G. Stanley Hall

1844-1924 · American · Genetic and Developmental Psychology

The child is father of the man, and the race is the ancestor of the child.

G. Stanley Hall was the great organizer and impresario of American psychology, and the founder of its genetic — that is, developmental — tradition. He took the first American doctorate in psychology under William James, studied physiological psychology in Germany with Wundt, established one of the first psychological laboratories in America at Johns Hopkins, became the first president of Clark University, founded the American Journal of Psychology and several others, organized and was first president of the American Psychological Association, and in 1909 brought Freud and Jung to America for…

Topics G. Stanley Hall addresses

• recapitulation theory
• the genetic method in psychology
• adolescence
• storm and stress (Sturm und Drang)
• the second birth
• child study
• the questionnaire (topical syllabus) method
• ontogeny and phylogeny
• the psychology of religious conversion
• genetic psychology
• the childhood of the race
• senescence and the psychology of old age
• the education of adolescents
• developmental stages
• the psychology of fear
• play and its evolutionary meaning
• the education of women
• periodicity and the female nature
• pedagogy and the child-centered school
• the founding of American psychology
• bringing Freud to America
• the psychology of Jesus
• youth and its regimen
• the recapitulation of racial history in the child

Converse with G. Stanley Hall on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in G. Stanley Hall's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.