A seasick dropout from an Amazon expedition, a failed painter, tone deaf, chronically ill, and so depressed he contemplated suicide for months. That was the young William James, who went on to become the father of American psychology. This deep dive follows his privileged but pressured upbringing, his father’s push toward medicine, the mysterious ailments diagnosed as neurasthenia, and the 1870 breakthrough when he wrote that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will.

We explore his founding of the first experimental psychology course in the United States, the 12-year effort behind The Principles of Psychology, the James-Lange theory that we feel afraid because we run, and his model of the divided self. We then move into pragmatism, the squirrel debate, the cash value of ideas and the relativism critique, and his radical empiricism that led him to study mystical experience, nitrous oxide, and the medium Leonora Piper.

• How James engineered his own recovery through a deliberate belief in free will
• The regret argument against determinism and the two-stage model of chance and choice
• The bear in the woods and why the body leads while the feeling follows
• The material, social, and spiritual selves versus the observing I
• The Varieties of Religious Experience, the white crow logic, and radical empiricism