Johns Hopkins's first professorship in philosophy: a critical pivot point in the history of American psychology

The first professorship in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University was contested in the early 1880s by two of the most prominent and influential scholars in America: Charles Sanders Peirce and George Sylvester Morris. A third figure also vied for the position, although he was much less well known at the time: Granville Stanley Hall. Through a series of unexpected circumstances, Hall ultimately won the professorship and then used it to leverage an extraordinary career that included his opening the first American research laboratory in psychology, establishing the American Journal of Psychology, becoming president of Clark University, founding the American Psychological Association, and profoundly affecting the character of developmental psychology in America.     

The Johns Hopkins University: Training center for social scientists

In 1878, Professor Benjamin Peirce of Harvard, president of the American Social Science Association, viewed the Johns Hopkins University as the headquarters for social science in the United States. With the guidance provided by Franklin B. Sanborn, secretary of the ASSA, the Hopkins initiated formal instruction in social science in 1888, with Amos G. Warner and Daniel C. Gilman as instructors. This article is concerned with the contributions the ASSA and the Hopkins made in developing a theory/practice model for education for the social sciences.     

Between Peirce (1878) and James (1898): G. Stanley Hall,the origins of pragmatism,and the history of psychology

This article focuses on the 20‐year gap between Charles S. Peirce's classic proposal of pragmatism in 1877–1878 and William James's equally classic call for pragmatism in 1898. It fills the gap by reviewing relevant developments in the work of Peirce and James and by introducing G. Stanley Hall, for the first time, as a figure in the history of pragmatism. In treating Hall and pragmatism, the article reveals a previously unnoted relation between the early history of pragmatism and the early history of the “new psychology” that Hall helped to pioneer. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Shaping of scientific psychology in Japan

Japanese scientific psychology began with Y. Motora's lecture on pyschophysics at the University of Tokyo in 1888. He had just received his PhD under G.S. Hall at Johns Hopkins University, in the USA. He became the first professor of psychology in 1890 and founded the first psychological laboratory at the University of Tokyo in 1903. He studied many psychological problems, including attention, experimentally and theoretically. One of his first students, Matataro Matsumoto, founded the second psychological laboratory at Kyoto University and then succeeded to Motora's position in Tokyo. Matsumoto was interested in experimental studies of human performance and their applications. He trained many able psychologists and organized the Japanese Psychological Association in 1927. Some of his students founded more psychological laboratories in major universities of Japan. They introduced psychological tests, Gestalt psychology, and behaviourism in the 1920s and 1930s. Psychoanalysis was introduced through mainly nonacademic roots and became familiar to Japanese psychologists in the 1930s. After World War II, a strong influence of American psychology came to Japanese psychologists who had already trained in scientific methodology. The areas of research and applications have been greatly widened and the number of psychologists has increased rapidly up to the present day. Promotion of international interactions and indigenous traditions are both expected.     

Cultivating the field of psychology. Psychological journals at the turn of the century and beyond

Prominent psychologists, including G. Stanley Hall, James Mark Baldwin, and James McKeen Cattell, cultivated the field of psychological publishing with privately owned and managed journals. Hall's journals, including the American Journal of Psychology and Pedagogical Seminary, reflected his view of psychology as the empirical study of human nature and his support for applied psychology. Baldwin and Cattell's periodicals, including Psychological Review and Psychological Monographs, reflected a narrower scientific and academic view of psychology. Baldwin and Cattell were more successful editors than Hall and strategically linked their journals to the American Psychological Association (APA). The Psychological Review journals were purchased by APA in 1925. The narrower vision represented in these journals may have contributed to applied psychologists' dissatisfaction with APA during the late 1920s and early 1930s.     

John B. Watson's alleged sex research: an appraisal of the evidence

In 1974, a story was published about clandestine research done by John B. Watson that was judged to be so reprehensible that it was offered as the real reason he was fired from his faculty position at Johns Hopkins University in 1920, at perhaps the peak of his academic career. Watson's dismissal from Johns Hopkins may have been the most important event in his career, and it almost certainly altered the history of American psychology. Thus, this story has great significance. The claims of the story, however, have never been validated or invalidated. This article examines the evidence for and against the existence of such research and discusses Watson's academic dismissal in light of that evidence.     

Gordon Allport, character, and the "culture of personality," 1897-1937

This article examines the cultural context of early American personality psychology through a consideration of the early career of Gordon Allport. Between 1921 and 1937, Allport was among the leading figures in the movement to establish personality as a research category in American psychology. Far from being a strictly scientific concern, Allport's project was deeply embedded in the cultural politics of the age. Of particular importance was the gradual erosion of the language of character and the self-sacrificing, morally grounded self that it supported. Allport's "psychology of personality" helped fuel this trend while simultaneously attempting to resist it. His experience illustrates the elasticity and moral ambiguity of the newly emerging category of personality.     

The Fate of the Forgotten: Chamberlain''s Work Reconsidered

This article discusses the early psychological traditions developed at Clark University under the guidance of G. Stanley Hall. Anthropology and cultural psychology are both rooted in the notion that humans are social beings. That idea constituted a brief moment of theoretical unity between psychology and anthropology in the study of human language in its psychological functions. In that context, the work of Alexander Chamberlain is explored as a major contribution. Chamberlain--if viewed in the jargon of our contemporary social scientists--was deeply "interdisciplinary" in his work. Despite the positive meaning of the term "interdisciplinary" in contemporary discourse about the social sciences, the realities of social organization of any science entail separation rather than integration. Chamberlain's work took place in parallel in anthropology and in developmental psychology under the interdisciplinary emphasis of "child study" as set up by G. Stanley Hall. Hall made child study the distinctive feature of the "Clark tradition" of psychology. Chamberlain's work constituted both the beginning and the end of the (miniscule) "Clark tradition" in anthropology.     

American Psychology of Religion and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

It is doubtful whether there ever has been a rise‐fall‐rebirth of the psychology of religion. While the claim has marginal merit for American academic psychology, it has little application in other cultures or even within American psychology of religion outside mainstream psychology. The psychology of religion has always been and remains tied to key individuals who sustain the field. This historical fact is important in understanding the role of the JSSR in the field. Early psychologists of religion such as Hall and James set the pattern for two distinctively different approaches to the psychology of religion. Hall's approach was methodologically restrictive, inherently reductive, and came to dominate the academic psychology of religion. James ‘approach was methodological plural, receptive to the evidential force of religious experience, and quickly marginalized within American psychology. These opposing orientation continue to influence the psychology of religion in societies such as the SSR and its journal. A review of the psychologist editors of JSSR illustrates that the psychology of religion remains a marginal interest of mainstream psychology. It survives because of the interdisciplinary nature of the SSSR and its journal.     

Pragmatism,bioethics and the grand American social experiment

There is tension in bioethics between two strains of pragmatism. The most prominent strain, following John Dewey, proposes a content-rich ethos of controlled, collective moral inquiry. A second strain, descending from Charles Peirce and Josiah Royce, favors an open-ended approach where diverging moral communities evolve without extensive inter-communal oversight. This essay defends the second strain. The Deweyan approach, I argue, exhibits a problematic quasi-foundationalist character insofar as it canonizes a dubious constellation of "liberal" political values and seeks to establish these values by interposing a consensus of moral experts where genuine inter-communal dialogue, and compromise, would be more fruitful. I hold that the alternative approach of Peirce and Royce is preferable, and truer to the fundamental commitments of classical American pragmatism. Recognizing the epistemic fallibility of various content-rich moral-political formulations, Peirce and Royce hope to cultivate and sustain moral inquiry by allowing each moral community (1) to generate and test its own moral system (as long as it does so peaceably) and (2) to freely make or refuse to make collaborative arrangements with other moral communities. This approach is illustrated in a brief discussion of the Oregon Medical Experiment.     

TEACHING THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN COURSES IN ANOTHER DISCIPLINE

A survey of course titles in African American Studies departments and programs was conducted to examine the course offerings on the psychology of women, the psychology of African American women, and other areas of psychology as well as courses on gender from other disciplines. A total of 82 programs or departments of African American Studies and 182 courses were listed. The course discipline was stated in the majority of courses, with psychology having the most courses. Only a small percentage of the psychology courses listed gender in addition to race in the title. Of those courses listed in psychology, the majority were in social, developmental, or clinical psychology. The disciplines of English, sociology, history, and political science had listings of courses with both gender and race titles. This small survey indicates that the psychology of women has not had much influence on the curriculum of African American Studies. Possible reasons for this are discussed, as are solutions to this problem.     

Psychology and gender at the turn of the century

The turn of the 20th century in America was a period of changing gender ideals. The younger generation of women pressed for economic independence and political rights. Men became caught up with the virility and physicality of the new standard of passionate manhood. These gender shifts were reflected in turn-of-the-century American psychology. With men dominating the discipline, the emerging scientific psychology projected the values of the new man. Several examples of this androcentric psychology are reviewed, including the views of such prominent psychologists as G. Stanley Hall, James McKeen Cattell, and William James. There were also a few women psychologists who challenged the androcentric bias by attempting to incorporate the values of the new woman, most notably Mary Whiton Calkins, Helen Thompson Woolley, and Leta Stetter Hollingworth.     

A Fallible Groom in the Religious Thought of C.S. Peirce – A Centenary Revisitation

Under the general tutelage of Kant, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) introduced American pragmatism to yet another philosophical dialectic: between a neglected transcendental instinct and earthly authorities. The dialectic became Peirce’s response to various evolutionary schemes in the 19th century. Guided by the recollected voices of Socrates, Jesus, St. John, Anselm, and Kant, as well as his own brand of pragmatism, Peirce eventually developed a “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” a century ago, in 1908. Here, Peirce endorsed a more adventurous god than ecclesiastical or theological authorities could imagine, a god of love (agapism) and chance (tychism), but still rife with fallibility.

Of faculties, fallacies, and freedom: dilemma and irony in the secularization of American psychology

In The Principles of Psychology, William James (1890) articulated an influential, boundary-setting argument against faculty psychology, subsequently dubbed the Fallacy of the Faculty Psychology. This argument was reiterated in American psychology textbooks for the next several decades, arguably solidifying and simplifying American perceptions of the "old" faculty psychology and establishing belief in the superiority of the "New Psychology." When placed in the context of American theological and philosophical history, however, the New Psychology argument appears unoriginal, somewhat unfair, and deeply (and even tragically) ironic. Despite their best intentions, a fallacy did emerge in the old psychology as they sought psychological foundations for libertarian free will. For those members of the New Psychology still committed to free will, then, the Fallacy argument cut both ways - refuting the fallacy also meant tearing down a long-standing foundation for free will in American psychology. Offering no viable alternative to fill the moral void, the New Psychology appeared at times conflicted with its new deterministic identity.     

The X club and the secret ring: lessons on how behavior analysis can take over psychology

In 1864 Thomas Huxley and eight fellow scientists formed a secret organization called the X Club, dedicated to the promotion of Darwinian theory and naturalistic science. Its members active for almost 40 years, the X Club acted as the "power behind the throne" with respect to the governance of the Royal Society and other British scientific groups. In 1914 Sigmund Freud formed the Secret Ring with six other psychoanalysts, dedicated to the covert promotion of their field and to the removal of impediments (persons and policies) to the acceptance of psychoanalysis. After over 20 years of existence, the Secret Ring disbanded, having succeeded in its mission. It is suggested that behavior analysis should adopt a similar arrangement, whereby a group of distinguished scholars quietly but systematically promotes the persons and practices of our field within psychology, with respect to awards, elected and appointed office, and governance.     

Faint voices from Greenwich Village: Jung's impact on the first American avant-garde

In 1913 Jung made a trip to New York which was to have an important impact on the creation of modern American culture. At the invitation of Beatrice Hinkle, the first Jungian analyst in the country, he spoke to the Liberal Club, a forum for discussing progressive topics. Jung was the leading spokesman for psychoanalysis and his ideas about creative fantasy resonated with popular interest in the ideas of William James and Henri Bergson. This paper will document that visit and the influence that Hinkle had on the young people who had gravitated to Greenwich Village. She promoted Jungian psychology through her analytical practice and her translation of Jung's Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido as Psychology of the Unconscious. Her influence is evident in four key neighbourhood institutions: The Masses, a socialist magazine, The Seven Arts, an avant-garde literary magazine, the Provincetown Players theatre ensemble, and the Heterodoxy Club, America's first feminist group. Her influence is also evident at The New School where several pioneering anthropologists employed the theory of psychological types as a tool for understanding social behaviour. This paper will demonstrate that a cultural moment usually seen through a Freudian lens had, in fact, a remarkably Jungian character.     

The window on psychology's literature: a history of Psychological Abstracts

With the rapid expansion of scientific information at the end of the 19th century, disciplines sought ways to keep their members abreast of the relevant research. Those pressures were felt in the science of psychology in the United States, where psychologists developed a bibliographic aid, The Psychological Index, in 1895 only a little more than a decade after G. Stanley Hall opened America's first psychology laboratory. The Index was useful but was only a listing of titles. More information was needed, which led to the development of a journal of abstracts, first published in 1927. This article traces the history of Psychological Abstracts from its origins in the Index to the evolution of the American Psychological Association's electronic information system known as PsycINFO, of which Psychological Abstracts has become an outmoded part. Nevertheless, for most of its 80 years, Psychological Abstracts was psychology's window on the world of research.     

THE BIOLOGIST AS PSYCHOLOGIST: HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN'S EARLY MENTAL ABILITY INVESTIGATIONS

In the early 1880s, biologist Henry Fairfield Osborn conducted some of the first questionnaire research in American psychology. This article details how he came to distribute Francis Galton's questionnaire on mental imagery in the United States, as well as how he altered it to suit his own burgeoning psychological research interests. The development and circulation of questionnaires at the very beginning of American scientific psychology, first by Osborn and later by G. Stanley Hall, is discussed in terms of the new psychology's often‐overlooked methodological plurality. Further, Osborn's late nineteenth century interest in individual variation and group differences in mental imagery ability are discussed in relation to his pervasive educational and social concerns, as well as his eventual status as a prominent eugenicist in the twentieth century United States. This research into mental imagery ability foreshadows the eugenic‐oriented intelligence testing that developed in the early twentieth century.     

Predicating from an Early Age: Edusemiotics and the Potential of Children’s Preconceptions

This paper aims to explain how semiotics and constructivism can collaborate in an educational epistemology by developing a joint approach to prescientific conceptions. Empirical data and findings of constructivist research are interpreted in the light of Peirce’s semiotics. Peirce’s semiotics is an anti-psychologistic logic (CP 2.252; CP 4.551; W 8:15; Pietarinen in Signs of logic, Springer, Dordrecht, 2006; Stjernfelt in Diagrammatology. An investigation on the borderlines of phenomenology, ontology and semiotics, Springer, Dordrecht, 2007) and relational logic. Constructivism was traditionally developed within psychology and sociology and, therefore, some incompatibilities can be expected between these two schools. While acknowledging the differences, we explain that constructivism and semiotics share the assumption of realism that knowledge can only be developed upon knowledge and, therefore, an epistemological collaboration is possible. The semiotic analysis performed confirms the constructivist results and provides a further insight into the teacher-student relation. Like the constructivist approach, Peirce’s doctrine of agapism infers that the personal dimension of teaching must not be ignored. Thus, we argue for the importance of genuine sympathy in teaching attitudes. More broadly, the article also contributes to the development of postmodern humanities. At the end of the modern age, the humanities are passing through a critical period of transformation. There is a growing interest in semiotics and semiotic philosophy in many areas of the humanities. Such a case, on which we draw, is the development of a theoretical semiotic approach to education, namely edusemiotics (Stables and Semetsky, Pedagogy and edusemiotics: theoretical challenge/practical opportunities, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, 2015).     

The growth and transformation of American ego psychology

The roots of ego psychology trace back to Sigmund Freud's The Ego and the Id (1923) and "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety" (1926), works followed by two additional fundaments, Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936) and Heinz Hartmann's Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (1939). It was brought to full flowering in post-World War II America by Hartmann and his many collaborators, and for over two decades it maintained a monolithic hegemony over American psychoanalysis. Within this framework the conceptions of the psychoanalytic psychotherapies evolved as specific modifications of psychoanalytic technique directed to the clinical needs of the spectrum of patients not amenable to psychoanalysis proper. This American consensus on the ego psychology paradigm and its array of technical implementations fragmented several decades ago, with the rise in America of Kohut's self psychology, geared to the narcissistic disorders, and with the importation from Britain of neo-Kleinian and object-relational perspectives, all coinciding with the rapid growth of the varieties of relational psychoanalysis, with its shift in focus to the two-person, interactive, and co-constructed transference-countertransference matrix. Implications of this intermingled theoretical pluralism (as contrasted with the unity of the once dominant ego psychology paradigm) for the evolution of the American ego psychology are spelled out.