Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 41, No.

1, Spring 2002 (䉷 2002)

William James, Mind-

Cure, and the Religion
of Healthy-Mindedness
DONALD F. DUCLOW
ABSTRACT: At the turn of the twentieth century, the mind-cure movement emphasized the
healing power of positive emotions and beliefs. William James defended mind-cure during the
Massachusetts legislature’s debates on licensing physicians in 1894 and 1898. In The Varieties of
Religious Experience (1902) he used the movement’s therapeutic claims to illustrate the typically
American, practical turn of the “religion of healthy-mindedness.” Varieties sympathetically sur-
veys mind-cure literature, but also criticizes healthy-minded religion for its limited range and
refusal to confront tragedy and radical evil. Many of today’s mind/body therapies continue the
mind-cure tradition and retain the limitations that James noted.

KEY WORDS: William James; mind-cure; healthy-mindedness.

Today we face a confusing swirl of information and claims for alternative or

complementary medicine. Many of these therapies involve practices of mind/
body medicine: biofeedback, visualization, meditation, etc. Despite their di-
versity, these practices cluster around a common theme: the importance of
emotional and mental states in sickness and healing. Norman Cousins
(1990), Herbert Benson (1976, 1997), Bernie Siegel (1986) and Larry Dossey
(1993) have all proposed such therapies. At the turn of the twentieth century,
William James encountered something remarkably similar in the mind-cure
movement. His Varieties of Religious Experience (1985), first published in
1902, presents this movement as a key example of the “religion of healthy-
mindedness.” In lines that Norman Cousin could have penned in the 1980s,
James identifies the movement’s key theme as “an intuitive belief in the all-
saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy
of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry,
and all nervously precautionary states of mind” (p. 88).
While James vigorously defended mind-cure and considered it a major con-

Donald F. Duclow is Professor of Philosophy at Gwynedd-Mercy College, Gwynedd Valley, PA

19437, USA. He holds degrees from DePaul University (B.A and M.A.) and Bryn Mawr College
(M.A. and Ph.D.), and has published articles on the medieval Christian Neoplatonic tradition
and on the cultural dynamics of healing, suffering and dying.

45 䉷 2002 Blanton-Peale Institute

46 Journal of Religion and Health

tribution to American religion and culture, he nevertheless criticized it and

the healthy-minded religion that it embodied.

Defending mind-cure

In the 1890s Americans faced an even more bewildering array of medical

claims and practices than we do today. No single group or doctrine dominated
medical practice. Patent medicines of all kinds were flourishing, and medical
advertising dominated newspapers. The mind-cure or New Thought move-
ment was gaining enormous popular support. And homeopathy, Christian
Science, electrical medicine, naturopathy and other therapies all sought con-
sumers’ attention. In this medical marketplace, academically trained or “reg-
ular” physicians were simply one group among others and struggled to compete.
Through the American Medical Association (AMA) and its local affiliates,
these physicians lobbied for state boards that would license physicians by
examinations “with reference to their knowledge and skill in medicine and
surgery” (James, 1987, p. 145). State licensing, its proponents claimed, would
ensure a scientific basis to medical practice and protect the public from
quackery.
On two occasions William James—a Harvard M.D. and professor—force-
fully argued against licensure proposals in Massachusetts.1 When presented
with a petition against a Medical Registration Act in 1894, James not only
signed it but explained his opposition in a letter to the Boston Evening Tran-
script. Then in 1898 he testified against a similar bill before the Massa-
chusetts legislature’s Committee on Public Health. In his testimony James
sided with a wide range of “irregular” healers. According to the Boston Eve-
ning Transcript for March 2, he was among the speakers introduced to the
Committee by Harrison D. Bartlett, editor of the spiritualist journal Banner
of Light and “today representing officially the Spiritualists, electricians, os-
teopathists, metaphysicians, magnet healers, botanic physicians and hydro-
pathists of the State” (James, 1987, pp. 656–57). Within this diverse group,
James’ testimony focused on the mind-cure movement.2 His arguments are
worth reviewing on two counts: as commentary on the imperfect, confused
reality of medicine in the 1890s; and as statements of James’s developing
views on mind-cure that would emerge a few years later in The Varieties of
Religious Experience.
James distinguished sharply between two forms of medical licensure. He
approved of medical registration that would forbid “anyone who has not qual-
ified by State examination to announce or advertise himself as a physician or
put ‘doctor’ before or ‘M.D.’ after his name” (James, 1987, p. 149). By a simple
restriction on medical advertising, this form of registration clarifies the pub-
lic’s choices: “The people have a right to know who is regular and who is
irregular, and to follow their several affinities” (James, 1987 p. 149). This
Donald F. Duclow 47

policy—adopted in Massachusetts in 1894—marked out a basic distinction

between medical practitioners, and permitted their many varieties to flour-
ish.
In contrast, the licensure bills that James opposed sought to limit medical
diversity by making it illegal “to practice medicine without a license.” Irregu-
lar practitioners would be outlawed. This exclusion troubled James for politi-
cal and scientific reasons. On both grounds the issue involved the incomplete
and fractured state of medical science. In contrast to fields like pharmacy and
plumbing where controversy was minimal, medicine offered a free market of
competing practices with no consensus. As James (1987) candidly states, in
medical practice, “It is the confusion, the deplorable imperfection of the most
expert knowledge, and the conscientious divergences of opinion, the infinite
complication of phenomena, and the varying and exclusive fields of experi-
ence, that are the very essence of the case” (p. 60). James here admits what
the AMA would not: the limitations of “the most expert knowledge” of profes-
sional doctors, and the “conscientious” practices of at least some of their com-
petitors (p. 146). Under these conditions, the state is not qualified to inter-
vene. Since “regular,” academically trained physicians were seeking to
exclude other practitioners, the legislature should steer clear of factional
strife within the medical community. “The Commonwealth of Massachusetts
is not a medical body, has no right to a medical opinion, and should not dare
to take sides in medical controversies” (James, 1987, p. 58) by granting one
group a monopoly on medical practice. Specifically, the legislature must re-
main neutral concerning mind-cure. Since legislators are unqualified to judge
“whether the mind-curers do really achieve the successes that are claimed,”
they should consider only the social reality “that a large number of our citi-
zens . . . are convinced that they do achieve them, are persuaded that a valu-
able new department of medical experience is opening up.”3 The absence of
medical consensus required that the legislature respect people’s right to
choose among different therapies and remedies, including mind-cure. In
short, James viewed Massachusetts’ legislation to license physicians as both
misguided and ineffective: misguided because the legislature lacked compe-
tence to decide among competing therapies, and ineffective because it failed
to address the broader context where citizens were treating themselves with
patent medicines of every description (James, 1987, pp. 146–147).
According to James, the legislature was not the only group without suffi-
cient knowledge to decide the issue. By backing this legislation, the academic
physicians themselves were closing off progress in medical science. Like his
AMA colleagues, James (1987) was appalled by “the flood of quackery and
medical ignorance about us” (pp. 61–62). But unlike them he also called for a
break in medicine’s “hideous history, comparable only with that of priestcraft:
ignorance clad in authority, and riding over men’s bodies and souls” (James,
1987, p. 62). By locking medicine into a single pattern, the proposed legisla-
tion would continue this history instead of advancing the cause of medical
48 Journal of Religion and Health

science. James noted how medical knowledge changes in each generation and
listed recent innovations such as anaesthesia and antiseptic surgery. He also
pointed to a deeper, more elusive issue: differences in what counts as “experi-
ence” that can verify regular medicine and homeopathy (James, 1987, p. 57).
Similarly, he argued that while hypnotic suggestion and other mind-cure
methods were producing cures, medical regulars denounced these methods
without bothering to consider the evidence. James insisted on keeping the
mind-cure questions open to investigation. “What the real interests of medi-
cine require is that mental therapeutics should not be stamped out, but stud-
ied, and its laws ascertained” (James, 1987, p. 58). Only if mind-curers con-
tinued to practice openly and offered their results to public scrutiny could the
“conditions and limits” of their methods be examined. So, James argued, let
the mind curers continue their experiments, and let orthodox M.D.’s study
and interpret the facts that these experiments yield. To rule out the experi-
ments would be to halt progress in medical knowledge.
Although James defended mind-curers and noted their achievements, he
also criticized the theories used to explain their methods. Indeed, he often
found the mind-curers’ theories incomprehensible. Yet what little James did
understand was of decisive importance. Commenting on his 1898 testimony,
he wrote to his friend Dr. James J. Putnam, “I am not fond and cannot under-
stand a word of their jargon except their precept of assuming yourself well and
claiming health rather than sickness which I am sure is magnificent” (James,
1987 pp. 657–658; emphasis added). For James (1987) this precept qualifies
mind-cure as “a religious or quasi-religious movement” (p. 59) and made it
central to The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Mind-cure and the religion of healthy-mindedness in Varieties

In The Varieties of Religious Experience’s lectures on “The Religion of

Healthy-Mindedness,” James discusses mind-cure’s widespread popularity.
Over the previous twenty-five years the movement had spread everywhere
and come to the point where “it must now be reckoned with as a genuine
religious power” (James, 1985, p. 83). Its “moral fruits”—its impact on daily
lives of individuals and families—had become obvious. And as the market for
its literature vastly expanded, publishers were churning out works “so moon-
struck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained
intellect finds it almost impossible to read it at all” (James, 1985, p. 84). Yet
James sorts through much of it and finds comparative gold in the writings of
Horatio W. Dresser and Henry Wood.
James sees mind-cure as a typically American contribution to the history
and psychology of religion. As Varieties explains, “The spread of the [mind-
cure] movement has been due to practical fruits, and the extremely practical
turn of the American people has never been better shown than by the fact
Donald F. Duclow 49

that this, their only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philoso-
phy of life, should be so intimately knit up with concrete therapeutics” (pp.
84–85). James thus agrees with mind-cure’s proponents that it passes the
pragmatic test of making a difference, as evidenced in the testimonials of
cures which Varieties cites in abundance. Similarly, Henry Wood (1893) ar-
gues that idealism was finally producing useful changes: “Utility is the
watchword of the present age. What is idealism good for? Does it lift up hu-
manity and restore weak minds and disordered bodies?” (p. 52) Wood replies
that “mental photography”—his method of mind-cure—does precisely these
things.
James summarizes mind-cure’s methods under three headings: suggestion,
release or letting go, and tapping into the subconscious.
Citing H. H. Goddard’s (1899) psychological study of faith cures, James
takes up the core theme of suggestion. He cautions, however, that a reductive
use of this theme—claiming that mind-cure is “nothing but” suggestion—
throws a “wet blanket upon investigation.” James defines suggestion more
precisely as “the power of ideas, so far as they prove efficacious over belief
and conduct” (p. 97). He therefore asks how ideas become effective and which
ones currently bear the power of suggestion: “An idea, to be suggestive, must
come to the individual with the force of a revelation” which requires novelty
to spark faith, enthusiasm and example (p. 98). Although the Christian
churches had lost their therapeutic power, the mind-cure gospel kindled
many believers’ religion into an “acute fever.”
“Suggestion” is a prominent term within the mind-cure literature. Henry
Wood’s book Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography clarifies mind-
cure’s methods. His technique reworks traditional contemplative methods
and resembles such recent developments as Herbert Benson’s (1976) “relax-
ation response,” guided imagery and visualization. Wood (1893) advises a dis-
ciplined sequence of silence, breathing exercises, repeated readings of “medi-
tation” texts, concentration on large-print “suggestions”—e.g., “HEALING IS
BIBLICAL” or “HEALING IS SCIENTIFIC”—and closing one’s eyes to “be-
hold it [the suggestion] with the mind’s eye, and let it permeate the whole
organism” (pp. 108–109). Each of Wood’s twenty-four meditations is a one-
page commentary on the suggestion that appears on the facing page.
Whereas today’s visualization techniques focus on specific images, a “sugges-
tion” is more like visual mantra, a text for repetition and concentrated atten-
tion that imprint it on the mind as on a photographic plate. The concluding
meditation and suggestion illustrate mind-cure’s message. Glossing the sug-
gestion “I AM HEALED,” the meditation guides readers to see “the real ego”
as spirit, not body, and as already whole: “In God’s strength I affirm that my
(naming seemingly diseased parts or members) are already well, strong, and
beautiful” (Wood, 1893, p. 156). The meditation then encourages the refusal
to acknowledge evil that James finds central to healthy-minded religion: “I
bolt the door of thought against every mental picture of imperfection and
50 Journal of Religion and Health

disorder. I hold only the perfect, and affirm nothing less. . . . I will forget the
evil and remember the good. I am whole, mentally and physically” (Wood,
1893, p. 156).
The second feature of mind-cure that James highlights is “readiness for
regeneration by letting go” (p. 99). One must surrender all muscular and mor-
alistic straining of the will.4 In an ingenious move, James notes “a psychologi-
cal similarity between the mind-cure movement and the Lutheran and
Wesleyan movements” which claimed that salvation cannot be achieved
through our efforts, but has already been achieved in Christ and is freely
given to us; we only need to open ourselves to receive it (pp. 94–95). Here too
James’s comparison reflects the mind-curers’ own language. He cites Ralph
Waldo Trine (1995) who urges his readers, “God is well, and so are you. You
must awaken to the knowledge of your real being” (p. 75). Similarly, Wood
(1893) stresses that “The prayer of doubt and uncertainty, or the petition that
salvation may come, does not avail. The kind of prayer that is needed is real-
ization that salvation is already complete, and that its full expression de-
pends entirely upon ourselves” (pp. 91–92). By opening to our “real being,”
this receptive awakening yields healing through the third key factor in mind-
cure, its “unprecedentedly great use of the subconscious life” (James, 1985 p.
99).
By 1900 the subconscious had become a major theme in psychology. As
James notes, the studies of hysteria by Binet, Janet, Breuer, Freud and
others “have revealed to us whole systems of underground life” (p. 191).
Mind-curers also appealed to the subconscious. For example, Wood (1893)
writes, “The consciousness which is on the surface is only the merest fraction
of the great stored-up sub-conscious deeps of the mental reservoir” (p. 50).
Mind-cure developed techniques to tap into this “submerged personality” and
shape its impact on conscious life and health. James cites Horatio Dresser,
Trine and Wood who describe the “practice of concentration.” Dresser (1899)
recommends setting aside “times for silent meditation, by one’s self, prefera-
bly in a room where the surroundings are favorable to spiritual thought. . . .
This is called ‘entering the silence’ ” (p. 33). Powerful healing energies emerge
in this silence when, as Wood (1893) says, “The ego gradually becomes con-
scious that it is face to face with the Divine Presence. . . . There is soul-
contact with the Parent-Soul, and an influx of life, love, virtue, health, and
happiness from the Inexhaustible Fountain” (p. 71). Mind-cure thus finds di-
vine forces within the subconscious, rather than Freud’s repressed memories
and psycho-sexual conflicts. Our mental reservoirs apparently contain vastly
different materials and forces. On this issue, although James expresses him-
self more guardedly than Wood, he nevertheless places himself close to the
mind-curers when he traces both psychic phenomena and religion to a “sub-
liminal self” (James, 1956, p. 321). And in Varieties’ conclusion, he argues
that religion itself arises within the mind’s subconscious levels, and through
these may touch on objective realities that are “more” than ourselves (pp.
400–404).
Donald F. Duclow 51

James’s critique

James considers the healthy-minded religion exemplified in mind-cure to be

valuable but incomplete. Indeed, if it were complete Varieties would be a
much shorter book. But James recognizes other religious personality types
who are anything but healthy-minded. In particular, he juxtaposes the
healthy-minded to its opposite, the sick soul—the type which poses questions
that fuel the rest of Varieties. When he sets aside healthy-mindedness, James
asks, “Let us see whether pity, pain, and fear and the sentiment of human
helplessness may not open a profounder view and put into our hands a more
complicated key to the meaning of the situation” (p. 118). Not only do the
lectures on the sick soul form the book’s darkest section, but they also lead
into discussions of the divided self, conversion, saintliness and mysticism. For
the sick soul’s immersion in sin, pain and evil initiates a journey that the
later sections of Varieties follow to the end. In particular, sick souls and di-
vided selves require the trauma and surrender of conversion to resolve their
basic conflicts. The religion of healthy-mindedness is thus limited in two
ways. First, it forms one type among others, and hence its vision is neces-
sarily incomplete. Second, the healthy-minded cannot acknowledge the need
for the journey that sick souls and divided selves undertake.
James had personal reasons for criticizing healthy-mindedness, and was
horrified when readers took the two testimonials appended to the lectures on
healthy-mindedness to be his own. Writing to a friend on this point, he said,
“Heaven forbid!” and wished to delete the cases from later editions of Vari-
eties.5 James does include a disguised personal account in Varieties—not
among the healthy-minded, but among the sick souls. He describes his early
experience (1869–70) of the “worst kind of melancholy” in a testimonial that
he attributes to a correspondent writing in French. Overcome by a sudden
“fear of my own existence,” the writer recalls seeing an asylum patient sitting
“like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing
but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human” (p. 134). Recognizing
with horror how easily he himself could become that figure, the writer is
reduced to “a mass of quivering fear,” and the vision left him with an endur-
ing “sense of the insecurity of life.” Especially revealing are the lasting after
effects: “the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of
others ever since” (pp. 134–135). This sympathy informs much of Varieties,
and had found expression in James’s earlier address to the Harvard YMCA
where he summons up “the whole army of suicides” and proclaims solidarity
with them because “we are of one substance with these suicides” (James,
1956, p. 37).
While James’s early crisis has received much commentary (Stroudt, 1968;
Simon, 1998), less familiar are the circumstances surrounding the writing of
Varieties. While climbing in the Adirondacks in 1898, James sustained the
heart damage that he struggled with until his death in 1910 (Bjork, 1988). He
had been scheduled to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures—which were
52 Journal of Religion and Health

published as Varieties—at the University of Edinburgh in 1900. But James’s

ill health required him to postpone the lectures to 1901–02, and his notebook
suggests just how sick-souled he was in 1900:

I find myself in a cold, pinched, quaking state when I think of the probability of
my dying soon with all my music in me. . . . My mind is pinned down to the
continual contemplation of annihilation which fills me with a kind of physical
dread. . . . I have forgotten, really forgotten, that mass of this world’s joyous facts
which in my healthful days filled me with exhultation [sic] about life, facts which
are there still, wholly undiminished by my own paltry little fading out. The in-
creasing pain and misery of more fully developed disease—the disgust, the final
strangulation etc., begin to haunt me, I fear them; and the more I fear them the
more I think about them. I am turned into a pent-in egotist, beyond a doubt,
have in my spiritual make-up no rescuing resources adapted to such a situation.6

Even within Varieties’ accounts of sick souls like Tolstoy and Bunyan, it
would be hard to find a more complete reversal of the mind-cure program
than this statement. While mind-curers encourage optimistic self-confidence
and setting aside all thoughts of evil, James is driven by fear, preoccupied
with dying, and forgets—and knows that he forgets—all life’s joys. Worse
still, he claims to have “no rescuing resources” to deal with his desperate
condition.
Yet during the last twelve years of his life, James continually sought cures
for his heart condition. Like many seriously ill patients who try any promis-
ing therapy, he consulted regular physicians and a Christian Science healer,
took the baths at Nauheim in Germany, and received experimental injections
of animal extract (Bjork, 1988; Simon, 1998). As we know, he also found the
psychological resources to continue writing and lecturing. He completed not
only Varieties, but his major essays on pragmatism and radical empiricism.
Indeed, the sense of his own mortality may have led him to this renewed
productivity so that he at least would not die “with all my music in me.”
Yet James’s reasons for criticizing healthy-mindedness in Varieties are not
exclusively personal. He also brings practical, psychological, systematic and
religious objections to the fore. His central criticism is that healthy-minded
religion sidesteps tragedy. In practical terms, mind-cure dismisses rather
than confronts the sick soul’s oppressive sense of evil and suffering. While
mind-cure works for the healthy-minded, it can do little to relieve the melan-
choly of sick souls. We have seen James defend mind-cure’s effectiveness as
central to its popular success and religious importance. Yet he also recognizes
its limits, unlike Wood (1893) who sees “no limitations” to his method’s power
and overstates his case like a medicine show pitch man: “Those in servitude
to any kind of fear, or who are carrying burdens of grief, poverty, disappoint-
ment, anxiety, or melancholia, will find Ideal Suggestion a free and sovereign
remedy” (p. 104). But Varieties’ stark recital of sick souls’ testimonials makes
Wood’s claim incredible by showing how inevitably “our original optimism
Donald F. Duclow 53

and self-satisfaction get leveled with the dust” (James, 1985, p. 135). Healthy-
mindedness thus offers a temporary solution, one that James considers ulti-
mately doomed to failure and melancholy. In addition, his sympathetic clini-
cal sense leads James to recognize the damage that can be done by imposing
optimistic mind-cure on sick souls. He knows how useless and even cruel it
can be to tell the deeply depressed to cheer up and turn away from the evils
that oppress them.
Still more is at stake in James’s critique. For healthy-minded religion and
mind-cure fail to take into account some basic realities of human life: “The
fact that we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us” (James,
1985, p. 119). The broader issue is not how healthy-minded individuals over-
come their pains and sorrows, but the human reality that we are all subject
to illness, suffering and death. This problem requires a solution that is wider,
indeed universal. If by “a lucky personal accident,” the healthy-minded can
isolate themselves from this reality, their approach “leaves the general world
unhelped and still in the clutch of Satan” (James, 1985, p. 289). James thus
poses broadly metaphysical and religious questions when he acknowledges
that in our lives evil and suffering are every bit as real as good and flourish-
ing—can in fact overwhelm them—and struggles toward an adequate re-
sponse to this tangled reality.
Comparing the healthy-minded and sick souls, James asks which type has
the fuller, more complete view of experience. Not surprisingly, he says that by
including suffering and evil, sick souls’ “morbid-mindedness ranges over the
broader scale of experience,” and concludes that “healthy-mindedness is inad-
equate as a philosophical doctrine, because evil facts which it refuses pos-
itively to account for are a genuine portion of reality” (James, 1985, p. 136).
When Wood argues—like Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science—that sin
and evil are not “entities,” but “conditions” that can and must be thought
away, James disagrees. In his view, this claim blinks away too much reality.
With rhetorical force, he argues that “lunatics’ visions of horror are all drawn
from material of everyday fact,” and—playing on a phrase of Kant—he de-
scribes the moments when “radical evil gets its innings”: “every individual
existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony” whether in the jaws of
“carnivorous reptiles of geologic time,” of the cats in our gardens, or of croco-
diles and tigers (p. 137). Later in Varieties he similarly notes “the prevalence
of tragic death” (p. 289). Up against terrors so obvious and extreme, he sug-
gests, “It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute
totality of things is possible” (p. 137). Certainly mind-cure and healthy-
minded religion fail before such radical evil.
Seeking more adequate responses to sick souls and evil’s reality, James
goes on to explore conversion and saintliness. In conversion deep, prolonged
suffering provokes a surrender of self to the divine and re-centers one’s per-
sonality around a religious core. Conversion yields a “willingness to be, even
though the outer conditions remain the same,” and replaces melancholy with
54 Journal of Religion and Health

a sense of “newness within and without” (p. 201). Saintliness displays an

ascetic impulse that actively struggles with life’s troubling, darker forces and
risks defeat and death.7 Sharply critical of ascetical excesses, James seeks
“saner channels for the heroism” that inspired saints’ actions (p. 291). He
wants asceticism’s practical fruits—self-discipline and work toward a better
world—without the self-torture and narrow focus on one’s own salvation
found in many saintly narratives.
In Varieties’ concluding lecture, James tones down his critique of healthy-
minded religion. He moves toward a polytheism where the divine “must mean
a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different
men may all find worthy missions” (p. 384). With their varied, alternating
perspectives and careers, sick souls require one kind of religion and the
healthy-minded another. These types also pass the pragmatic test. For al-
though conversion and saintliness offer a “higher synthesis” that embraces
both healthy-mindedness and morbidness, James notes that all these ap-
proaches lead to a similar outcome: “The final consciousness which each type
reaches of union with the divine has the same practical significance for the
individual” (p. 385). Just as conversion heals the sick souled, mind-cure
serves the healthy-minded. He also notes similarities between these methods,
since mind-cure narratives offer “abundant examples of regenerative pro-
cess,” and thus differ from conversion accounts mainly in the intensity of the
crises described and the duration of sufferers’ consciousness of evil. In the
end, James recognizes healthy-mindedness as a distinct religious type with
its own limitations and value.

Conclusion: mind-cure and its limits today

James thus presents a sympathetic critique of healthy-minded religion and

mind-cure. He reminds us of the power of our attitudes, emotions and beliefs
to sicken and heal, and to be aware of this power’s limits as well.
Today we still hear claims for mind-cure, but the medical landscape has
changed considerably since James’s time. The licensure debate has long been
settled in ways that James opposed—in favor of the AMA and academically
based, scientific medicine. Yet alternative or complementary medical prac-
tices are again flourishing. And mainstream medicine itself has not only be-
come much more precise and effective, but has also begun to welcome mind/
body approaches. In 1992 the National Institute of Health took a small but
important step in this direction by establishing an Office of Alternative Medi-
cine. The emerging science of Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) is clarifying the
immune system’s role in mediating between “mental” states and “physical”
disease and health (Cousins, 1989). Bill Moyers has televised Healing and the
Mind, a wide-ranging PBS series on advances in mind/body medicine, and
published a companion book with the same title (Moyers, 1993). Healing
Donald F. Duclow 55

claims and practices have also become more explicitly religious. In the 1970s
Herbert Benson (1975) presented his “relaxation response” within the context
of the meditative practices of world religions. More recently he has high-
lighted the “faith factor” in healing and remaining well, and proposed that we
are “wired for God” (Benson, 1985, 1997). Similarly, Larry Dossey (1993), Jeff
Levin (2001), and others have attempted to document links between prayer
and healing.
Yet the limits that James found in mind-cure and healthy-minded religion
remain with us. Illness, suffering and death have not gone away, and those
with good attitudes and healthy lifestyles—even, as Dossey (1993) notes, the
saints among us—continue to suffer and die. With James, we may do well to
confront these realities and to work out alternatives to healthy-minded reli-
gion and medicine. Varieties’ account of asceticism’s active struggle against
evil has long echoed in cure-oriented medical practice and the heroic suffering
of patients, especially those in experimental therapies. But today’s chronic
and degenerative illnesses require approaches that promote coping more than
cure. Arthur Kleinman (1988) and Arthur Frank (1995) have suggested the
importance of narrative in developing less triumphal, more appropriate ways
of living in “the remission society” and with debilitating illnesses. Like Vari-
eties’ conversion, these approaches may help the chronically ill to sustain
their “willingness to be” amid unalterable, limiting conditions. In addition,
we are also learning more humane ways to come to terms with dying through
hospice and institutions like the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, which
gathers seriously ill patients together for an intense week of creative, sorrow-
ful and even joyful life.8 In short, we are beginning to develop arts of suffering
and dying that will supplement our expanding healing arts (Duclow, 1981).
As we have seen, William James understood the need for such arts only too
well.

Endnotes

1. The texts have been edited in James (1987): James’s two letters to the editor of the Boston
Evening Transcript (March 24 and April 4, 1894) on proposals for a Medical Registration Act
(pp. 145–150), and his “Address on the Medical Registration Bill (1898)” (pp. 56–62).
2. James knew that his physician colleagues would condemn him for tesifying, and he was crit-
icized as a “spokesman of medievalism and ally of quackery” in Philadelphia and Boston medi-
cal journals (James, 1987, pp. 567 and 657–658).
3. James (1987), p. 59. James himself was among those who consulted mind-curers: in 1885 for
insomnia; in 1893–94 for “melancholy” or depression; and in 1906 for insomnia (Levin, 1998).
4. Gail Thain Parker (1973) argues that here James “bowdlerized the mind-cure message, cut-
ting out the parts that were unmistakably strenuous. . . . [Mind-curers] were invigorated not
by their moral holidays so much as by the fact that they found themselves eager to get back to
work” (pp. 19–20; see pp. 162–168).
5. See James, letter to B. Wendell, August 24, 1902, in Howe (1928, p. 682). See also the Harvard
edition of Varieties (James, 1985): “In his copy James indicates that this Appendix should be
omitted” (p. 444). The Appendix remains in all later editions.
6. James, Notebook, cited in Bjork (1988), p. 241.
56 Journal of Religion and Health

7. James highlights the contrast with healthy-mindedness when he writes that asceticism “sym-
bolizes . . . the belief that there is an element of real wrongness in this world, which is neither
to be ignored nor evaded, but which must be squarely met and overcome by an appeal to the
soul’s heroic resources, and neutralized and cleansed away by suffering” (p. 289).
8. See “Wounded Healers,” the fifth episode of Bill Moyers’ PBS series, Healing and the Mind,
and his interviews with Michael Lerner and Rachel Naomi Remen (Moyers, 1993).

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