The Mind, Mental Illness and the Stream of Consciousness

Abstract

Virginia Woolf, along with James Joyce, is credited with introducing into narrative writing the ‘stream of consciousness’. This term was first used by the great American psychologist William James at the end of the nineteenth century. James provides a phenomenological description of consciousness as follows: “Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life”.