Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

CHAPTER 15
William James
FRANCES HELYAR
William James’s career may best be conceptualized as a bridge. His many biographers point
out the way his work serves to link the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Europe and
the United States, Darwin and Freud, the ancient realm of philosophy and the new world of
psychology, and professional and popular audiences. There are a number of ways to gauge
the importance of his work, including the “firsts” he accomplished, the dominance in the field
of educational psychology of several of his students, and the influence he still exerts on his
theoretical descendents. He lived in the company of the well-known and the yet-to-be famous
thinkers of his lifetime: the novelist Henry James was one of his brothers; their father counted
among his acquaintances Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau;
among James’s friends were Charles Peirce and Oliver Wendell Holmes; his sometime dinner
companions included Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and John Dewey; and among his students
were G. Stanley Hall, Edward Thorndike, and W.E.B. Dubois. William James’s major works
are still in print over a hundred years after their first publication and while in some ways his
work represents a narrow view of the world, reflecting his privileged upbringing and professorial
career, his writings are examined and interpreted to this day. It is a mark of the complexity of
his contribution to educational psychology that direct lines may be drawn at the same time from
James to the behaviorism of Thorndike, and the phenomenology of Husserl (Feinstein, 1984;
Edie, 1987; Cotkin, 1990). In this way, James stands both in opposition to and as a precursor of
postformalism.
THE LIFE
William James was born in 1842 to a wealthy New York family with recent roots in Ireland.
James’s father had strong views on education and mysticism (James’s biographer Howard Feinstein
calls the elder James a “renegade theologian” [p. 15]). The main result seems to have been
that between 1855 and 1858, and again in 1859–1860, Henry Sr. removed the entire family of five
children to Europe in order to give them an education in the senses. This trans-Atlantic journey
was one William would take repeatedly during his lifetime. Family biographer F. O. Mathiessen
says William resented his self-perceived “lack of exact discipline” (p. 73), a consequence of