The Story of Psychology (31 page)

He based this on introspection; one had only to look searchingly within to perceive that one’s emotions develop their power from their physical manifestations:

Virtually the same theory was advanced at about the same time by a Danish physiologist, Carl Lange, whose work James acknowledged. Although he and Lange did not collaborate on the theory, it soon became known as the James-Lange theory, and is discussed, under that name, in today’s textbooks.

The theory has had a curious history. It immediately provoked much controversy and research, and eventually was shown to be faulty in a number of ways. Walter Cannon, a Harvard physiologist, demonstrated in 1927 that certain dissimilar emotions are accompanied by generally similar bodily reactions; the physical responses are not specific enough to account for the different emotions. Both anger and fear, for instance, are marked by a speeded-up heart rate and an elevated blood pressure. Moreover, said Cannon, visceral reaction times are slow but emotional reactions are often immediate; physical changes thus cannot always precede the emotion.
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Cannon concluded that an emotional stimulus activates the thalamus (more recent research has, instead, pinpointed the hypothalamus and limbic system); from the brain, messages go out both to the autonomic nervous system, generating visceral changes, and to the cerebral cortex, creating the subjective feelings of the emotion.

Yet the James-Lange theory is still highly regarded by psychologists. It was correct in postulating that emotions have physical causes, although more recent and more complex explanations are based on physiological research with animals and psychological research with humans; evidence from these studies indicates that the arousing stimulus activates autonomic nervous processes in the brain, sending signals both to the body and to the mind, while other evidence shows that the experience of emotion is often the joint result of physiological arousal and cognitive appraisal based on experience and the situation.
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Despite the James-Lange theory’s shortcomings, it has practical applications. To the degree that we control a physiological response to a stimulus, we govern the associated emotion. We count to ten to control rage, whistle to keep up courage, go running or play tennis to shake off depression. Many contemporary psychotherapists teach their patients to perform relaxation exercises to reduce anxiety or fear and to practice standing, walking, and talking in a confident manner to engender a feeling of confidence in
themselves. In the 1980s the psychologist Paul Ekman and his colleagues at the University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco, showed that when volunteers consciously make facial expressions associated with certain emotions—surprise, disgust, sadness, anger, fear, happiness—they affect their heart rates and skin temperatures and induce in themselves a modicum of the appropriate emotion.
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The

Anyone who reads James’s psychological writings is bound to be frequently puzzled: James is always clear and persuasive, but often equally so on opposing sides of an issue. He is chronically self-contradictory, not out of muddleheadedness but because he is intellectually too expansive to be confined within a closed or consistent system of thought. Gordon Allport, a leading psychological researcher and theorist of several decades ago, summed up James’s chameleonlike qualities:

Allport, however, found this inconsistency a virtue. He spoke of James’s “productive paradoxes”; seeing both sides of a question often laid open the kernel of a problem and left it ready for others to work on.
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But the result was that James’s influence on psychology, though great, was fragmented; though pervasive, was never dominant. James avoided creating a system, founded no school, trained few graduate students, and had no band of followers. Remarkably, however, a number of his ideas became part of mainstream psychology, particularly in America. Wundt won out over James as far as laboratory methods and experimentation were concerned; James’s psychology, with its richness, realism, and pragmatism, won out over the Wundtian system.
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As Raymond Fancher has said:

Outside the mainstream, James influenced psychology in two other respects, both of them practical. One: His suggested applications of psychological principles to teaching became the core of educational psychology. The other: In 1909, James, as an executive committee member of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, was largely responsible for getting the Rockefeller Foundation and similar groups to allocate millions of dollars to the mental hygiene movement, the development of mental hospitals, and the training of mental health professionals.

When the American Psychological Association celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary in 1977, the opening speaker, David Krech, spoke of William James as “our father who begat us.” Referring to the past three quarters of a century of work on questions James had raised, Krech said, “Even if I were to total up all advances in gains and achievements and multiply them by a factor of hope, the total would still not suffice as an adequate tribute to lay at James’s feet.”
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M
ore than any other figure in the annals of psychology, Sigmund Freud has been both extravagantly praised and savagely castigated for his theories, venerated and condemned as a person, and regarded as a great scientist, a cult leader, and a fraud. His admirers and critics agree that his impact on psychology, the psychotherapies, and the way human beings in Western society think about themselves has been larger than that of anyone else in the history of the science; for the rest, they seem to be talking about different people and different bodies of knowledge.

The sociologist and Freud scholar Philip Rieff said in 1959 that “the greatness of the man is beyond question, complementing the greatness of his mind,” and rated his writing “perhaps the most important body of thought committed to paper in the twentieth century.” But several years later a well-known scholar and humanities professor, Erich Heller, asserted in the
Times Literary Supplement
that Freud was one of the most overrated figures of our time, and Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar called psychoanalytic theory “the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the century.”

The political scientist Paul Roazen judged Freud to be “unquestionably one of the greatest psychologists of history” and “a great thinker,” and the theologian Paul Tillich considered him “the most profound of all the depth psychologists.” But an English scholar, E. M. Thornton, gathered up bits of evidence that, in her opinion, prove “that [Freud’s]
central postulate, the ‘unconscious mind,’ does not exist, that his theories were baseless and aberrational,” that he formulated them while under the influence of cocaine, and that he was “a false and faithless prophet.”

Freud’s admirers, including the historian Peter Gay, author of a massive 1988 biography, see him as a brave and heroic fighter for truth. His detractors see him as a neurotic and ambitious egotist who sought notice by propounding fantastic theories. In two lengthy diatribes in
The New York Review of Books
in 1993 and 1994, and later in other writings, Frederick Crews, a professor of English literature, established himself as perhaps the most savage of the many Freud bashers, saying that as a therapy psychoanalysis is “indifferently successful” and “vastly inefficient”; that as an empirical approach to scientific knowledge it is “fatally contaminated” by assuming, in dialogue with patients, the very ideas it seeks to corroborate; that Freud himself was “indifferent to his patients’ suffering” and that they achieved only mediocre or negative therapeutic results; that he often sought to “nail” the patient “with hastily conceived interpretations which he then drove home unabatingly”; and so on and on.

Most historians of psychology credit Freud with a long string of influential discoveries, the most noteworthy being that of the dynamic unconscious. But Frank Sulloway, a historian of science, has learnedly argued that Freud’s concepts were largely “creative transformations” of ideas already extant in neurology and biology, and the scholar Henri Ellenberger has painstakingly made the case that Freud’s discovery of the dynamic unconscious merely crystallized and gave shape to diffuse ideas that had already been put forward by many of his predecessors and contemporaries.

Freud saw himself, and most of his biographers have seen him, as an outsider—an isolated Jew in anti-Semitic Vienna—courageously battling medical conservatives to bring humanity the benefit of his discoveries. His disparagers say that he exaggerated the anti-Semitism around him in order to present himself as an embattled hero and that in any case he got many of his ideas from his friend Wilhelm Fliess but passed them off as his own.

What is one to make of such contradictions?

But, then, what is one to make of a man who was himself a bundle of contradictions?
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Radical in his theories about human nature and a militant atheist, Freud was, except in his early years, a political conservative. He espoused liberated attitudes toward sexuality but was himself a
model of decorum and sexual restraint. He claimed that he rid himself of his own neuroses through his famous self-analysis, but throughout his life suffered from assorted neurotic symptoms, among them migraine headaches, urinary and bowel problems, an almost morbid dislike of the telephone, a tendency to faint at times of intense interpersonal stress, and a pathological addiction to cigars. (He smoked twenty a day and could not stop even after he developed cancer of the jaw as a result.) He hated Vienna and was never part of its easygoing café society but could not bring himself to leave it for any more congenial place until 1938, when he moved to London after the Nazi takeover of Austria.

At times, he was unabashedly egotistical; he likened himself to Copernicus and Darwin, and told an admirer of one of his later works, “This is my worst book, the book of an old man. The genuine Freud was really a great man.”
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At other times he was unassuming and modest; late in life, in “An Autobiographical Study,” he wrote:

He was surrounded by a large and loving family and a circle of devoted followers but over the years fought with a number of his closest friends and disciples. In his seventies he ruefully wrote:

In photographs, Freud invariably looks formal and grave—impeccably dressed, neatly barbered, somber and unsmiling—yet his own writings and the reminiscences of those who knew him well attest that he was uncommonly witty and that he loved telling funny stories with a psychological point to them. An example from his study of humor,
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious:

If [a doctor] enquires from a youthful patient whether he has ever had anything to do with masturbation, the answer is sure to be: “
O, na
,
nie!
” [German for “Oh, no, never”—but in German
Onanie
means “masturbation”].
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And a longer joke, of the kind Freud enjoying telling and told well: