Structural and Functional Psychologies

Oswald Külpe’s method of systematic introspection had a very strong proponent in Edward Bradford Titchener at Cornell University. Titchener had become interested in
Wundt’s psychology while studying philosophy and physiology at Oxford University. He translated the third edition of Wundt’s Gründzüge into English and, when he could find no one in England with whom to study the new science, went to Leipzig to complete his doctorate with Wundt in 1892. English universities were unreceptive to the new psychology; Titchener accepted a professorship at Cornell University,
where he remained until his death in 1927. Titchener presented himself as Wundt’s representative in North America, but his psychology was not Wundt’s voluntarism
(Leahey, 1981; Danziger, 1990). Titchener’s view of mind was influenced by the English philosophy of John Locke and his heirs that he had studied at Oxford. The British philosophers viewed mind as a recipient of stimulation: Mental content was whatever had entered mind through the senses. The purpose of the study of mind was to understand how complex mental experience and function could arise from combinations of these elements. Laws of association, by which elements combined, played a significant role in understanding how mind grew from sensory elements. Similarly, mind was, for Titchener, composed of elements that he identified as sensations, images, and affections. Sensation was the primary experience resulting from stimulation of the senses, images were complex representations that carried thought, and feelings were the elements of which emotions were comprised. Through the direct systematic introspection of consciousness under laboratory conditions, Titchener pursued three goals: the reduction of conscious experience to its basic elements, determining how the elements were connected to form complex perceptions, and
identifying the underlying physiological processes. The first of these goals provided the primary focus of research at the Cornell laboratory, as the elements were themselves analyzed for their attributes (which, in a later version of the system,
became the new elements of consciousness; see Evans, 1972). Pursuit of the other goals was secondary because they depended upon the successful completion of the first. The subject of psychology, Titchener argued, was the understanding of the human, adult, normal, generalized mind through the use of introspection; only after psychology had completed that task could the nonhuman, child, abnormal, or
individual mind be understood. For Titchener, psychology needed to emulate physics, with its pursuit of the analysis of matter into the smaller units of which it was composed. Titchener stood for rigorous experimental pursuit of the elements of mind, pursued for their own sake and not for any potential application. He disparaged “functional psychology” as essentially the “mind in use” approach of the older, discarded philosophical psychology. An early response to Titchener’s postulates for his structural psychology came from John Dewey (1859–1952), chair of the Department of Philosophy, which subsumed psychology and pedagogy, at the University of Chicago. Dewey perceived that the new method of laboratory experiment would free the older barren mental philosophy from the theological and philosophical constraints of its past and open the way for a useful psychology that would help resolve problems of the
asylum, the classroom, and other practical affairs (Dewey,1884). He facilitated the establishment of a laboratory at the University of Michigan before moving to Chicago. In 1896, Dewey argued against reductionist approaches to the study of consciousness and for a functional analysis and understanding of mind (Dewey, 1896). A functional approach to mind was embedded in the nineteenth century mental philosophy taught in American colleges (Fuchs, 2000a) and its development at the University of Chicago was influenced by pre-Chicago Associations among Dewey and others (Raphelson,1973).
James R. Angell, a graduate of the University of Michigan and a student of psychology there, built on Dewey’s approach in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 1906 (Angell, 1907), in his successful textbooks
(e.g., Angell, 1905), and from his position as Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. Functional psychology dealt not with mental elements as its primary focus but with mental operations; the role of consciousness in helping to adapt an organism to its environment involved psychology in a concern for mind and body relationships (Angell, 1907). Functionalism was interested in the uses of consciousness and its role in guiding behavior; it was profoundly practical and reformist. Psychology and other social sciences were useful to a variety of educational and social reforms promoted during the progressive era (Fitzpatrick,
1990; Milar, 1999). Angell’s approach to psychology encompassed the broad range of interests and methods that had developed in psychology since 1879 and reflected the influence that evolutionary theory exerted on psychology in the United States.
The science of mind was pursued in the laboratory; mind was its subject matter, and many methods were available for its study. Psychophysical experiments, research on the connections between physiology, especially the nervous system, and mental processes, and direct observation of others, including children and animals, provided data that could supplement the results of introspection under laboratory conditions
(Angell, 1905). The use of a variety of methods would, in Angell’s view, supplement the results of the direct observations of mind that introspection provides. Functional psychology was interested in how mind worked (i.e., how it functioned) and on its functional relation to the physiological substrate (i.e., on what did mind depend) and its purpose (i.e., its use or function) and was less concerned the content of mind. Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930) attempted to reconcile the differences between the structural and functional psychologies by proposing a psychology of the self that possesses both conscious contents and mental functions.
Calkins had begun her study of psychology unofficially at Harvard with William James and Josiah Royce in 1890; Clark University professor Edmund Sanford tutored Calkins privately in experimental psychology. In 1891, Calkins established the first psychological laboratory at a women’s college at Wellesley College, one of the first 12 laboratories in the United States (Furumoto, 1980). She developed the pairedassociate technique for the study of verbal learning and memory and published papers on her research and on experiments conducted with students in the Wellesley laboratory (Calkins, 1894a, 1894b). She pursued further study in psychology with Hugo
Münsterberg at Harvard, but not as an officially registered student. Münsterberg petitioned Harvard’s president to allow Calkins to be admitted as a candidate for the PhD, but his request was refused. In May 1895, after an unauthorized examination,
the following communication was forwarded to The Harvard Corporation: “At the examination, held . . . before Professors Palmer, James, Royce, Münsteberg, Harris, and Dr. Santayana it was unanimously voted that Miss Calkins satisfied all the customary requirements for the degree” (cited in Furumoto, 1980). Again, the PhD was denied (Harvard refused to grant the doctoral degree to a woman until 1963). In
1902, four women who had completed graduate study at Harvard were offered PhD degrees from Radcliffe College. Radcliffe, established in 1894, offered almost exclusively
undergraduate courses; women who completed graduate work did so at Harvard University. Calkins refused the Radcliffe degree, seeing it as a symbol of Harvard’s refusal to admit women on an equal footing with men (Scarborough & Furumoto, 1987). In 1905, Mary Whiton Calkins became the first woman elected to the presidency of theAmerican Psychological Association. By 1905, the functional point of view had become the dominant view in American psychology (Leahey, 1992). For his part, Angell claimed that functionalism could easily contain Calkins’s “Self Psychology,” “were it not for her extreme scientific conservatism in refusing to allow the self to have a
body, save as a kind of conventional biological ornament” (Angell, 1907). Calkins, and Titchener, did not reject the pursuit of identifying the physiological substrates of mental content and processes but placed that pursuit at a lower priority to the study of mind more directly. Indeed, Calkins extended the use of introspection to the study of abnormal experiences of the normal self and included the study by comparative means of abnormal individuals (Calkins, 1901,1919) among the range of topics to be studied in the new psychology. In these psychologies, introspection continued to serve as a method for the direct examination of conscious experience,
but problems arose when introspective reports from different laboratories contradicted each other. Doubts about the capacity of introspection to serve as a scientific method were brought forcefully into focus by the “imageless thought” controversy. Titchener’s psychology proposed that images were the carrier of thoughts, and introspective observations carried out in his laboratory supported his position. Oswald Külpe and his colleagues at the University of Würzburg, however,
failed to observe images in their studies of thought processes and concluded that thinking was carried out by “imageless thoughts.” How could introspection, as a method, reconcile incompatible results when conscious experience was private
and not open to public inspection? Supporters of introspection as the primary method of scientific psychology added more instructions in an attempt to improve the method (English, 1921) while others advocated its more limited use among other psychological methods (Angell, 1905; Dodge, 1912). The question of whether introspective
analysis could indeed serve as a scientific method producing reliable data was present at the start of psychology’s history as a science. Introspective observations were reliable within limits: A wavelength of light at a given frequency was reported to evoke the same color sensation in all observers of normal vision. The question lay in the capability of introspection to go beyond such limited observations in the
search for elements of mind. Meanwhile other research traditions arose.