William James: The Stream

Six dialogues in the psychology of a mind describing itself

A course on the thought of William James.

Course outline

1. The Man Who Chose to Believe in Free Will — Where this psychology came from: a young man's collapse, a diary entry that staked everything on an unprovable act of will, and a recovery slow enough to be honest about.
2. The Stream of Thought — The founding observation of the whole psychology: thought is not a procession of separate ideas but a continuous, personal, selective stream — and the most important parts of it are the ones the old…
3. Habit: The Fly-Wheel — The most practical chapter I ever wrote: the nervous system's plasticity makes repetition into structure, structure into character, and character into fate — for good and for evil, and never to be…
4. Attention and Will — The hinge of the psychology: attention is the mind's choosing agency, the will's essential achievement is to hold a difficult idea fast — and whatever freedom we have lives in that holding.
5. What Is an Emotion? — The most famous reversal in psychology: the bodily changes follow directly on the perception, and our feeling of those changes as they occur IS the emotion — with the subtraction test as its evidence…
6. The Self and Its Selves — The most puzzling puzzle in psychology: the me that is everything a man can call his — material, social, spiritual — and the I that knows it; with the strange discovery, at the chapter's edge, of…

Part of the Symposium course library.