William James: Father of Psychology, Grandfather of NLP

© Richard Bolstad

William Who?

One hundred years ago, an American professor distinguished three types of imagination (visual, auditory, and motor) and noted that people often have a preference for one. He pointed out that visualising involves eye movements as if the attention were pulled back, and identified a large collection of relevant questions about what a person visualises; questions about what are now called “submodalities”. He studied hypnosis and the art of suggestion, and described how people store their memories in a “time line”. He wrote a volume called A Pluralist Universe advocating the notion that no one model of the world is “real”, and another volume called The Varieties of Religious Experience in which he attempted to describe and evaluate inner spiritual experiences previously considered beyond human assessment.

William James (1842-1910) was an American philosopher and Psychologist, and a Professor at Harvard University. His book The Principles of Psychology, a two volume text written in 1890, has earned him the title “The Father of Psychology”. In NLP terms, William James is a man worth modelling. In this article I want to consider “How much did this precursor of Neuro Linguistic Programming discover?”, and perhaps more important, “How did he do it?” and “What else lies in his work for us to discover?”. It’s my belief that James’ most important discovery has never been recognised by the Psychological community.

The “Adorable Genius”

William James was born in a well to do New York household, where in his youth he met with such literary notables as Thoreau, Emerson, Tennyson and J.S. Mill.  As a child he read philosophy widely, and became fluent in 5 languages. He tried his hand at several careers, including being an artist, a naturalist in the Amazon jungles, and a doctor. However, graduating as an MD at the age of 27 only left him more depressed and anguished about the pointlessness of his life, which seemed predetermined and empty.

In 1870, he made the philosophical breakthrough that enabled him to pull himself out of his depression. This was the realisation that different beliefs have different consequences. James had been puzzling for some time about whether human beings had a genuine free will, or whether their actions were the deterministic results of genetic and environmental influences. He now realised that such questions were insoluble, and that the more important issue was which beliefs have the most useful consequences for the believer. James discovered that the belief in determinism made him passive and impotent; the belief in free will allowed him to consider alternatives, to act and to plan. Describing the brain as “an instrument of possibilities” (Hunt, 1993, p149), he decided, “At any rate, I will assume for the present -until next year- that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power.

Although James’ physical health was always fragile (he kept himself fit with mountaineering, but had chronic heart trouble), this decision to choose free will delivered the psychological results he sought. James had discovered the fundamental presuppositions of NLP: “The map is not the territory”, and “Life is a systemic process”.

He went on to marry Alice Gibbens, a pianist and schoolteacher in 1878, the year he accepted a request from the publisher Henry Holt to write a text of the new “scientific” Psychology. James and Gibbens had five children. In 1889 William James became the first professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

James continued to be a “free thinker”. He wrote on “the moral equivalent of war”, an early way of describing nonviolent action. He studied the fusion of science and spirituality in depth, thus resolving age old differences between the approach of his theologically trained father and his own scientific studies. As a professor, he dressed in what was then highly informal garb (Norfolk jacket, bright shirts, and flowing tie) and was frequently to be seen in the unheard of activity of wandering around Harvard yard talking with students. He hated doing mundane tasks such as proofreading or doing experiments, and only did the latter when he had a point he desperately wanted to prove. His lectures were events of such frivolity and humour that on occasion students would interrupt to ask if he could be serious for a moment.

Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead summed him up as “that adorable genius, William James.” As I’ll describe, we could also call him “the grandfather of NLP”.

Sensory System Use

We sometimes assume that it was the developers of NLP who discovered the sensory basis of “thought”; that Grinder and Bandler first noticed that people have preferences for sensory information , and use sequences of sensory information to achieve results. Actually, it was William James who first introduced this fact to a world wide audience, in 1890. James notes (Volume 2, p49)

“Until very recent years it was supposed by all philosophers that there was a typical human mind which all individual minds were like, and that propositions of universal validity could be laid down about such faculties as “the imagination”. Lately, however, a mass of revelations have poured in, which make us see how false a view this is. There are imaginations, not “The Imagination”, and they must be studied in detail.”

James defines four key types of imagination. (Volume 2, p58)

“In some individuals the habitual “thought stuff”, if one may so call it, is visual; in others it is auditory, articulatory [to use an NLP term, auditory digital], or motor [kinesthetic, in NLP terms]; in most, perhaps, it is evenly mixed.”

He explains each type quoting (Volume 2, p60-61) from M.A. Binet’s “Psychologie du Raisonnement” 1886, p25

“The auditory type… appears to be rarer than the visual. Person’s of this type imagine what they think of in the language of sound. In order to remember a lesson they impress upon their mind, not the look of the page, but the sound of the words….

The motor type remains -perhaps the most interesting of all, and certainly the one of which least is known. Persons who belong to this type make use, in memory, reasoning, and all their intellectual operations, of images derived from movement…. There are persons who remember a drawing better when they have followed its outlines with their finger.”

James himself (Volume 2, p63) deals with the issue of remembering words, which he has described as a fourth key sense (articulatory). He argues that this is generally done using a combination of auditory and motor senses.

“Most persons, on being asked in what sort of terms they imagine words, will say “in terms of hearing.” ….Partly open your mouth and then imagine any word with labials or dentals in it, such as “bubble”, “toddle”. Is your image under these conditions distinct? To most people the image is at first “thick”, as the sound of the word would be if they tried to pronounce it with the lips parted….The experiment proves how dependent our verbal imagination is on actual feelings in lips. tongue, throat, larynx etc.”

One breakthrough which does seem to originate with Twentieth Century NLP is the identification of a regular pattern of relationship between eye movements and sensory system use. James touches repeatedly on the issue of the eye movements which accompany and can be used as cues for sensory accessing. At one stage he quotes (Volume 2, p50) Fechner’s “Psychophysique”, 1860, Chapter XLIV.

“In imagining, the attention feels as if drawn backwards towards the brain”

Describing what happens when he himself visualises, James adds (Volume 2, p65):

“All these images seem at first as if purely retinal. I think, however, that rapid eye movements accompany them, though these latter give rise to such slight feelings that they are almost impossible of detection.”

Submodalities and Time Storage

James also recognised certain subtle differences in the way an individual visualises, or hears internal sounds, or feels. He suggested that a person’s success with mental processes depended on these differences, called in NLP submodalities. James quotes (Volume 2, p51) from Galton’s “Enquiries Into Human Faculty”, 1880, p83 about the extensive study Galton made of submodalities, beginning with brightness, definition and colour. The powerful uses which NLP would put these understandings to is not commented on by him, but all the background work is ready in James text.

“The first group of the rather long series of queries related to the illumination, definition and colouring of the mental image, and were framed thus:

Before addressing yourself to any of the questions on the opposite page, think of some definite object -suppose it is your breakfast table as you sat down to it this morning- and consider carefully the picture that rises before your mind’s eye.

1. Illumination.- Is the image dim or fairly clear? Is its brightness comparable to that of the actual scene?
2. Definition.- Are all the objects pretty well defined at the same time, or is the place of sharpest definition at any one moment more contracted than it is in a real scene?
3. Colouring.- Are the colours of the china, of the toast, bread-crust, mustard, meat, parsley, or whatever may have been on the table, quite distinct and natural?”

William James is also very aware that past and future are concepts represented by the submodalities of distance and position. In NLP terms, people have a Time Line which stretches out in a certain individual direction from their body towards the past, and in another direction towards the future. James explains (Volume 1, p605)

“To think of a thing as past is to think it amongst the objects or in the direction of the objects which at the present moment appear affected by this quality. This is the original of our notion of past time, upon which memory and history build their systems. And in this chapter we shall consider this immediate sense of time alone.

If the constitution of consciousness were that of a string of bead-like sensations and images, all separate, we could never have any knowledge except that of the present instant…. Our feelings are not thus contracted, and our consciousness never shrinks to the dimensions of a glow worm spark. The knowledge of some other part of the stream, past or future, near or remote, is always mixed in with our knowledge of the present thing.”

James explains that this stream of time, or Time Line, is the basis on which you know who you are when you wake up in the morning. Using the standard “Past=Back behind” (in NLP terms “In Time”) Time Line, he says (Volume 1, p238):

“When Paul and Peter wake up in the same bed, and recognise that they have been asleep, each one of them mentally reaches back and makes connection with but one of the two streams of thought which were broken by the sleeping hours.” (By the way, what were Peter and Paul doing sleeping in the same bed? Whatever else you can call William James, he is not homophobic.)

Anchoring and Hypnosis

Understanding the sensory systems was only a small part of James’ prophetic contribution to Psychology as a field. In 1890, he announced, for example (Volume One, p566) the principle of anchoring, as used in NLP. James calls this “Association”.

“Let us assume as the basis of all our subsequent reasoning this law: When two elementary brain-processes have been active together or in immediate succession, one of them, on recurring, tends to propagate its excitement into the other.”

He then shows how this principle is the basis (p598-599) of memory, belief, decisionmaking, and emotional responses. This theory of Association is the earlier source from which Ivan Pavlov later developed his theory of classical conditioning (demonstrating that if a bell is rung just before dogs are fed, then in future, ringing the bell causes the dogs to salivate).         

James also studied Hypnotherapy. He compares various theories of hypnosis (Volume 2, p601), offering a synthesis of the two rival theories present at that time. These were a) the “trance state” theory, proposing that the effects called hypnosis are due to the creation of a special “trance” state, and b) the “suggestion” theory, claiming that the effects of hypnosis are due to the power of the suggestions made by the hypnotist, and require no special state of mind-body. James synthesis was to suggest that the trance state does exist, but that the body responses previously associated with it may simply be a result of the expectations, methods and subtle suggestions made by the hypnotist. Trance itself has very little in the way of observable effect, James noted. So hypnosis = suggestions + trance state.

“The three states of Charcot, the strange reflexes of Heidenhein, and all the other bodily phenomena which have been called direct consequences of the trance state itself, are not such. They are products of suggestion, the trance state having no particular outward symptoms of its own; but without the trance state there, those particular suggestions could never have been successfully made….

The first subject trains the operator, the operator trains the succeeding subjects, all of them in perfect good faith conspiring together to evolve a perfectly arbitrary result.”

James also discusses the “magnetic rapport” which occurs as hypnotist and subject synchronise with each other, evidenced by movements of one person being mirrored in movements of the other, like a magnet. This whole model is comfortably similar to the NLP or Ericksonian model of trance and suggestion.

Introspection: Modelling James’ Methodology

How did James produce such remarkably prophetic results? He was working in a field where very little previous research had been done. His own answer was the methodology of introspection (Volume 1, p185), said by him to be so basic as to be beyond challenge.

“Introspective observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always. The word introspection need hardly be defined -it means of course, the looking into our very own minds and reporting what we there discover. Everyone agrees that we there discover states of consciousness….All people unhesitatingly believe that they feel themselves thinking, and that they distinguish the mental state as an inward activity or passion, from all the objects with which it may cognitively deal. I regard this belief as the most fundamental of all the postulates of psychology, and shall discard all curious inquiries about its certainty as too metaphysical for the scope of this book.”

This activity of introspection, then, is the key strategy which we would model if we are interested in duplicating and extending James’ own discoveries. In the above quote, James uses sensory words from all three major systems to describe the process. He says it involves “looking into” (Visual), “reporting” (probably Auditory digital), and “feeling” (Kinesthetic). This sequence of use is repeated by James several times, suggesting that it is the structure of his “introspection” -his Strategy in NLP terms. For example, he describes his own method of preventing incorrect presuppositions about Psychology thus (Volume 1, p145):

“The only way to prevent this disaster is to scrutinise them beforehand and make them give an articulate account of themselves before letting them pass.”

He says (Volume 2, p46);

“The slightest introspective glance will show to anyone the falsity of this opinion.”

And explaining what thought consists of (Volume 2, p325) he says:

“Much of our thinking consists of trains of images suggested one by another, of a sort of spontaneous reverie of which it seems likely enough that the higher brutes should be capable. This sort of thinking leads nevertheless to rational conclusions, both practical and theoretical…. The upshot of it may be that we are reminded of some practical duty; we write a letter to a friend abroad, or we take down the lexicon and study our Greek lesson.”

In NLP terms, James Looks inside and “sees” a thought (Visual Trigger) which he then “scrutinises” and makes “articulate” an account, report or conclusion (Visual and Auditory Digital Operation) on the basis of which he decides (Auditory Digital Test) whether to let the thought “pass”, or  what “feeling” he acts on (Kinesthetic Exit). The strategy is:

Vi >Vi > Ad > Ad/Ad > K

James also describes his own inner cognitive experience as involving what we in NLP would term Visual/Kinesthetic synesthesias, and particularly notes that the exit to most of his strategies is a Kinesthetic “nod of the head or an expulsion of the breath”. By comparison, auditory tonal, olfactory and gustatory are not significant factors in his awareness. (Volume 2, p65)

“My optical images are in general very dim, dark, fugitive and contracted. It would be utterly impossible to draw from them, and yet I perfectly well distinguish one from the other. My auditory images are excessively inadequate reproductions of their originals. I have no images of taste or smell. Touch imagination is fairly distinct, but comes very little into play with most objects thought of. Neither is all my thought verbalised; for I have shadowy schemes of relation, as apt to terminate in a nod of the head or an expulsion of the breath as in a definite word. On the whole, vague images or sensations of movement inside my head towards the various parts of space in which the terms I am thinking of lie or are momentarily symbolised to lie together with movements of the breath through my pharynx and nostrils, form a by no means inconsiderable part of my thought stuff.”

James remarkable success with the method of Introspection (including discovering the above information about his own process) suggests the value of using the strategy described above. You may like to experiment now. Simply watching internally, until some image appears worthy of scrutiny, and then asking it to explain itself, and checking the logic of the answer, leads to a physical response and inner feeling confirming that the process is complete.

The Consciousness of Self: James’ Unrecognised Breakthrough

Considering what William James achieved with Introspection, in terms of understanding sensory system use, anchoring and hypnotherapy, there may obviously be other gems in his writing which could expand the current methodology and models of NLP. One area that particularly interests me, and was central to James’ own sense of what was important, is his understanding of the individual “self” and it’s relationship to universal life.             James (Volume 1, p 291-401) has a startlingly different way of understanding the “self”. He puts up an excellent case for the self being an illusory concept and summarises on page 400-401:

“The consciousness of self involves a stream of thought, each part of which as “I” can 1) remember those which went before, and know the things they knew; and 2) emphasise and care paramountly for certain ones amongst them as “me” and appropriate to these the rest. The nucleus of the “me” is always the bodily existence felt to be present at the time. Whatever remembered-past-feelings resemble this present feeling are deemed to belong to the same me with it…. This me is an empirical aggregate of things objectively known. The I which knows them cannot itself be an aggregate, neither for psychological purposes need it be considered to be an unchanging metaphysical entity like the Soul, or a principle like the pure Ego, viewed as “out of time”. It is a Thought, at each moment different from that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together with all that the latter called its own…. If the passing thought be the directly verifiable existent which no school has hitherto doubted it to be, then that thought is itself the thinker, and psychology need not look beyond.”

For me this is a breathtakingly powerful comment, and one which has been as politely overlooked by Psychologists as James’ other breakthroughs. In NLP terms, James is explaining that the self is merely a nominalisation. It is a nominalisation for the process of “owning”, or as James puts it, the process of “appropriating”. As such “Self” is simply a word for a type of thinking where past experiences are appropriated or owned. This means that there is no “thinker” separate from the flow of thought. The existence of such an entity is purely illusory. There is just the process of thinking oneself the owner of previous experiences, goals and actions. Just reading this concept is one thing; but living for a moment with it is quite extraordinary! As James emphasises in “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (p388)

“A bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of the word “raisin”, with one real egg instead of the word “egg”, might be an inadequate meal, but it would at least be a commencement of reality.”

Religion as The Truth Beyond Self

In many of the world’s spiritual traditions, living with this reality of the non existence of a separate self has been considered the ultimate aim of life. A Zen Buddhist master exclaimed on reaching enlightenment “When I heard the temple bell ring, suddenly there was no bell and no I, just the ringing.” Wei Wu Wei begins his book “Ask The Awakened”, a Zen text, with the poem:

“Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 percent
Of everything you think,
And of everything you do,
Is for yourself-
And there isn’t one.”

Information flows into our neurology via the five senses from outside, from other areas in the neurology, and also as part of the various non-sensory connections between all life.  There is a very simple mechanism by which, from moment to moment, our thinking then divides this information into two sets.  I see the door and I think “not-me”.  I see my hand and I think “me” (I “appropriate” the hand to myself, or “own” it).  Or, internally I see the craving for chocolate and I think “not-me”.  I see the ability to read this article and understand it and I think “me” (again, I appropriate or own it).  Actually, all these pieces of information are in one mind! The notion of self and non-self is an arbitrary division; a division useful metaphorically, but a division which has “taken over” and now thinks it runs the neurology.

What would life be like without this division? Without this sense of owning and not owning, all the information in my neurology would be as one field of experience. This is what actually happens on a beautiful evening when you become immersed in the beauty of the sunset, or when you listen to a perfect concert with your whole attention, or make love with total involvement. The distinction between the experiencer and the experience, between the thinker and the thought, ceases in such moments. This type of unitary experience is a wider or truer “self”, in which nothing is appropriated and nothing is rejected. It is joy, it is love, it is what all human beings seek. This, says James (“The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p398) is the source of Religion, not the complex beliefs which encrust that word.

“Disregarding the over-beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common and generic, we have in the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come, a positive content of religious experience which, it seems to me, is literally and objectively true as far as it goes.”

James argues that the value of religion lies not in it’s dogmas or in some abstract “theory or science of religion”, but in it’s usefulness. He quotes (in “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p392) Professor Leuba from an article on “The Contents of Religious Consciousness” in The Monist xi, 536, July 1901:

“God is not known, he is not understood, he is used -sometimes as a meat purveyor, sometimes as a moral support, sometimes as a friend, sometimes as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the religious consciousness asks for no more than that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.” 

Other Voices; One Truth

In previous articles, I have drawn attention to the revisiting of this theory of the nonexistence of self in several fields. For example, modern physics pushes resolutely towards the same conclusion. Albert Einstein said (Dossey, 1989, p.149)

“A human being is part of the whole, called by us “universe”, a part limited in time and space.  He experiences his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal decisions and to affection for a few persons nearest us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

And in the field of NLP, Connirae and Tamara Andreas state this clearly in their book “Core Transformation” (p.227):

“Judgement presupposes separation between the judge and that which is judged.  If in some deeper, spiritually true way I am really one with everything, then judgement makes no sense.  When I experience myself as one with everything – a much larger experience than what I usually think of as myself – then I act out of this larger awareness.  In a sense I have “surrendered” to that which is within me, which is everything, which is more truly me”.

Spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1972a, p.94) adds

“We draw a circle around ourselves: a circle around me and a circle around you … .  Our minds are conditioned by formulas: my experiences, my knowledge, my family, my country, like and dislike, hate, jealousy, envy, sorrow, the fear of this and the fear of that.  That is the circle, the wall behind which I live … .  Now can the movement of the formula – which is the “me” with its memories, which is the centre around which the walls are built – can that “me”, that separate entity with its self-centred activity, come to an end, not by a series of acts but by one act completely?”

Again, in relation to these descriptions, William James’ voice was prophetic. 

William James’ Gift To NLP

Any successful new discipline is like a tree growing branches in all directions. When one branch reaches the limits of its growth, perhaps a wall in its way, the tree can retrace its development back to the earlier branches and explore the previously unrecognised potential of older extensions. Later, as the wall crumbles, the tree may rediscover that once limited branch and grow out there again. A hundred years on, we can look back at William James and discover many such budding potentialities.

In NLP we have already explored many of the possible uses of sensory system preferences, submodalities, anchoring and hypnosis. Introspection is the technique which James developed to discover and test such models. It involves looking inside and considering thoughtfully what one sees there, so as to find action which truly works. And perhaps the strangest of all discoveries that awaits us there is that we ourselves are not who we thought. As Krishnamurti says (1972b, p158) using the same introspection strategy:

“In oneself lies the whole world, and if you know how to look and learn, then the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either that key or the door to open, except yourself.” 

Bibliography

• Andreas, C. and Andreas, T. Core Transformation Real People Press, Moab, 1994.
• Dossey, L. Recovering The Soul, Bantam, New York, 1989.
• Hunt, M. The Story of Psychology, Doubleday, New York, 1993
• James, W. The Principles Of Psychology (Volume 1 and 2), Dover, New York, 1950.
• James, W. The Varieties of Religious Experience, Collier, New York, 1961.
• Krishnamurti, J. The Flight Of The Eagle, Harper and Row, New York, 1972a.
• Krishnamurti, J. You Are The World, Harper and Row, New York, 1972b.
• Wu Wei, W.  Ask the Awakened,  Routledge & Kegan Paul,  London, 1963.

Richard Bolstad, NLP Trainer