| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

William James on Consciousness beyond the Margin. By Eugene Taylor. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. xvi, 215 pp. $39.50, ISBN 0-691-01136-2.)

One cannot but admire Eugene Taylor's single-mindedness. He has used numerous forums, as he reminds us throughout, to argue that abnormal psychology is important in William James's thought because it provides the thread unifying the disparate aspects. In this book, he distinguishes two kinds of psychology: the psychophysics of Wilhelm Wundt and the Germans, and the psychopathology of Pierre Janet and the French. The former results in a sterile experimentalism, the latter, in rich, eclectic, person-centered theory. Standard histories of psychology identify psychology with the former, thereby depriving James of his proper place because it is his interest in psychopathology that forms the core of his contribution. 1

Taylor's argument is that psychopathological concerns are present in James from the beginning of his work in the 1870s, that in The Principles of Psychology (1890) the German and the French sides are at war, and that later the French side wins. This leads James to abandon the more positivistic (antimetaphysical) stance of Principles and to work out his metaphysics of radical empiricism as the world view best suited to the needs of a person-centered psychology. . . .

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