Romantic Science and the Experience of Self: Transatlantic Crosscurrents from William James to Oliver Sacks (review)

It takes a scholar of long reach, patience, intellectual fortitude, and idealism to address the life work of five deep thinkers spanning more than a century and representing several different, if related, cultures. Martin Halliwell, research fellow in English and American Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester, exemplifies these qualities, on the basis of this remarkable work. Of its subjects—William James, Otto Rank, Ludwig Binswanger, Erik Erikson, and Oliver Sacks—three are physicians, and all made major contributions to clinical therapeutics. Among Halliwell's many commendable capabilities is his view of medicine in practical—as in the art and science of the clinic—as well as philosophical terms. He addresses the way in which healers regard and interact with patients in historical and cultural context, making this book worthy of a place in medical education generally, as well as in cultural history and psychiatry.

Romantic science, stemming from Goethe and Novalis, "attempts to regalvanize the spirit of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century German romanticism in which there was no strict division between art and natural science" (p. vii). It came as a more flexible method—notably James's radical empiricism—in response to a positivistic science that excluded much of what can be called fundamentally human. Its practitioners steered clear of the excessively romantic or mystical, but valued subjective experience and cautioned against objectifying people for the sake of measurement, categorizing, and prediction. Neurologist Oliver Sacks took the term "romantic science" from the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, and is the only member of the quintet who used it.

Halliwell explains his choice of these five (having considered such others as Luria, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and Julia Kristeva): each combined theory and practice within his own branch of the medical humanities, focusing on "selfhood as the vehicle of understanding and expression while retaining a firm focus on empirical reality" (p. 14). They all bridged European and American cultures, and each became a distinctive innovator as an exemplar of romantic science, "questioning the parameters of inherited disciplines in order to strategically redescribe selfhood outside traditional categories of understanding" (p. 14).

William James—physician, physiologist, psychologist, and philosopher, whom Halliwell calls "The Pragmatic Romantic"—countered the deterministic behaviorism of Herbert Spencer with his theory of an active mind: "He devises a philosophy of empirical parallelism which entails a causal reciprocity between mental and physical realms" (p. 30). Halliwell traces the evolution of the concept of will from John Stuart Mill to Emerson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and James, who wrote that "the heave of the will" is felt "whenever strongly explosive tendencies are checked, or strongly obstructive conditions overcome" (p. 48). This notion of will as inhibitory as well as assertive finds expression later in Otto Rank, "The Creative Romantic."

Rank and Ludwig Binswanger were contemporaries from Vienna and Zurich, respectively. Psychologist Rank, who reintroduced will into psychology, died in New York in 1939 at the age of fifty-five, still in the shadow of his mentor, Sigmund Freud. Psychiatrist Binswanger, "The Existential Romantic," kept a cordial distance from Freud as he sought "to redress the explanatory bias of Freudian writing, not to deliberately oppose it" (p. 115). Binswanger's work became widely known in the United States during the 1950s; Halliwell skillfully discusses two of his cases in detail. Rank, who left no casebook, presents a different challenge, fully met; for example, "Rank's emphasis on emotion over intellect is essentially romantic in orientation and links his early analytic work in The Artist and The Double with his later humanistic work on patient-centered therapy" (p. 89). Halliwell's careful presentation of these less-known figures makes this book a trailblazer as well as a...