Edward B. Titchener
Edward Bradford Titchener, D.Sc., Ph.D., LL.D., Litt.D. (1867-1927) was an Englishman and a British Scholar and a student of Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, Germany, before becoming a professor of psychology and founding the first psychology laboratory in the United States at Cornell University. It was Titchener that coined the terms structuralism and functionalism, the initial and early trends in scientific Psychology. Titchener carried [Wundt]'s ideas [structuralism] and studied the structure of mental life. Structuralists used to analyze human experiences through introspection, breaking mental activity into basic elements or building blocks.
Life
Edward Titchener was born in southern England to a family of old lineage but little money. He entered Oxford University in 1885 on a scholarship to study philosophy, and he became interested in Wundt's writings, translating the third edition of the Principles of Physionlogical Psychology. However, the ne psychology of Wundt was not enthusiastically received at Oxford, so Titchener resolved to go to LEipzig and work directly under Wundt. There he took his doctorate completing a dissertation on binocular effects of monocular stimulation. After unsuccessfully searching for a position in England, Titchener accepted a professorship at Cornell, which had opened up when Frank Angell, another American student of Wundt, went to the newly founded Stanford University. For thirty-five years, Titchener presidedover psychology at Cornell, where he was an institution unto himself, arrogantly lecturing in his academic robes and tolerating no dissent.
He became the American editor of Mind in 1894, and associate editor of the American Journal of Psychology in 1895.
Professor Titchener received honorary degrees from Harvard, Clark, and Wisconsin,
Work
He was educated in Europe.
He would put his own spin on Wundt's psychology of consciousness after he emigrated to the United States. Titchener attempted to classify the structures of the mind, not unlike the way a chemist breaks down chemicals into their component parts-water into hydrogen and oxygen for example. Thus, for Titchener, just as hydrogen and oxygen were structures, so were sensations and thoughts. He conceived of hydrogen and oxygen as structures of a chemical compound, and sensations and thoughts as structures of the mind. This approach became known as structuralism.
Publications and Legacy
Titchener's major works are:
- An Outline of Psychology (1896; new edition, 1902)
- A Primer of Psychology (1898; revised edition, 1903)
- Experimental Psychology (four volumes, 1901-05)[1.1][1.2][2.1][2.2]
- Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention (1908)
- Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes (1909)
- A Textbook of Psychology (two volumes, 1909-10)
- A Beginner's Psychology (1915).
These works are characterized as scholarly and systematic, almost encyclopedic in their scope.
He also translated Külpe's Outlines of Psychology and other works,
External link
- Picture, biography and bibliography in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Credits
New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:
The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:
Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.
