanent ‘psychic traumata,’ thorns in the spirit, so to speak. The cure is to draw them out in hypnotism, let them produce all their emotional effects, however violent, and work themselves off.” This was the famous cathartic treatment, the “talking cure.” The phrase was first used by Bertha Pappenheim, the “Anna O” who was Breuer’s patient, whose case had aroused the curiosity of Breuer’s young colleague Freud, and whose story was a major source for the paper James was reviewing.

 

James turned fifty-two in January 1894 and shortly thereafter suffered his first (recorded) attack of angina pectoris, the severe chest pains usually caused by an insufficient flow of blood to the heart.¹⁵ Having complained of reactivated neurasthenia for the past couple of years, James now experienced compounded symptoms. He came down with influenza around Christmas 1893, and by March 1894 was so fatigued that he tried a course of eight injections of Brown-Sequard’s testicular elixir, a “glycerine extract prepared from bull’s testicles, used hypodermically every other day.”¹⁶ Many patients reported a stimulating effect “not unlike that of strong coffee... The sexual appetite if present is increased, if absent it is often renewed, sometimes in elderly men to an inconvenient extent.”¹⁷ But the main result of James’s taking these shots was a painful abscess that kept him in bed for five weeks. In May he had a persistent headache; for treatment he went to Miss Clarke, the mind-cure healer to whom he had gone the previous December and whose ministrations seemed to help, though James did express reservations.¹⁸

In March, before the abscess laid him up, James publicly opposed a bill then pending in the Massachusetts legislature that would have outlawed all healing except by licensed physicians. This would have made mind-cure methods illegal, except when practiced by an M.D., and it would have wiped out the therapeutic massage that James was trying. “I regard therapeutics as in too undeveloped a state for us to be able to afford to stamp out the contributions of all fanatics and one-sided geniuses,” he explained to a friend. He wrote a long letter to the Boston Transcript explaining his position. In a second letter to the editor he said that he was altogether in favor of another bill in the legislature that would make it illegal to call oneself Doctor or describe oneself as a physician unless one had an M.D. In other words, he was all for protecting people from fraud but against the outlawing of what we now call alternative medicine.¹⁹

Also in March 1894—a busy month—another hidden life that had found expression, though sadly no cure or rescue, popped to the surface like Queequeg’s coffin. It was the diary of Alice James, privately printed by Katharine Loring in an edition of four copies, one for herself and one for each of Alice’s surviving brothers. William wrote at once to Henry to say the diary had produced “a unique and tragic impression of personal power venting itself on no opportunity,” and he added that “it ought some day to be published. I am proud of it as a leaf in the family laurel crown.”

Harry agreed. He thought it “magnificent” and “wonderful,” spoke of his “immense impressedness by it.” He wrote of the “extraordinary intensity of her will and personality [which] really would have made the equal, the reciprocal life of a ‘well’ person—in the usual world—almost impossible to her—so that her disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the only solution for her of the practical problem of life.”²⁰ But for Harry there was a problem. A fair amount of Alice’s diary recorded gossip that he had retailed to her, complete with names and his often biting comments left in. Harry was all for publishing it, yes, but only in an edited form, with some things left out and some names changed. It would be 1934 before the diary was made public and Alice’s voice began to be brought back.²¹

“I make it a rule,” Alice wrote, “always to believe the compliments implicitly for five minutes and to simmer gently for twenty more.” She may have had a narrow field, but she had a good eye and a lively wit. She wrote how at fifteen she had read a description of the body of a murdered man given by a witness: “He looked pleasant-like and foaming at the mouth.” She could laugh at her sickbed misery and the times “when my shawls were falling off to the left, my cushions falling out to the right, and the duvet off my knees,” but she could also face things straight on. “Pain was as the essence of the Universe to my consciousness,” she wrote. “One must know how to suffer and the science of pain is the unique science of life.”²²

William’s reading that March included a book he despised; it was by Max Nordau and was called Degeneration (Entartung). Applying “Nordau’s method to the description of his own person,” James said, revealed the author as “a megalomaniac of the arrogant and insulting type, and... a victim of insane delusions about a conspiracy of hysterics and degenerates menacing the moral world with destruction unless the sound-minded speedily arm and organize in its defense.”²³ Nordau, who had changed his name from Sudfeld, saw degeneration everywhere: in Wagner, Tolstoy, Ruskin, Burne-Jones, Rosetti, Zola, Ibsen, and Nietzsche. “The trouble,” wrote James, “is that such writers as Nordau use the descriptive names of symptoms merely as an artifice for giving objective authority to their personal dislikes. The medical terms become mere ‘appreciative’ clubs to knock men down with.”

One place that had clearly not degenerated, in James’s view, was Harvard, which celebrated Charles W. Eliot’s twenty-fifth year as president in June 1894. Beginning in 1869, Eliot had doubled Harvard’s endowment every seven years, reaching $6.7 million in 1889. Faculty salaries had increased faster than that. The number of professors had doubled, from 45 to 90, between 1869 and 1889, and the number of undergraduates had grown from 529 to 1,180 in the same time. Incoming tides of books overflowed the libraries and overwhelmed successive classification schemes. By 1890 there were 272,000 books and 150,000 pamphlets in the college library alone. Despite all the buildings put up under Eliot, Harvard was unable to provide living space for all its students. On Mount Auburn Street, Claverly Hall was one of the first of many grand apartment buildings built with private capital and operated by independent owners, who rented rooms at exorbitant rates to the better-off students. If Harvard was transformed from a country college to an internationally respected university between 1869 and 1894, it was due more to Eliot than to anyone or anything else. He quoted approvingly (and approximately) Ezra Cornell’s saying, “I would found an institution in which anyone may study anything.”²⁴

James sent Eliot a letter congratulating him on his years as president, praising, among other things, his “devotion to ideals.” Eliot replied warmly: “I have privately supposed myself to have been pursuing certain educational ideals; but so many excellent persons have described the fruits of the past twenty-five years as lands, buildings, collections, money and thousands of students, that I have sometimes feared that to the next generation I should appear as nothing but a successful philistine.” No single thing Eliot did for Harvard was more important than his encouragement of William James. “You carry me back farther than anybody else—to 1861,” Eliot wrote, and he closed his letter, “Your coming to the university and your career as a teacher and writer have been among my most solid grounds of satisfaction.” James was not moved by the inevitable testimonial dinner. “Choate’s address to Eliot very common and poor,” he told Alice. “Eliot’s reply too cold.” But James valued Eliot’s letter all the same, and he sent copies to his wife and to Harry in London.²⁵