? He is the main founder of the American Psychological Research Association (founded in 1885). He has been discussing the psychological phenomena of transpersonal and transpsychology all his life. He believes that there are some places in human spiritual life that cannot be explained by biological concepts, and some "transcendental values" can be understood through some phenomena. It also emphasizes that people have great potential to be developed, and only a small part of people's consciousness is used. He participated in meditation activities similar to meditation, saying that meditation is a method to arouse deep willpower and can increase personal vitality and vitality, and also made empirical research on spirituality. In addition, James, who spans the fields of philosophy, psychology and psychiatry, is very interested in automatic writing with super consciousness. He collected a large number of cases and found that teenagers can best express their inner entanglements and personality conflicts in this way. He also noticed that automatic writing can sometimes solve the crux of criminals' crimes, but not everyone can write automatically and must be hypnotized or otherwise.
Proposition of stream of consciousness
? He put forward the famous idea of "stream of consciousness" and put it into practice in the whole book. He opposed the Feng Te-style psychology which was popular at that time to decompose psychological phenomena into various sensory and emotional elements, and advocated that consciousness was an indecomposable whole, and stated the main ideas of Gestalt psychology in advance. "Consciousness itself is not manifested as some fragmented fragments. Words like "chain" or "train" can't describe its initial state properly. It is not something connected; It's flowing. " River "or" flow "is the most vivid metaphor to describe it. From then on, when we talk about it, we call it the stream of thought, stream of consciousness or stream of subjective life. "(page 239) He further pointed out that consciousness has five characteristics: 1, and consciousness belongs to private ownership. It means that every thought is owned by someone or someone, and there is no thought that does not belong to anyone. That's right. But he also said, "These many hearts keep their own thoughts and don't trade with each other", thinking that personal consciousness chooses experience to form its own unique world. This statement is consistent with the proposition of humanistic psychology later. If it is absolute, it violates the basic proposition that consciousness is a reflection of objective reality. 2. Consciousness is constantly changing. It means that each mental state can only appear once and cannot return, because each state of consciousness is the function of the whole mind-matter cooperation; Each sensation corresponds to some kind of cortical activity. If the later feeling is the same as the original feeling, this feeling must have happened in an unchanged brain. This is an impossible condition. 3. Consciousness is continuous. In fact, there is a "transition state" between these entity states, which connects the entity states together. He used this "brinkmanship" to explain the free flow of consciousness and psychological experience about time; If the past, present and future are regarded as a kind of "specious present", * * * exists in our experience about time to explain why the thinking process sometimes changes unexpectedly, while what was just blurred on the edge of consciousness may develop and occupy a prominent position, and make the whole thinking process change direction. This subtle description of psychological state was ignored by the popular structuralist psychology at that time, but it had a direct impact on the stream of consciousness in literature and art. Consciousness must have objects other than itself. The object he said refers to the object outside the current state of consciousness, not necessarily the objective existence outside the subjective world. 5. Consciousness is selective. This is the basic feature of consciousness. The selectivity of consciousness has a purpose; According to James, the criterion of selection is the appropriateness of stimulation to the organism to achieve various behavioral goals. The purpose of choosing appropriate stimulus is to make consciousness operate in logical form and make a series of ideas reach reasonable results. This idea is obviously influenced by Darwin's theory of evolution, and it also forms the basic creed of American functional psychology: it also predicts the stereotype and tendency theory put forward by the Wü rzburg School.
The proposal of emotional theory
? 1884, James put forward a special emotion theory. According to this theory, emotions are just feelings about changes in the body. If there are no physical changes, such as muscle tension and aggravation, there will be no mood. Physical changes come first, and emotional experience comes later. He further believes that there is no psychological change that is not accompanied by or accompanied by some physiological change. James' theory of emotion. With Danish physiology Karl? Carl Langer (1834- 1900) published a paper in 1885 with similar views, which was later called James Langer's theory. James's emotional theory is based on introspection and observation, and it has not been proved by strict anatomical physiology and experiments. In fact, it is untenable, but it has promoted many experimental studies on emotions and is considered as the starting point of modern emotional research and emotional theory. His thought that "any psychological change will not be accompanied by some physical change" has a direct impact on behaviorism.
"self" analysis
James's theory about habits is also famous. He believes that habit is the function of the nervous system, and repeated actions will increase the plasticity of the nervous system. Make the subsequent repetitive actions easier to complete. James's analysis of self in Principles is quite consistent with the recent research results of children's self-concept at different ages. He believes that there are three kinds of self in experience: 1, material self, which comes from the awareness of the body, including clothes, family, property and so on; 2. Social self reflects the individual's views on two aspects, one is how others view themselves that are important to the individual, and the other is social norms and values; 3. Spiritual self refers to the conscious awareness of one's own existence and weaknesses, that is, the "accepted self" (I).
Constructing scientific psychology
? It constructs a complete system of scientific psychology. Principles of Psychology, published by James in 1890, is not only regarded as a classic work of psychology, but also recognized as a milestone in the rise of American functionalism. The topics listed include ten chapters, such as feeling, perception, brain function, habit, consciousness, self, attention, memory, thinking and emotion, which roughly determine the scope of psychological research in the next century. In this book, we can find five main points of James' psychological thought:
1) An analysis of the elements of consciousness against structuralism. James believes that the purpose of psychological research is not to discover the basic elements of consciousness, but to study the function of individual consciousness in adapting to its environment.
2) Initiate the theory of stream of consciousness. He believes that consciousness is not static, but constantly flowing because of people's time and place. He called this psychological phenomenon stream of consciousness. If the flowing consciousness is cut off from the analysis, the essence of consciousness will be distorted. His theory of stream of consciousness was aimed at opposing the popular Feng Te-style psychology's practice of decomposing psychological phenomena into various elements, which initiated the criticism of essentialism in psychology.
3) The first emotional theory is the earliest emotional theory. This theory plays an important role in James's psychological system. In his view, physiological changes precede emotional experience, and the feeling generated when the priming impulse caused by physiological changes reaches the cerebral cortex is emotion. In this theory, the general cause of emotion is assumed to be an internal physiological and neural process, not a mental or psychological process. Because this theory was discovered by Danish physiologist Carl Langer (Carl Langer 1834- 1900), it was named James Langer's emotional theory.
4) Advocating the diversification of psychological research methods. Tabu opposes the introspection method of structuralism, but he thinks that introspection method is not enough to really understand the behavior of individuals adapting to the environment. Therefore, he advocates that psychological research should adopt observation, experiment, comparison and investigation that meet the needs. At the same time, he advocates that the research object should not be limited to normal adults, but should expand the scope to study children, mentally abnormal people and animals.
5) The debate about self has laid the foundation for modern discussion of self-concept. He pointed out that the self is divided into "the object of cognition or the experienced self" and "the subject of cognition is also called the self (life or self)", and the experienced self includes everything that an individual can call himself. He thinks that the object of self consists of three parts: 1. Material: including personal body, clothes, house, family, property, etc. 2. Society: This is recognized by others, such as reputation. Everyone has a lot of social self because many people know him. 3. Spirit: including the individual's state of consciousness, characteristics, attitude and temperament.
Advocate pragmatism
? The central idea of James' functionalist psychology is pragmatism that he declared in his book Pragmatism published in 1907. He believes that there is no absolute truth in the world, truth depends on practical utility, and truth often changes with the changes of the times and environment; What suits the times and is effectively used is the truth. James's pragmatism has a great influence on the development of applied psychology in the future.
Self-esteem level formula and common patterns
? James believes that self-esteem depends on the individual's feeling of success or failure in the process of achieving the set goals. So a formula about self-esteem is put forward: self-esteem = achievement/pursuit.
? This formula shows that: generally speaking, the current achievement motivation of an individual is relatively stable, so his self-esteem level is inversely proportional to his pursuit level, that is, the higher the goal pursued by an individual, the lower his self-esteem level. In other words, for individuals with low self-esteem, there are two ways to improve their self-esteem: either to improve their ability level and strive for greater achievements; Or reduce your ambition and ambition, both of which can reduce the inconsistency between ability and pursuit level, and then achieve the effect of improving your self-esteem.
? American scholar Daupel found through investigation that people's coping styles when they feel inferior mainly include the following:
1, timid. The performance of this coping mode is that you always think that you are worthless, cautious, silent, withdrawn and reserved, and think that the best way to avoid "losing face" is not to talk.
2. aggressive. The performance is that some people who are usually silent and withdrawn will burst into strong emotions at some time and do some irrational things, and their behavior is destructive and harmful.
3. Humorous. People who respond in this way often use laughter to cover up their inferiority complex.
4. Deny reality. People with this coping mode always try to indulge in fantasy and get rid of reality by drinking and taking drugs, thus alleviating their inner inferiority.
5. Go with the flow. The performance is: I am afraid to express my opinions in social occasions, or even give up my own opinions, and try my best to seek the approval of others to alleviate my inner inferiority.
6. Compensation type. People with this coping mode will not be intimidated by shortcomings and setbacks. On the contrary, they will constantly develop and improve themselves by overcoming shortcomings and setbacks. I can find my strengths and weaknesses, carry them forward and overcome them, so that I can get sustainable development.
(The above information comes from the Internet)