Abstract
This article offers an introspective meditation on what William James described as the “fallible utility” of introspection, promoted here especially for countering experiences of shame, self-loathing, and melancholia—what Adam Phillips calls states of “total conviction”—in boys and men. The article draws on narratives from James’s and the author’s own youthful struggles and from James’s “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” an essay he believed best captured “the perception on which [his] whole individualistic philosophy is based.” It urges boys and men to attempt, against considerable odds, to practice a more generous self-acceptance, particularly of forbidden homoerotic interests, as their path to greater tolerance of idiosyncratic others.
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Notes
See Capps (2015, pp. 76–77, n. 97) for a review of incontrovertible evidence among biographers that James himself was the pseudonymous “French sufferer.”
Though James was guarded concerning his sexual interests and history, James Jackson Putnam, who at 19 befriended James as a fellow medical student at Harvard, was in later life more forthcoming. In 1911, Putnam (in Hale 1971), then 64, reveals in a letter to Sigmund Freud not only that he “dreaded” sexual relations with his wife, which by that point had become “rather infrequent,” but also that “affection, readiness to be caressed, narcissism, ‘protest,’ autoeroticism, homosexuality, heterosexuality—all played large parts in my early life, as also a sense of inferiority (‘too small sexual organs,’ etc.) and desire for recognition as an escape from inferiority” (pp. 125–129). He confides that a search for influential friends has been one strategy for attempting to overcome this sense of inferiority: “I think I have also tried, as I imagine many others have, to compensate for assumed internal lacks, by external aids—things that I could buy, influential friends, etc.” One could plausibly extrapolate from these remarks that Putnam’s youthful and enduring friendship with James, as also much later his budding friendship with Freud, though in each case chaste, may have channeled for him erotic undercurrents. For a compelling discussion of same-sex male friendship, including that shared by Putnam and Freud, as homoerotic sublimation, see Carlin and Capps (2015, pp. 20–27, 183). See also Dykstra et al. (2012, pp. 43–69).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my appreciation to the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., for kind permission to use the portrait of William James by artist John La Farge (c. 1860; oil on cardboard; gift of William James IV); to the National Railway Museum/SSPL, London, for permission to use the photograph of a bull’s-eye lantern from its collection; and to Rubén Arjona, Nathan Carlin, Horace Griffin, Jaco Hamman, Ryan LaMothe, Hyon-Uk Shin, and Phil Zylla for their generous reflections on an earlier draft of this article.
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Dykstra, R.C. The Sacredness of Individuality: Introspection for Refuting States of Total Conviction in Boys and Men. Pastoral Psychol 66, 779–797 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-017-0774-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-017-0774-0