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This volume represents a reconstruction by Eugene Taylor of William James' 1896 Lowell Lectures on Exceptional Mental States. The reconstruction was stimulated by the discovery, in 1977, of James's unpublished lecture notes. Through diligent and creative scholarship, Taylor located newspaper reviews of the lectures, as well as the annotated reference works James used in preparation. There were eight lectures in all: “Dreams and Hypnotism,”
“Automatism,” “Hysteria,” “Multiple Personality,” “Demoniacal Possession,” “Witchcraft,” “Degeneration,” and “Genius.” The first four lectures describe James's understanding of a dynamic psychology of the “subconscious” at work within the human personality. The second four lectures relate to manifestations, especially pathological ones, in the social sphere. Within this schema each lecture introduces one new idea. “Dreams and Hypnosis” describes the similarity between natural and hypnotically induced sleep. Between each of these states and the state of full awakening, there is a twilight or hypnagogic state in which the mind is open to suggestion. The second lecture, “Automatism,” introduces the idea of subliminal consciousness, that each person has two simultaneously operating systems of consciousness, one above the threshold of awareness and one below, with its own separate characteristics. The third lecture, “Hysteria,” demonstrates the power of a “buried” idea. Split off from consciousness because of traumatic shock, the idea operates in the subconscious according to laws of its own. The fourth lecture, “Multiple Personality,” relates this phenomenon to the previously discussed splitting of consciousness, adding that while psychic fragments may develop into seemingly independent personalities, the result is not merely pathological. What emerges as a subsidiary personality might contain valuable growth potential.
In the fifth lecture, “Demoniacal Possession,” James described “imitative neuropathic hysteria,” the phenomenon of