A History of Psychology in Letters, Second Edition Ludy T. Benjamin, Jr. Blackwell Publishing A History of Psychology in Letters A HISTORY OF PsychologyIN LETTERS SECOND EDITION LUDY T. BENJAMIN, JR. © 2006 by Ludy T. Benjamin, Jr. BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Ludy T. Benjamin, Jr. to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First edition published 1993 by Wm. C. Brown Communications, Inc. Second edition published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2006 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Benjamin, Ludy T., 1945– A history of psychology in letters / Ludy T. Benjamin, Jr. — 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-2611-3 (hard cover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4051-2611-6 (hard cover : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-2612-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4051-2612-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Psychology — History. 2. Psychologists — Correspondence. I. Title. BF95.B44 2005 150¢.9 — dc22 2005015448 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. 1 Set in Palatino 10/12 /2 by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed and bound in India by Replika Press The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com Contents Preface vii Credits xiii 1 Reading Other People’s Mail: The Joys of Historical Research 1 2 John Locke as Child Psychologist 15 3 On the Origin of Species: Darwin’s Crisis of 1858 27 4 John Stuart Mill and the Subjection of Women 41 5 An American in Leipzig 55 6 The Struggle for Psychology Laboratories 69 7William James and Psychical Research 81 8 Hugo Münsterberg and the Psychology of Law 95 9AWoman’s Struggles for Graduate Education 113 10 Titchener’s Experimentalists: No Women Allowed 125 11 Coming to America: Freud and Jung 139 12 The Behaviorism of John B. Watson 153 13 Nazi Germany and the Migration of Gestalt Psychology 169 14 A Social Agenda for American Psychology 183 15 B. F. Skinner’s Heir Conditioner 197 16 Kenneth B. Clark and the Brown v. Board Decision 213 References 231 Index 241 v Preface This is a book of journeys, a book that will allow you to travel in time and place, peering into the lives, indeed the very souls, of individuals who were important for the development of psychology. You will read their letters, letters that express the gamut of human emotions – happiness, fear, love, anxiety, sadness – letters filled with hope and others with expectations of doom, and letters expressing new ideas and invoking intellectual debates that shaped psychology. Your travels in this book will take you to Holland in the 1600s to read the letters philosopher John Locke was writing to his cousin, offering his advice on the raising of children. You will be in England in the nineteenth century, reading the letters of philosopher John Stuart Mill on the subjection of women and of natu- ralist Charles Darwin on the nature of species change. You will join an American graduate student in Leipzig, Germany in the 1880s where he was working in the first psychology laboratory and writing home to his mother and father about his experiences. You will read the letters of philosopher and psychologist William James and thus become involved in séances in the home of a famous Boston medium in the 1880s as she tries to make contact with the spirits of the dead. In nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts you will learn of Mary Whiton Calkins’s strug- gles as a woman to gain access to psychology courses and a doctoral degree at Harvard University. You will be in Vienna and Zurich in 1909 as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung write to one another about their upcoming trip to the United States, a new and much anticipated experience for both. You will experience some of the horrors of Nazi Germany in the 1930s as Adolf Hitler comes to power. And you will be in New York City on May 17, 1954 for the jubilation experienced by African-American Kenneth Clark when he learns of the Supreme Court’s decision to declare school segregation unconstitutional, a decision based, in part, on his psychological research. The stories in this book are often stories of great drama as revealed through the medium of correspondence. Letters are personal documents, private missives, often intended only for the eyes of the letter’s recipient. The most powerful human dramas are perhaps best revealed in the often private thoughts expressed in vii viii Preface letters. Historians understand that, and they understand the obligations they have as scholars to treat such personal documents with respect. The letters reprinted in this book exist because someone had the foresight to preserve them. Typically they are part of some archival collection, made available to scholars for their research. Indeed, they are the raw data of historians. They are what historians use to make sense of the printed record. In the language of a cog- nitive psychologist, letters can provide the deep structure that makes sense of the surface structure, that is, that gives real meaning to what we know. Such is the richness of letters. The idea for this book grew out of my undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of psychology, courses I have been teaching for more than 35 years. Almost from the beginning of my teaching, I have used letters of individuals, famous in the history of psychology, to supplement my lectures: letters from Sigmund Freud describing the evolution of his ideas on psychoanalysis, letters from Harry Kirke Wolfe describing his frustrations with establishing his psychol- ogy laboratory at the end of the nineteenth century, and letters from Christine Ladd-Franklin as she sought to gain access to an all-male psychology club where she might present some of her research on experimental psychology. As it became apparent that students liked this kind of material, I added more of it to my courses. I even began using it in my introductory psychology course as a supplement to lectures on conditioning, personality theory, the psychology of gender, and social psychology. Students greatly enjoy these letters and have consistently rated them among the most favorable aspects of my courses. Conse- quently, this book is intended to make this kind of material readily available to students and instructors. As students, you should find the content of this book easy to read, inherently very interesting, and helpful in your understanding of the development of the discipline of psychology. In the process you will learn some world history and some American history, as these letters are imbedded in the broader historical context of which they are a part. This book is not a comprehensive history of psychology. It could be used as a stand-alone text in a history of psychology course but would be more valuable reinforced with other reading, such as a history of psychology textbook or origi- nal source reading by the individuals treated in this book. This book is also very appropriate for senior capstone courses, honors introductory psychology courses, or graduate pro-seminar courses where the objective is to expose students broadly to multiple areas of psychology. Moreover, this book is appropriate as a supple- ment to a textbook in introductory psychology courses. See Tables 1 and 2 for a suggested matching of the chapters of this book with those commonly found in texts in the history of psychology and in introductory psychology. As in the first edition, individuals were selected for this book in order to cover a broad spectrum of psychology both with regard to time period and subfield of psychology. Inclusion does not imply that these persons were the most significant figures in psychology. Although that criterion is followed where possible, some Preface ix Table 1 Using This Book for a History of Psychology Course History of Psychology Corresponding Chapter Textbook Chapter in This Book Historiography 1 Reading Other People’s Mail Empiricism 2 John Locke 4 John Stuart Mill Evolution/Functionalist Antecedents 3 Charles Darwin Wundtian Psychology 5 James McKeen Cattell Beginnings of American Psychology 6 Harry Kirke Wolfe 9 Mary Whiton Calkins Structuralism 10 Edward B. Titchener Functionalism 5 James McKeen Cattell 7William James 8 Hugo Münsterberg Behaviorism 12 John B. Watson Psychoanalysis 11 Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung Gestalt Psychology 13 Koffka, Köhler, and Lewin Neobehaviorism 15 B. F. Skinner Applied Psychology 8 Hugo Münsterberg 14 Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues Psychology in the Post-Schools Era 14 Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues 16 Kenneth B. Clark significant figures were excluded because no letters exist for them, or because it was not possible to secure permission for publication of their letters. Others were excluded because the content too closely paralleled other letters in the collection.