William James, Positive Psychology, and Healthy-Mindedness

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In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James offers a psy chological analysis of the religious experiences of leading figures in traditional world religions. James diagnoses the leading figures of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism as morbid-minded. He describes them in this way because of their beliefs that evil is an essen tial component of the world and that the only way we can live a truly joyful and meaningful life is by maximizing our awareness of this evil. James contrasts the views of these morbid-minded persons with indi viduals he calls healthy-minded. Healthy-minded individuals believe evil is not an essential component of the world. For healthy-minded individuals, the way to a joyful and meaningful life lies through mini mizing our awareness of evil. By ignoring or reinterpreting our experi ences of it, they hold, we transform evil into good. James argues that the differences between morbid-minded and healthy-minded views of life are functions of an underlying difference of temperament and that persons of different temperament need differ ent types of religion. If the traditional world religions appeal to the mor bid-minded temperament, James holds, the newer is one example of a religion that appeals to the healthy-minded temperament. James devotes two of the twenty lectures of Varieties to an explicit analysis of the healthy-minded temperament and to a discussion of the beliefs, practices, and successes of the nineteenth century mind-cure movement. While James was impressed with the practical successes of mind-cure, he also believed that its healthy-minded views and practices could be applied beyond the context of healthy-minded religion. In The