Vol. 9 No. 5 · 5 March 1987
pages 13-14 | 3082 words
Introspection and the Body
P.N. Johnson-Laird
- William James: His Life and Thought by Gerald Myers
Yale, 628 pp, £30.00, October 1986, ISBN 0 300 03417 2
Henry James Sr was a redoubtable patriarch who received a large inheritance from his father – an Irish immigrant who had made a fortune in upstate New York – and spent it on a life of leisure and religiosity. He shuttled back and forth to Europe on a kind of one-man cultural exchange which combined the grand tour with a Continental education for his children. During a period in England, he introduced them to the likes of Carlyle, Tennyson and John Stuart Mill. He expressed himself in a characteristically Jamesian way: ‘I will not attempt to state the year in which I was born, because it is not a fact embraced in my own knowledge, but content myself with saying instead, that the earliest event of my biographic consciousness is that of my having been carried out into the streets one night, in the arms of my negro nurse, to witness a grand illumination in honour of the treaty of peace then just signed with Great Britain.’ He said of Emerson that he was ‘like an unsexed woman’. The remark was intended as a compliment. His religious impulse expressed itself in the devising of his own version of Christianity, which incorporated more than a scruple of Swedenborgian vastation into his ancestral Presbyterianism. His wife, Mary, about whom less is known, seems to have been all that was expected of an American mother of the mid-19th century: a provider of piety and apple pie.
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[*] William James by Graham Bird. Routledge, 221 p., £15.95, 23 October 1986, 0 7100 9602 X.
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Letters
Vol. 9 No. 8 · 23 April 1987
From Cushing Strout
SIR: P.N. Johnson-Laird, in his review of William James: His Life and Thought (LRB, 5 March), claims that the author, Gerald Myers, ‘throws new light on William as the eldest brother who allegedly messed everyone else up’, a supposed ‘neurotic enigma who sought refuge from his problems in his writing’, and whose fraternity with his younger brother Henry had ‘homosexual overtones’. These extravagances are attributed to ‘the psychoanalytically-inclined’. It is remarkable how the discussion of James’s life has centred on these unprofitable Freudian speculations, rather than on the extensively documented, historically sensitive and sympathetic narratives that have been based instead on Erik Erikson’s attention to the problems of vocation as a focus for conflict at the stage of identity-formation. His reflections on this stage of the lifecycle work even better for James than they do for Luther, for whom there is far less evidence. The result is to throw a psychologically sophisticated light on what Ralph Barton Perry understood in a common-sense way when he entitled one of the chapters of his great book, The Thought and Character of William James, ‘His Father’s Son’. The significant work in this Eriksonian vein on James has nothing to do with making him ‘a neurotic enigma’, but rather it seeks to understand his neurotic problems in relation to the complex entanglements he found himself in by reason of over-identification with a neurotic and implacable father, who profoundly influenced the son’s plight and the development of his philosophy. The purpose of such study – see, for example, Howard Feinstein’s Becoming William James and my own The Voracious Imagination – is to understand how James slowly worked his way out of the identity-confusion he suffered as a young man. Its service is to show (in Mr Johnson-Laird’s phrase) that ‘the personality was all of a piece with the thought.’ Whatever its merits as a philosophical critique of James, Meyers’s chapter on the life tends to obscure this Eriksonian scholarship by correcting unconvincing Freudian speculations about the James family.
Cushing Strout
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
