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 presided over psychology at Cornell, where he was an institution unto himself, arrogantly lecturing in his academic robes and tolerating no dissent. Titchener often quarreled with his American colleagues and founded his own organization to rival the fledging American Psychological Association because of the dispute with members of the latter group. Edward B. Titchener became the American editor of Mind in 1894, and associate editor of the American Journal of Psychology in 1895. Later, Professor Titchener received honorary degrees from Harvard, Clark, and Wisconsin. Although Titchener supervised a large number of students in early twentieth-century American psychology, his system died with himin 1927.
Work
The structural psychology of Edward B. Titchener ha a threefold aim: to describe the components of consciousness in terms of basic elements, to describe the combinations of basic elements, and to explain the connections of the elements of connections of the elements of consciousness to the nervous system. Consciousness is defined as immediate experience, i.e., experience as it is being experienced. Mediate experience was flavored by contents already in the mind, such as previous associations and emotional and motivation levels of a person. Structural psychology attempted to defend the integrity of psychology by contrasting it with physics. Edward Titchener would put his own spin on Wilhelm 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. The experimental method employed by structuralists was introspection. This technique of self-report is the ageless approach to describing self-experience. Introspection depended on the nature of consciousness observed, the purpose of the experiment, and the instructions given by the experimenters. Introspection was considered valid only if done by exceptionally well-trained sacientists, not naive observers. The most common error made by untrained introspectionists was labeled the "stimulus error" — describing the object observed rather that the conscious content. stimulus error, according to Titchener, resulted not in psychological data but in physical descriptions.
Critics
Most of the major findings of Structuralism were seriously challenged. In terms of higher mental processes, Titchener called thought a mental element that is probably an unanalyzed complex of kinesthetic sensations and images. Moreover, he perceived what we call will as an element composed of complex of images that form ideas in advance of action. As a result, thought and will are linked through mental images. According to this analysis, thought must be accompanied by images. This imperative gave rise to the imageless thought controversy, in which other psychologist, such as [[Kulpe}}, Binet, and Woodworth argued the possibilty of thought processe swithout discrete mental images. Such an interpretation was unacceptable for Titchener because it contradicted his analytic view of thought, described by elements if images. Instead, it substituted a more holistic or phenomenal view of thought processes, unanalyzed into constituent elements.
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. However, Titchener would not admit applied aspects of psychology , and so he removed himself from the major theme of American psychology that was eagerly studying such topics as child psychology, abnormal psychology, , animal psychology. Titchener was solely concerned with the experimental analysis of the normal adult human mind, not with the individual differences.
Titchener also translated Külpe's Outlines of Psychology and other works,
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Brennan, J.F.(1982). History and systems of psychology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
- Titchener, E.B.(1898). The postulate of structural psychology. In: Philosophical Review, 1898, No.7. - P.449-465.
- Titchener, E.B.(1929). Systematic psychology: Prolegomena. New York: Macmillan.
External link
- Picture, biography and bibliography in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Credits
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