Article Writing Homework Help

Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on the contribution of william james to american psychology. William James has known for his masterpiece The Principles of Psychology written in 1890 and he is noted for traversing three disciplines in psychology philosophy and physiology to come up with original and groundbreaking ideas relating to human consciousness and the mechanics of human thought processes and perception among other things. The influence of this work is far-reaching and fertilized the thinking and work of later intellectuals both in America and in Europe, including John Dewey, Edmund Husserl, and Bertrand Russell (Goodman, 2013). It is on the strength of the book, which is said to be as relevant and foundational to the thinking and practice of American psychologists up to the present day, that William James is considered to be the foremost American psychologist, and effectively the founder of psychology in the country. The book itself is considered to be the first book on psychology in America. In particular, James is credited with being the early champion of the functionalist school, which in contrast to the structuralist school argued that consciousness is not something that can be partitioned into components. In opposition to a structural interpretation of consciousness, James argued that consciousness is unity, that is characterized by the continuity of flow, as well as by transitions. As opposed to discrete elements, consciousness is a flow or a stream (Gordon, 1995).

There is consensus that prior to William James’ work, American psychology simply did not exist, but that psychology as it was practiced in the United States mainly was transplanted from European conceptions about the nature of the human psyche and the theoretical underpinnings of psychological science as it was espoused in Europe. It was only during&nbsp.the time of William James, on the other hand, that a truly organic form of psychology that was rooted in the original ideas of the man, relating to his now widely cited and used concepts relating to the emotions and to “stream of consciousness”, came to life.