American Psychological Association

1892

G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924)

A few short years after the first laboratory of scientific psychology was opened in Germany, the new discipline had grown fast enough to warrant the establishment of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1892. The driving force behind its founding was the entrepreneurial psychologist Stanley Hall, who recognized that the time was right to organize the field, as others in such subjects as economics, history, biology, and political science were doing. Once organized, psychology prospered as it made itself useful for the management of an increasingly complex and diverse society.

For its first fifty years, APA membership grew modestly, with only 640 full members in 1940. However, in 1926 a new class of nonvoting members, called associates, was created and saw rapid growth; there were over two thousand associates in 1940. The fact that most of these associates were engaged in applied psychology foreshadowed the explosive growth in the APA after World War II. Growth in APA membership was so great between 1945 and 1970 that one psychologist joked that if the present growth continued, by 2010 every person in the world would be a psychologist. In 2010, in fact, APA had over 150,000 members and affiliates.

The areas of psychology devoted to mental health, clinical psychology, and counseling psychology grew the fastest and remain the dominant specialties of psychology today. Since World War II, APA has had a divisional structure so that members can belong to special-interest groups along with other like-minded members. Nineteen divisions were approved in 1944; since then, thirty-five more divisions have formed to represent interests such as the psychology of women, the history of psychology, psychopharmacology, and others. From a historical perspective, it seems that psychology is too complex a body of knowledge and practice to be represented by only one approach.

SEE ALSO Experimental Psychology (1874), Mental Chronometry (1879), Psychological Tests (1890), Army Intelligence Tests and Racism (1921)

Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, C. G. Jung, A. A. Brill, Ernest Jones, and Sándor Ferenczi pose in front of Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1909.

Jonas Clark Building, Clark University, 2007. Wealthy industrialist Jonas Clark hired G. Stanley Hall to found a college for working-class young men. He established a graduate school instead.