ABSTRACT
In 1894, there were more than two dozen psychology laboratories in the US. In 1892, G. Stanley Hall, who had founded the country’s first psychology journal five years before, founded the first national scholarly society for psychologists: the American Psychological Association. Although psychology in America’s cities started to become increasingly responsive to urban problems, Edward B. Titchener of Cornell, in rural central New York, demanded that psychologists focus solely on “pure” science, addressing no practical interests. He called his form of psychology “structuralist,” although most psychologists followed one of the forms of psychology that he decried as being “functionalist.” A dispute between Titchener and Princeton psychologist J. Mark Baldwin led John Dewey to write his most revolutionary psychological article, claiming that the “stimulus” and “response” of the “reflex arc” were functional roles in a drama that was mostly of the psychologist’s own making. The article became one of the most influential in psychology’s history. Dewey’s “functionalist” view was soon adopted into psychiatry as well by the Swiss émigré Adolf Meyer. For Meyer, mental illness was not an incurable “brain defect,” but a failure of the person to functionally adapt to his or her environment, especially the social environment. If true, mental illness could be treated by teaching sufferers more adaptive modes of behavior.
