William James, the father of American psychology – Online Psychologists

The philosopher and psychologist William James He was in charge of investigating one of the most basic and universal concepts regarding the study of our mind: consciousness.

William James was born in 1842 in New York and came from a wealthy upper-class family. Thanks to his family's good finances, he was able to study at good schools in the United States and Europe, and research on different philosophical and artistic currents that characterized every place he set foot in.

His father was a well-known theologian and the bourgeois culture that connected his entire family was what It helped him to be ambitious when setting life goals.

Although William James had everything to become a very well-positioned person, the fact is that in 1864 he began to study medicine at Harvard, but a series of academic and health problems made him He did not finish it until 1896and, in the end, He never got to work as a doctor.

The fact is that he always liked medicine, but there was another field that caught his attention: the binomial formed between Philosophy and Psychologytwo 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.

In 1873 James returned to Harvard this time to teach Psychology and Philosophy. Since he graduated in medicine he had subjected his life to a philosophical examination and He had tried so hard that he wanted to be a teacher. despite not having studied for it.

The topics he was interested in were of the type that had marked the beginnings of the history of the great thinkers. He could not focus his studies on psychological research since this was not yet consolidated, so decided to focus on studying consciousness and emotional states. These are always present in our way of interacting with the environment.

When he began to study and research about consciousness encountered many difficulties. According to William James, even defining what consciousness is is very complicated. And if you don't know exactly what you're going to study, it's very difficult to get it right. For this reason, His first challenge was to explain what consciousness is in philosophical terms. so that its operating mechanisms and verifiable foundations can later be tested.

He approached what it was by drawing a analogy between consciousness and a river. A metaphor to describe it as a flow of thoughts, images, and mental ideas.

That's why William James can also be related to philosophygiven that the figure of the river already had been used many millennia before by Heraclitusone of the first great thinkers of the West.

The psychologist said that in the aforementioned flow of ideas and images that form consciousness existed some transitive and other substantive parts.

The Transitive clauses often refer to other elements of the stream of thoughtswhile the nouns are those in which we can stop for a while and notice a sense of permanence.

Actually, all those parts of consciousness are transitory and private in the sense that we can only know other people indirectly, through our own awareness of what we are experiencing.

The practical consequences of this for psychological research were clear. This idea meant admitting that experimental psychology I was not able to fully understandonly through methods, How the human mind worksTo examine the stream of thoughts, James says, you have to start studying the «I»which appears from the stream of consciousness itself.

Therefore, studying human psychology is equivalent to studying a construct as abstract as the «I», something that experimental psychologists did not like.

The other important theory that James proposed in his work is the theory of emotion by James-Lange since he and the Danish physician Carl Lange formed the idea independently of each other in the 19th century. This theory relates that Emotions arise as a mental reaction to the physiological conditions that result from the stimulus, rather than from the stimulus itself.

For example, we don't smile because we are happy, but We are happy because our conscience has been informed that we are smiling.

To prove it, James revealed the a person's reaction to encountering a bear. He said that instead of seeing a bear, feeling afraid and running away, we see a bear, run away and are afraid of it because of our mind's perception of the physical response.

So it's not the bear that makes us realize we're scared, it's the adrenaline and racing heart that makes us realize it. That's why, Different types of emotions are the result of different physiological reactions.

In the end, William James left psychology behind and defined it as “a nasty little topic.” As a consequence decided to focus on philosophy and religion.

Most of James' ideas have been some of the principles on which Interesting proposals have been put forward which are still in force today.

In his book The Principles of Psychology (Principles of Psychology) there are many ideas that serve to understand how the human brain worksdespite having been written at a time when almost nothing was known about the existence of synaptic spaces that separate neurons from each other.

Also, that pragmatic approach that gave to Psychology is the philosophical foundation of the majority of psychological theories and therapies that They place more importance on the usefulness of thoughts and affective states that in its correspondence with an objective reality.

Due to the union between Psychology and the philosophical current of American pragmatism, it is called He is the father of Psychology in the United States.

Although William James participated in the difficult mission of contributing to the beginnings of psychology, He showed great interest in what he studied and researched and was able to use it to make exceptionally insightful predictions about the human mind.