Credit: Harper’s Magazine, vol 148, March 1924, 471–480.
When this story began in the 1840s, there was, essentially, no discipline or profession answering to the name “psychology.” Philosophical systems of “mental philosophy” or “mental science” (occasionally called “psychology”) were common enough in colleges, but the idea that one could investigate the mind scientifically, much less apply those findings to the real world of social institutions and personal problems lay somewhere between radical and unheard of in America. Of course there were common truisms about the processes of learning and about techniques of memory that found their origins in the Medieval or even Ancient world. For instance, the assumption that the study of mathematics and Classical languages would discipline the mind, or the idea that the method of loci would facilitate the memorization of long lists—but these were not the conclusions of formal empirical investigation any more than were sayings like “spare the rod, spoil the child.”
The 1860s and 1870s saw, in Germany, the emergence of an experimental psychology that took the recent successes of experimental physiology as its model, but this development was noticed and acknowledged as valuable by a very small number of young American scholars at the time: James, Hall, Ladd, and perhaps a few others. This changed quickly, though. By the 1880s and 1890s, dozens of young Americans were racing to Germany to earn their PhDs in the “new psychology” so that they could land professorships back home in a new discipline that, though sometimes a hard sell to college administrators, presented the distinct advantage of not being already ruled by an older generation of professors. In creating new spaces for themselves, though, the new psychologists ran into a cultural conflict—Wundt and the other German psychologists who had mentored them were adamant that psychology must be a “pure” science in order to prevent it from being relegated downward from the prestigious universities to the pedestrian technical schools. Thus, no “practical” psychological questions were permitted.
In America, by contrast, the college system was expanding rapidly as a result of the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, but the emphasis was quite the opposite of that in Germany: “practical” knowledge was paramount. Some psychologists in America continued to insist upon the purity of experimental psychology, such as Titchener, ensconced in his position in central New York State, but those who were more sensitive to the social revolution then underway in America, especially in the country’s large and expanding cities, saw intellectual, financial, and political opportunities in virtually every direction. Even some who disdained city life for themselves, like Cattell and Thorndike, enhanced their reputations with work that had great appeal to committed urban reformers (of a variety of political stripes).
In addition, psychology rapidly became so popular a topic for American graduate students that their numbers quickly outpaced the number of available university professorships. This forced many young psychologists—especially those whom colleges were reluctant to employ, such as women—to find or create for themselves psychological vocations that had not existed up to that point. Many carved out new consultancies with social institutions that had both money to spend and a need for psychologists’ expertise: business and industry, public education, the courts, immigrant settlement, and mental health, among others. Of course, along with any new “profession” comes new opportunities for grifters and charlatans who see an opportunity to make a quick buck and move on. So the new professional psychologists—not seen as equals by their academic cousins—were soon forced to organize themselves into associations and develop systems of licensure so that their potential clients could distinguish between those with the relevant training and expertise and those without it who simply hoped to benefit from the confusion surrounding a emergence of a new class of paid professional.
The relationship between academic and professional psychologists was never fully settled—indeed, one might argue that it isn’t fully settled in the present day—but the two sides were never able to exist completely separately either. The academics depended on the professionals to maintain and enhance the public visibility and appreciation of “psychology,” and the professionals depended on the academics to maintain and enhance the discipline’s scholarly and scientific status.
Either way, by the 1920s, “psychology” had become a permanent presence in American society at large. It seemed that everyone knew something about it, and many people began to feel that they needed whatever they thought it offered in order to live their lives to the fullest. Dozens of popular new magazines promoted the topic, with titles like Psychology, Popular Psychology, Herald of Psychology, Super Psychology, Mind Power Plus, National Brain Power, and The Golden Rule.1 In 1921, no less a public figure than the legendary baseball player Babe Ruth was put through his psychomotor paces at the Columbia University psychology laboratory to uncover the secrets to his great athleticism. A prominent sports writer of the era, Hugh Fullerton, made sure the public learned of every detail by writing the event up a lavishly illustrated account published in Popular Science Monthly.2 The psychological din soon became so great that the popular humorist Stephen Leacock declared the nation was experiencing an “outbreak of psychology.”3
Credit: Harper’s Magazine, vol 148, March 1924, 471–480.
According to Leacock’s satirical vision:
It is generally admitted that the human mind was first discovered about four years ago by a brilliant writer in one of the Sunday journals. His article “Have We a Subconscious Ego?” was immediately followed by a striking discussion under the title “Are We Top Side Up?” This brought forth a whole series of popular articles and books … and such special technical studies as The Mentality of the Hen and the Thought Process of the Potato.
This movement, once started, has spread in every direction. All our best magazines are now full of mind. In every direction one sees references to psychoanalysis, auto-suggestion, hypnosis, hopnoosis, psychiatry, inebriety, and things never thought of a little while ago. Will power is being openly sold by correspondence at about fifty cents a kilowatt. College professors of psychology are wearing overcoats lined with fur, and riding in little coupé [sic] cars like doctors. The poor are studying the psychology of wealth, and the rich are studying the psychology of poverty. Memory has been reduced to a system. A good memory is now sold for fifty cents.
Everybody’s mind is now analysed. People who used to be content with the humblest of plain thinking, or with none at all, now resolve themselves into “reflexes” and “complexes” and “impulses.” Some of our brightest people are kleptomaniacs, paranoiacs, agoraphobists, and dolomites. A lot of our best friends turn out to be subnormal and not worth knowing. Some of the biggest business men have failed in the intelligence test and have been ruined. A lot of our criminals turn out not to be criminals at all, but merely to have a reaction for another person’s money.4
The increasing popularity of psychology in society at large fed back into the academy, rapidly making the discipline an essential part of the modern college rather than an exotic and expensive add-on to philosophy. Autonomous departments of psychology began to appear in many colleges across the country. Illinois had started the process in 1893, long before any other school. It was later followed by its neighbors, Chicago and Northwestern, in the first decade of the 20th century. Johns Hopkins and Cornell created separate psychology departments in the 1910s. Yale, California, and (in Canada) Toronto and McGill followed suit in the 1920s. Before long, it became a foregone conclusion—especially in schools that encouraged research among their faculty—that psychologists and philosophers not only increasingly operated from very different sets of theoretical assumptions, but that they required very different kinds of spaces and resources to do their work properly.
The theoretical scene changed as well. From the 1920s, behaviorism rapidly became popular among the younger generation of psychologists. Under close scrutiny, though, Watson’s simple, original behaviorism quickly revealed unsustainable weaknesses. Psychologists of myriad theoretical predilections attempted to shore up the crucial Watsonian imperative that behavior, not consciousness, would be psychology’s core concept. As an unintended result of this focused attention, behaviorism rapidly splintered into several competing schools of thought: Jacob Kantor’s interbehaviorism, Edwin Guthrie’s contiguity theory, Edward C. Tolman’s purposive behaviorism, B. F. Skinner’s operant behaviorism, Clark L. Hull’s drive theory, to name a few of the most influential.5
Although behaviorism and learning theory were ascendant in this era, they did not dominate all areas of psychology. During the 1920s and 1930s, a number of new specialties appeared from the general psychology of previous years. Research on sensory perception and its physiological underpinnings continued apace.6 The psychological study of early child development was revolutionized by Arnold Gesell, a graduate of Clark and an assistant at Goddard’s Vineland School.7 Social psychology entered a new era with the appearance of Floyd Allport’s controversial textbook.8 A new kind of trait-based personality theory began to establish itself as distinct from the older study of “character,” also led by an Allport: Gordon.9 As psychology’s boundaries expanded, the principles of scientific method and statistical analysis took on greater importance as well.10
Soon, American psychology was being buffeted by novel influences from Europe. As early as the early 1920s, the new Gestalt psychology started to arrive in English translation.11 This holistic movement—led by Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka—posed significant challenges not only to traditional theories of perception—where it was, perhaps, most successful—but also to developmental psychology and to the behaviorists’ home turf: learning theory.12
Specialization of this kind—learning, perception, development, social, personality, methodology, etc.—started to become a widespread phenomenon in psychology. The days of the “general” psychologist were dwindling rapidly. One psychologist at Illinois even founded an entire laboratory dedicated to the psychology of sport, the first of its kind in North America.13
Perhaps the most interesting episode of the 1920s, though, was the sudden and nearly simultaneous appearance of several new textbooks on the history of psychology. These were authored by Edwin Boring, Gardner Murphy, Walter Pillsbury, and, slightly later, Edna Heidbredder.14 All four of these texts represented a significant break with history texts of a decade or two before in that they markedly reduced coverage of the discipline’s deep philosophical antecedents in favor of coverage of the relatively recent emergence of the scientific ethos.15 Boring even pointedly include the word “experimental” in his title lest the object of his interest be confused with some “other” form of psychology. Details of the titles aside, though, all four of them aimed at recasting psychology as a discipline more strongly allied with natural sciences such as physiology, neurology, evolution, and even physics (thus the oft-repeated story about the British Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne firing his assistant for apparently poor time-keeping of celestial events, thereby unintentionally opening the question of the “personal equation” in psychology). Any connection that psychology might have had with philosophy (apart from, perhaps, the British empiricism of Locke, Hume, and Mill) was rendered distant and tentative. This dramatic shift in tone does not seem to have been the personal decision of a few textbook writers either. Prior to their publication, other scientifically-oriented psychologists had been calling for such a change in perspective, sometimes even in print.16 Indeed, one of these four texts, Boring’s, came to be seen (in America) virtually as the history of psychology for the next thirty years.17
Frequently in the past, psychologists have attempted to portray themselves as somehow separate from the workaday world, uninterested and uninfluenced by the grimy business of “politics” (in its pejorative sense). But this has never really been the case, of course. To be sure, some researchers have had the luxury of working on abstruse topics that have no immediate relevance to society’s major institutions, but virtually from its arrival on America’s shores, psychology has built its reputation and its social authority by inserting itself into the business of those very institutions—schools, hospitals, industry, government, etc. And those institutions have been intimately connected with the growth and health of America’s large cities. Indeed, with two scholarly societies that now boast a combined membership of over 100,000 (APA and APS), psychology has now carved out a significant societal role for itself with such success that it now is a major social institution, exerting own its influences on the others.
Although rarely acknowledged, it is an astonishing coincidence that psychology rose to prominence in the US at precisely the same time as cities became the residences of a majority of the American population. It is hard to imagine that psychology could have grown to the proportions we see today had it not repeatedly claimed for itself an important role in the modern urban scene. Psychology and cities have had a remarkable history together, and they will probably have a remarkable future together as well.