Background

Edward was born on January 11, 1867 at Chichester, England, son of Alice Field (Habin) and John Titchener, of a family that in several centuries had displayed unusual ability.

Education

His early school training was obtained in the Prebendal School at Chichester and at Malvern College. From 1885 to 1889 he was at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he was senior scholar in classics and philosophy, and senior Hulme exhibitioner; in 1889-90 he was research student in physiology. He received the degree of B. A. in 1890.

The next two years he spent in Wilhelm Wundt's psychological laboratory at Leipzig, and there in 1892 he won his doctorate.

In 1894 he received the degree of M. A. from Oxford.

He held a number of honorary degrees. Professor Titchener received honorary degrees from Harvard, Clark, and Wisconsin.

Career

After a short time as extension lecturer in biology at Oxford, in the autumn of 1892 he accepted an assistant professorship of psychology in Cornell University; three years later he became Sage Professor of Psychology. In 1894 he became American editor of Mind, a position he held through 1921; in 1895 he joined Edmund Clark Sanford as associate editor of the American Journal of Psychology. In the summer of 1896 he made his only return to England and the Continent.

During the first eight years of his career at Cornell he published a number of translations: with J. E. Creighton, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology (1894), from the German of Wundt; Outlines of Psychology (1895), from Oswald Külpe; with W. B. Pillsbury, Introduction to Philosophy (1897), from Külpe; and, with J. H. Gulliver, Ethics (1897), from the first volume of Wundt's Ethik. He also published two textbooks, An Outline of Psychology (1896) and The Primer of Psychology (1898). The point of view of these books is orthodoxly Wundtian: the subject matter of psychology is mental processes, and its method analysis by introspection of these processes into elements and attributes.

In 1898 he defended the Wundtian type of psychology as "structural" against the "functional" type then coming to the fore, especially at the University of Chicago, which dwelt on the significance of various mental reactions for welfare rather than on the introspective analysis of mental states ("The Postulates of a Structural Psychology, " Philosophical Review, Sept. 1898). His most important work, Experimental Psychology (2 vols. , 1901 - 05), was a milestone in the progress of psychology. Each volume consisted of two manuals, one for the student, the other for the instructor. The first volume, "Qualitative, " dealt with experiments not involving exact measurement; the second, "Quantitative, " with more precise psychophysical work; the student's manuals gave carefully tested directions for experimenting, while the instructor's manuals were mines of erudition on all possible points, historical and theoretical, relating to the interpretation of the experiments.

It is characteristic of his loyalty to England (he never gave up his British citizenship) that he presented these books to Oxford for the degree of D. Sc. , which he won in 1906. In 1904 he published a translation of the first volume of Wundt's Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie. Later appeared Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention (1908); Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes (1909); A Textbook of Psychology (2 vols. , 1909 - 10), dedicated to the memory of his Oxford teacher in physiology, Sir John Burdon Sanderson; and A Beginner's Psychology (1915). In 1909 he became research professor in the graduate school, and in 1917 declined a call to succeed Hugo Münsterberg at Harvard. He delivered the Lowell Institute lectures, never published, at Boston in 1911.

From 1921 to 1925 he was editor of the American Journal of Psychology. The last ten years of his life were relatively unproductive; he was, however, working on a systematic psychology, to be his magnum opus, but his death from a brain tumor, after only a few days' illness, came before it was far advanced.

In 1929 some introductory material for his unfinished work appeared, edited by a colleague, under the title of Systematic Psychology: Prolegomena. Titchener's personality was a dominating one. It has been pointed out that his attitude towards his junior colleagues and his students was modelled after the autocracy of Wundt at Leipzig.

Because the American Psychological Association refused to expel one of its members for a mild plagiarism from one of Titchener's translations, he attended only one of its meetings after 1895, and formed a group of his own. It was a point of personal privilege that caused him to relinquish the editorship of the American Journal of Psychology in 1925.

But, although he wrote a classic book on experimental psychology, he made no important experimental discovery. And although he was a penetrating, if not always illuminating, critic of theory, he made no major contribution to it. So far as his writings show, the most noteworthy change in his views on method as time went on was an inclination towards the use of "phenomenological observation" as a substitute for introspection (see "The Schema of Introspection, " American Journal of Psychology, October 1912, and "Experimental Psychology, a Retrospect, " Ibid. , July 1925), but he was not the author of this new method. The originality of his mind was apparently not equal to its remarkable grasp, versatility, and acuteness. But it may truly be said of him that his high conception of psychology as pure science has made his work, and that of his pupils, the strongest bulwark against the flood of applied psychology, educational psychology, and mental testing that has threatened in America to obliterate the science.

Achievements

• Edward Bradford Titchener is best known for creating his version of psychology that described the structure of the mind: structuralism. He created the largest doctoral program in the United States (at the time) after becoming a professor at Cornell University, and his first graduate student, Margaret Floy Washburn, became the first woman to be granted a PhD in psychology (1894).

Works

More photos

• book

  • Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • A primer of psychology

    (A primer of psychology is an unchanged, high-quality repr...)

  • book

  • AN OUTLINE OF PSYCHOLOGY
  • Experimental Psychology. A Manual of Laboratory Practice. Volume II: Quantitative Experiments. Part II: Instructors Manual.

Membership

He was a member of numerous important scientific and philosophical societies.

He became a charter member of the American Psychological Association, translated Külpe's Outlines of Psychology and other works. In 1904, he founded the group "The Experimentalists, " which continues today as the "Society of Experimental Psychologists".

Personality

In his letters he was unassuming, reasonable, and kind. As a lecturer he was unequaled. He could hold an ordinary popular audience spellbound through an hour's discourse on the measurement of sensations.

Interests

• He was versatile--a scholarly amateur of music (he was actually professor of music at Cornell, 1896-98, before its department was organized), a connoisseur of coins.

Connections

On June 19, 1894, he married Sophie Kellogg Bedlow of Portland, Me. , who had been studying history at Cornell. His wife, a son, and three daughters survived him.

Father:

John Titchener

Mother:

Alice Field (Habin)

Spouse:

Sophie Kellogg Bedlow

References

• Annual Review of Psychology 2016