"Failure, then, failure!": shame and William James's "sick soul"

William James understood that any particular philosophy is in fact "the expression of a man's intimate character, and all definitions of the universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions of human characters upon it " (Allen, 1967, p. ix, quoting W. James, Pluralism). James's acutely sympathetic perspective on the "sick soul" in The Varieties of Religious Experience is certainly a reflection of his intimate character.

The milieu of James's famous family of origin created, in the case of William, the oldest child, a crisis in his ability to be independent. The emotional, spiritual and intellectual stranglehold that the father, Henry St., had on William initially paralyzed the latter's ability as a young adult to live independently, to individuate, to establish himself in a vocation, to establish himself in a primary intimate relationship with a partner of his own--in short, to establish a psychologically separate self (Feinstein, 223).

In fact he did not secure his first paying job until he was offered a part time teaching post at Harvard at age 31. Even after he began to teach, he had many misgivings, with his resolve to work seeming to evaporate whenever he entered 20 Quincy Street, the family home (139). He lived with his parents until he was when he married Alice Gibbens after a long and ambivalent courtship, having had no known romantic relationships with women until he met her. It seems significant that Alice was first introduced to his father at a Radical Club meeting. The latter returned from the meeting proclaiming that he had just met William's future wife. The point being, of course, that Henry, Sr. even seems to have been instrumental in choosing, or at least locating, the woman whom William would fall in love with and marry.

William's various physical and psychical indispositions are described throughout his journals and correspondence. He once confided to a friend that he felt "separated from God" (quoted in Simon, 297). It is believed that his gravest collapse took place in the early 1870s and is described under a pseudonym in Varieties (disguised in the identity of a "French correspondent")(1):

   While in this state of philosophic pessimism and general
   depression of spirits about my prospects.... suddenly there fell
   upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the
   darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence.... I became a mass
   of quivering fear ... I woke up morning after morning with a
   horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the
   insecurity of life I never knew before.... It was like a
   revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed away, the
   experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of
   others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable
   to go out into the dark alone (Varieties, 160-161).

James's work on the Gifford Lectures from which Varieties is derived coincided with a severe physical and emotional collapse. Much of the writing was done in bed, at a time when he could only work two or three hours a day. In fact it was necessary for the lectures to be postponed from 1900 to 1901, and there was always the fear that he might not be able to deliver them even if he could complete their preparation. Two weeks before the lectures began, he wrote, "I have become like a vegetable, a suffering vegetable if there be such a thing" (Perry, 256). On another occasion while preparing the Gifford Lectures he wrote, "the disgust, the final strangulation etc begin to haunt me, I fear them" (Simon, 296).

Varieties of Religious Experience

In Varieties (508), James contended that a common denominator of different religious traditions was that they are constructed around the following: 1. an uneasiness; and 2. its solution.

1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand.

2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.

I believe that James is here referring to the transformation of revelatory shame experience. James saw two basic types of religious temperaments: the "healthy-minded" and the "sick soul." He gave the name of "healthy-mindedness" to the tendency which looks on all things and sees that they are good" (Varieties, 87). The healthy-minded temperament has a "constitutional incapacity for prolonged suffering" and a "tendency to see things optimistically.... in which the individual's character is set". In response to persons subject to a perpetual sense of "something wrong," the healthy-minded person would say something like, "'Stuff and nonsense, get out into the open air!' or 'Cheer up old fellow, you'll be all right erelong, if you will only drop your morbidness!'" (127)

James left no doubt of his own opinion of the ultimate inefficacy of the unbridled optimism of healthy-mindedness when he wrote: