Scott M. Dittman

4/4/97

Edward Bradford Titchener

Edward Bradford Titchener was born on January 11, 1867, in Chichester, England. This small town had been home to his family for several generations during which the Titchener family had built up a proud heritage. In 1532 John Titchener had been headmaster of the very school in which Edward would later be educated. His great-grandfather had been mayor in 1832 and his grandfather represented the Titchener family by becoming a prominent lawyer before losing the wealth he had obtained (Boring, 1927). Edward's father, John, was the younger of two boys and had no inheritance on which to rely, so he traveled to America to seek his fortune. After fighting with the Confederate army, John returned to Chichester and married Alice Field Habin in 1866. Edward was born the next year. John died only a few years after his son's birth, and Edward was left to fend for himself from a very early age. It was felt that "there was no parental assistance coming for him; he had, so far as his family was concerned, simply the consciousness of a very respectable decent" (Boring,1927, p 378).

At the age of 14, Titchener matriculated to Malvern College in England. He went there on a scholarship and was there for four years. In 1885 he went from Malvern to Oxford, and began attending Brasenose College. Here he studied philosophy and classics as a senior scholar. After four years he became interested in the study of physiology and began working as a research assistant under Burdon-Sanderson. He would later dedicate his first book to Burdon-Sanderson. He earned his A.B. degree in 1890, at the age of 23, from Oxford (Boring, 1927).

During the time he had been working toward his degree, a new field had arisen from the combination of philosophy and physiology. The development of experimental psychology so intrigued Titchener that he traveled to Leipzig to work for Wundt. While there he met several Americans, including Angell, with whom he established a lifelong friendship. Though Titchener never became close to Wundt personally, he did become terribly close to him academically. With this relationship came a driving motivation to demonstrate that psychology was a science. In 1892, Titchener received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and returned to England at the age of 25. He stayed on at Oxford for a few months as an extension lecturer, but had already agreed to travel to America while at Leipzig (Boring, 1927).

Titchener went to Cornell in Ithaca, New York, and filled the vacancy left by Angell when he was called to Stanford University. Cornell would house Titchener for the rest of his life. Starting as an assistant professor, he dove into research and began to write. It seems he spent most of his first few years at Cornell translating the works of Wundt, including Human and Animal Psychology, Ethics, and Physiologische Psychologie. By 1895 he had made full professor at the age of 28. From 1893 to 1900 he had published 62 long and short articles. During this time he began to stray away from a philosophical approach to psychology and turned toward a more scientific methodology (Boring, 1927).

As mentioned above, Titchener's goal was to prove that psychology was as much of a science as chemistry or physics. The first thing he had done in order to achieve this goal was to secure himself a laboratory. He also had begun to translate the necessary texts from the master -- Wundt. Along with Wundt's work, he translated two works of Kulpe, with whom he had also worked in Leipzig. In 1896 he published his first original work, Outline of Psychology, which was followed by Primer of Psychology in 1898. His most influential work was presented in Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice, which was published in two volumes of two parts each. A Textbook of Psychology was published in 1910 in its entirety and was followed in 1915 by A Beginner's Psychology. Other systematic texts of his include Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention in 1908 and Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of Thought Processes in 1909. These writings and translations of writings provided a basis on which the field of experimental psychology was to be grounded in the mind of Titchener. All that followed was for Titchener to advance the science with research (Cadwallader, 1977).

Titchener carried out numerous research projects through the graduate students working under him. It eventually led to the publishing of 176 papers under the title of "Studies from the Department of Psychology of Cornell University", all of which Titchener had edited. These articles, along with the separate publishings and notes of Titchener himself, outlined the position that came to be known as structuralism. Titchener declared that the rest of American psychology fell under the category of functionalism, which was interested in understanding the mind. His structuralism, on the other hand, took different angle in its investigation of human psychology. It first considered the structure of the mind in its smallest elements and looked at the laws of combination of the elements. He dabbled briefly in the relationship between stimuli and the resulting neural reactions, but quickly found it unnecessary and abandoned his search (Cadwallader, 1977). Through research using introspection, Titchener believed he had broken the mind down into its elemental portions by eliminating the biases of meaning. He explained the combination of thought elements into complex thought by using the law of contiguity as his basic law of association. Through his work he also developed the context theory of meaning, which he managed to maintain as empirical even though the topic was such a rationalist idea as meaning (Hergenhahn, 1997).

As his career had developed, he had been granted several honors, including honorary doctorates from Harvard, Clark, and Wisconsin Universities. He had been offered the position of President of Clark University upon retirement of G. S. Hall in 1920, and the position of director of the Harvard Psychological laboratory in 1917 -- both of which he declined. He was, for a time, a member of the American Psychological Association, but soon came to create a group known as "The Experimentalists" to battle the fact that the APA didn't always follow a the path of experimental psychology (Cadwallader, 1977). All the while he managed to maintain his basic Wundtian notions in lecture and research, never once heeding credit to the functionalists of the time.

Though structuralism didn't come to dominate the psychological world in methods or theory, Titchener had provided a growing field a solid base on which to expand -- albeit in directions other than what would have been preferred by Titchener himself. Through his work at Cornell University, where he remained until his unexpected death in 1927, Titchener had brought the ideas of great European minds of the time to America and helped to stimulate the growth of a budding new area of inquiry. Though he never married, he wedded himself to his work from a very early age and was faithful throughout his lifetime. The following is an account of the works published by Titchener as listed in the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences:

(1896) 1902 An Outline of Psychology. New ed., enl. New York: Macmillan.

(1898a) The Postulates of a Structural Psychology. Philosophical Review 7:449-465.

(1898b) 1925 A Primer of Psychology. Rev. ed. New York: Macmillan.

1901-1905 Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice. 2 vols. New York and London: Macmillan. Volume 1: Qualitative Experiments, 2 parts. Volume 2: Quantitative Experiments, 2 parts.

1908 Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention. New York: Macmillan.

1909a Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-processes. New York: Macmillan.

(1909b) 1910 A Textbook of Psychology. New York: Macmillan.

1910 The Past Decade in Experimental Psychology. American Journal of Psychology 21:404-421.

1915 A Beginner's Psychology. New York: Macmillan.

1929 Systematic Psychology: Prolegomena. New York: Macmillan.

The only article I was able to locate from the above list (excluding books) was the 1910 article printed in the American Journal of Psychology entitled "The Past Decade in Experimental Psychology". This article is extremely representative of Titchener's structuralist approach, however, and will be abstracted below. As indicated by the title, the purpose of this lecture was to provide the audience with his summation of the first decade of the twentieth century from an experimental psychology point of view. He begins with a partial eulogy of Ebbinghaus, who had recently passed away. He even goes so far as to say he initially wondered "what experimental psychology would do without him" (Titchener, 1910, p 405). He then proceeds with his commentary on the state of the field of experimental psychology.

He admits in the first portion of his address that he realizes he is in the minority by wanting psychology to become a pure science. He then attempts to sum up the past decade in one phrase: a definite leaning toward application. He then talks about the progress of each of nine individual areas of inquiry within experimental psychology. Those specifically addressed are: sensation; affection; attention; perception (a mix of the first three); recognition, memory, and association; action; imagination; affective formations; and thought. Of the first three, which he considers the major players, he believes that sensation had been the most developed, followed by attention, then affection. He also speaks of the uncanny ability of action -- specifically reaction time experiments -- to hold the interests of experimenters over time (Titchener, 1910). Scattered throughout his lecture, it is possible to find direct and indirect influences of Wundt. These are most obvious in his descriptions of laboratories and the methodology that should be employed within those laboratories. He concludes by stating that analysis needs to gain appreciation in the laboratories of "today". He feels that the atomism that has become so much a part of the psychology of his day is "betraying a woeful misunderstanding of scientific methods...and scientific psychology" (Titchener, 1910, p 421).

References

Boring, E. G. (1927). Edward Bradford Titchener. American Journal of Psychology, 4, 377-394.

Cadwallader, T. C. (1977). Titchener, Edward Bradford (1867-1927). In International encyclopedia of psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis & neurology (Vol. 11, pp.174-176). New York: Aesculapius Publishers, Inc.

Dallenbach, K.M. (1968). Titchener, Edward Bradford. In International encyclopedia of the social sciences (Vol. 16, pp. 88-90). New York: Crowell Collier and Macmillan, Inc..

Hergenhahn, B. R. (1997). An Introduction to the History of Psychology. (3rd ed.). New York: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company.

Titchener, E. B. (1910). The past decade in experimental psychology. American Journal of Psychology, 21, 404-421.