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Edward Bradford Titchener
Edward Bradford Titchener
Born	January 11, 1867
Died	August 31, 1927
Citizenship	English
Fields	psychology
Institutions	Cornell University
Known for	structuralism (psychology) empathy introspection

Edward Bradford Titchener, D.Sc., Ph.D., LL.D., Litt.D. (January 11, 1867 – August 3, 1927) was a British psychologist who studied under Wilhelm Wundt for several years. Titchener is best known for creating his version of psychology that described the structure of the mind; structuralism (psychology). He created the largest doctoral program in the United States (at the time) after becoming a professor at Cornell University, and one of his graduate students, Margaret Floy Washburn became the first woman to be granted a PhD in psychology (1894).

Biography

Education and Early Life

Attended Malvern College and then went on to Oxford from 1885 to 1890. It is at Oxford that Titchener first began to read the works of Wilhelm Wundt. During his time at Oxford, Titchener translated the third edition of Wundt’s book Principles of Physiological Psychology from German into English. After receiving his degree from Oxford in 1890, Titchener went on to Leipzig in Germany to study with Wundt. He completed his doctoral program and went on to take a position as a professor at Cornell University where he taught his view on the ideas of Wundt to his students in the form of structuralism (psychology).

Main Ideas

Titchener’s ideas on how the mind worked were heavily influenced by Wundt’s theory of voluntarism and his ideas of Association and Apperception (the passive and active combinations of elements of consciousness respectively). Titchener attempted to classify the structures of the mind, not unlike the way a chemist analyzes 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.

Titchener believed that if the basic components of the mind could be defined and categorized that the structure of mental processes and higher thinking could be determined. What each element of the mind is, how those elements interact with each other and why they interact in the ways that they do will was the basis of reasoning that Titchener used in trying to find structure to the mind.

Introspection

The main tool that Titchener used to try and determine the different components of consciousness was introspection. Unlike Wundt’s method of introspection, Titchener had very strict guidelines for the reporting of an introspective analysis. The subject would be presented with an object, such as a pencil. The subject would then report the characteristics of that pencil (color, length, etc.). The subject would be instructed not to report the name of the object (pencil) because that did not describe the raw data of what the subject was experiencing. Titchener referred to this as stimulus error.

The Experimentalists

Titchener formed a club in 1904 of his fellow colleagues and graduate students. The members of this club were only permitted entrance with an invitation from Titchener himself. The creation of the club was due in part to Titchener’s dissatisfaction with the American Psychological Association and how it dealt with a member whom he saw as a plagiarist and that he wanted to have a gathering like minds, a place where his views on Psychology were strongly believed in. Titchener himself wrote: "For many years I wanted an experimental club- no officers, the men moving about and handling (apparatus), the visited lab to do the work, no women, smoking allowed, plenty of frank criticism and discussions, the whole atmosphere experimental, the youngsters taken in on an equality with the men who have arrived."

Life and Legacy

Titchener was a charismatic and forceful speaker and his idea of structuralism thrived while he was alive and championing for it, but the idea that the mind was made of components that could be dismantled to determine interaction and experience does not live on after his death. Structuralism, along with Wundt’s voluntarism, were both effectively challenged and improved upon, though they did influence many schools of psychology today.

Professor Titchener received honorary degrees from Harvard, Clark, and Wisconsin. He became a charter member of the American Psychological Association, translated Külpe's Outlines of Psychology and other works, became the American editor of Mindduring 1894, and associate editor of the American Journal of Psychology during 1895, and wrote several books. Titchener's brain was contributed to the Wilder Brain Collection at Cornell.

Bibliography

• An Outline of Psychology (1896; new edition, 1902)
• A Primer of Psychology (1898; revised edition, 1903)
• Experimental Psychology (four volumes, 1901-05)—1.11.22.12.2
• 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)
• Systematic Psychology: Prolegomena (1929)

External links

• Picture, biography and bibliography in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science