Edward Bradford Titchener

1867-1927 · British · Structuralism and Introspective Psychology

The task of psychology is to analyse mind into its simplest components — and there is no experience which cannot be so analysed.

Edward Bradford Titchener was the great systematizer of structural psychology in America — the English-born, Leipzig-trained disciple of Wilhelm Wundt who carried experimental introspection across the Atlantic to Cornell and there built it into the most rigorous and uncompromising system the young science had seen. For three decades he ruled his laboratory as a magisterial autocrat, lecturing in his Oxford gown, training a generation of experimentalists, and defining by opposition the discipline that would soon leave him behind.

Topics Edward Bradford Titchener addresses

• structuralism
• introspection
• the analysis of consciousness
• the elements of mind
• sensation, image, and affection
• the attributes of sensation
• the stimulus error
• the context theory of meaning
• imageless thought
• the Würzburg controversy
• psychophysical parallelism
• structure versus function
• the experimental study of feeling and attention
• clearness and attensity
• the dimensions of sensation
• systematic experimental introspection
• the existential (descriptive) standpoint
• Wundt and the Leipzig tradition
• the thought-processes
• trained observation
• the mind as sum of experience
• the anatomy of consciousness
• affective psychology and the tridimensional theory
• the laboratory manual tradition

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