You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Great men at the apex of their power are grand figures. We enjoy the momentousness of William James and Sigmund Freud (ages 67 and 53) meeting at Clark University in 1909. We thrill to discover academic philosophy seeing the light and acknowledging the master when James put his arm around Freud's shoulder and says prophetically, “The future of psychology belongs to your work.” The poetry of that moment and our desire for idealization blinds us to the fact that great men were once blundering boys trying desperately to detach and separate from parents and from families. We have forgotten about their first three decades when so many young men were floundering like the rest of us. Becoming William James reminds us that the great writer/philosopher/psychologist was once just a kid and a scared young man, paralyzed by his love/hate for his father, trapped by a family and a family history, a boy that was a broken reed, a prince of the walking wounded, who almost drowned in Spa Therapy (in 6 months he did the European Cure Circuit of five different water treatments), and almost was drowned in the James family sympathy for his psychological invalidism that lasted at least for the 12 years between 18 and 30.
“Biographers,” wrote Sigmund Freud, “devote themselves to a work of idealization, which strives to enroll the great man among their infantile models … they let slip the opportunity to penetrate into the most attractive secrets of human nature.” One of the excellences of Becoming William James is that it's not a eulogy and that it penetrates with the microscope of analytic psychobiography into the brilliant writer's life and work.
Becoming William James (originally entitled Work and the Inner World of William James) is a magnificent story of a vulnerable family and a vulnerable young man who was almost broken over the issue of vocation and self-definition. It's magnificent because it has the ring of analytic truth and because it is written with novelistic suspense and a pros