Approaches to Human Personality: William James and Sigmund Freud*

Common sense and science tell us that what we think about human nature is intimately connected with what we think about ourselves. Freud taught us that the connecting threads are rarely simple and that proper methods of observation and analysis must be brought to bear upon this, as upon any problem, about which we hope to reach valid solutions. With James and Freud the threads are peculiarly difficult to follow since we must make allowance for the decades of exposure of both men to the specialized world of scientific investigation. The less an individual knows about a subject the more any specific theme is a blank screen upon which he is free to project the convictions that have grown in the privacy of his experience with a single specimen of humanity, his private ego. James and Freud were phenomenally learned in fields of knowledge having undeniable relevance to the critical evaluation of any theoretical model purporting to characterize the nature of man. When we ask how they approached the study of human nature it will be more essential than usual to pay attention to the relation between what they said and what they heard from other professionals.

These men interest us today because what they said about psychology reverberated far and wide among their contemporaries, professional and lay, and among their successors. The thought-ways and talk-ways of modern man reveal the impact of Freud and James. Hardly a conversation or a scientific conference on psychology fails to disclose some evidence that both men lived. The hallmarks of Freudian thinking are perhaps more obvious: “unconscious”, “repression”,