Jung, Carl Gustav, and Religion
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William James and the James Family William James was born on January 11, 1842 in New York City and died on August 26, 1910 in Chocura, New Hampshire. He was a bridge figure between the intellectual and social milieu of the mid nineteenth century America of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman and the evolving international Modernist world of Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead. He was part of one of America’s most remarkable families who in the generations before his birth built resources of great wealth through business and entrepreneurial success. His father, Henry Senior, was an itinerant philosopher and theologian who authored dense and idiosyncratic texts related to the work of Swedish religious figure Emanuel Swedenbourg. William was the eldest of five children born to Henry Senior and his mother, Mary Robertson Walsh. His eldest brother, Henry, born in 1843, became one of America’s greatest novelists and men of letters. He had two younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) and Roberson (Bob), along with the youngest of the five, his sister Alice, born in 1848. It was Alice who came closest to the literary and analytical gifts of William and Henry as evidenced in her letters and diaries. She also shared with them physical and mental collapses which in turn mirrored the experience of Henry Senior with what he called in a nineteenth century term his ‘‘vastation’’ which denotes something closely akin to a depressive breakdown. The James’ family traveled widely and frequently during William’s younger years due to Henry Senior’s search for an ideal place to educate his children and to satisfy his own restlessness. William was thus raised and educated in both the United States in Europe. He never completed an undergraduate degree but he did manage to receive an M.D. from the Harvard Medical School in 1869 though he never practiced medicine. His medical and previous
scientific training opened him to the world of physiology and experimental science. He taught anatomy and physiology at Harvard and went on in 1880 to pursue another career interest in the teaching of philosophy. A key point in this formative period came in 1872 where for nine months he met in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Charles Sanders Peirce, Oliver Wendell Homes, and Chauncey Wright in what came to be called the Metaphysical Club. These meetings proved to be a prime source of inspiration and reflection that grew over time into what later came to be known as philosophical pragmatism. Pragmatism (a term James himself coined) became a school of thought that dominated American intellectual life up through the first third of the twentieth century.
James’ Contribution In 1876 James married Alice Howe Gibbens and proceeded with having a family of his own to go along with a wide ranging career that spanned the next three decades. In 1877 he met the philosopher Josiah Royce who was to become one of James’s great companions as well as a friendly intellectual rival and whose idealist framework differed dramatically from his own empiricism
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