Hall, G. Stanley

WORKS BY HALL

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924), American psychologist and educator, was born in the rural hamlet of Ashfield, Massachusetts. In 1863 he enrolled at Williams College, where he studied with Mark Hopkins. After graduation, although he was with out a strong sense of vocation, he enrolled at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He spent a year there, more intent on absorbing the various facets of city life than on theological study. He then sought and received from Henry Ward Beecher a loan of $500 for foreign study. He went to Bonn, where he concentrated on philosophy and theology, but afterward, at Berlin, his interests broadened to include physiology, physics, and work in a clinic for mental diseases. He also enjoyed the lighter side of Berlin, its beer gardens and theaters. In 1871, heavily in debt and without a degree, he returned home. Failing to receive an appointment at a midwestern university, he accepted a position as tutor to the children of a New York City banker and remained for more than a year in this post.

A charming, enthusiastic person, Hall had a lively interest in many of the intellectual issues and writers of the day, from associationism to evolutionism, and from John Stuart Mill to Thomas Carlyle. His religious leanings, which had never been strong, disappeared and were replaced by a mild skepticism. University teaching became his professional goal.

He was offered a post at Antioch College, the midwestern outpost of Unitarianism, where for three years he taught English literature, French and German language and literature, and philosophy, as well as serving as librarian, choirmaster, and even occasionally as preacher. He read Wilhelm Wundt’s Principles of Physiological Psychology when it first appeared and immediately decided to return to Germany to study psychology. But he got only as far as Cambridge, Massachusetts, when an offer of an instructorship in English at Harvard diverted him from his plan. Although the grading of sophomore English themes consumed much of his time, he also carried on research in the Medical School laboratory of Henry P. Bowditch. This physiological research and some study with William James were accepted by the department of philosophy as fulfilling the requirements of a ph.d. degree in psychology. Hall was the first in the United States to receive this degree.

Immediately thereafter he left for Europe. He did work in physiology at Berlin and then went to Leipzig where he was the first of Wundt’s many American students. Yet the enthusiasm engendered by his reading of Wundt’s work did not survive direct contact: although he attended Wundt’s lectures and served as a subject in his psychological experi ments, he apparently did not carry on any research of his own.

On returning to Boston he was without a job or even any prospects of one. A providential offer from President Eliot of Harvard to sponsor him in a series of extension lectures on education saved the day financially and, what is more important, brought him to the attention of Daniel C. Gilman, president of the then recently founded Johns Hopkins University, an institution already celebrated for its pioneer graduate program, organized after the plan of the German universities. In 1882 Hall arrived in Baltimore, and in 1884 he was made professor of psychology and pedagogics.

To further scientific psychology, in 1883 Hall set up a laboratory in a private house adjacent to the campus. The following year he opened the first university psychology laboratory to win formal acceptance in the United States. While at Johns Hopkins he and his students published papers on optical illusions, skin sensitivity, the perception of space, and the time sense. John Dewey completed a dissertation on the psychology of Kant, William Burnham published on memory, and James Mc-Keen Cattell (1890) wrote papers on reaction time and speed of association, as well as his famous “Mental Tests and Measurements,” which intro duced the term mental test.

Hall had for some time dreamed of the possi bility of establishing a journal devoted to psychol ogy. One day a stranger walked into his office and offered him $500 to help found a journal. Although the gift was apparently based on a misunderstanding—the benefactor discontinued his subscription after the second year when he discovered that the journal did not intend to foster psychic research (spiritualism)—it did result in the appearance, in 1887, of the American Journal of Psychology, the first psychological journal in this country.

Meanwhile, Hall was preparing to leave for Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, to become its first president. The school was being financed by Jonas G. Clark, a wealthy, retired merchant who wished to endow an educational institution in his home town. After what eventually turned out to be too sketchy an understanding with Clark, Hall departed for a tour of European educational centers to inspect possible models for the new uni versity and to find likely prospects for professional appointments (Rush 1948). He had visions of a graduate school modeled on the German univer sities and perhaps even superior to Johns Hopkins. Research was to be paramount, teaching secondary.

In 1889 Clark University opened its doors with only a few departments staffed and with no pretense at covering all academic fields. Mr. Clark, a reticent man, had different ideas from those of the eager Hall and proved to be secretive about his financial plans for the university. The amount of money he advanced was small, very much smaller than Hall had been led to expect. Hall did not disclose this discrepancy to the faculty, who blamed him for the less than expected equipment, salaries, and assistantships. “Calls” from the University of Chicago, then being founded—and supported by the Rockefeller millions—decimated the Clark faculty. Over the next few years, those who remained made the necessary adjustments, some more money was raised, and toward the end of the century, the bulk of the Clark estate did come to the university. It was divided among the library, the graduate school, and a new undergraduate college. Although Clark’s will stipulated that he was to have no connection with the college, Hall continued as president.

Hall, fortunately, had appointed himself professor of psychology and all through these hectic years taught in the graduate school; it was his most brilliant and productive period. From Johns Hopkins he had brought along Edmund C. Sanford to head the laboratory and W. H. Burnham to teach pedagogy, which was interpreted to mean educational psychology and mental hygiene. Adolf Meyer, then with the Worcester State Hospital and destined to become the leading psychiatrist of his day, gave lectures in abnormal psychology.

Hall was an inspiring teacher to a majority of the first generation of American-trained psychologists. By 1893, 11 of 14 and by 1898, 30 of 54 of the ph.d.s granted in psychology were awarded to his students (Harper 1949). Among them were Lewis M. Terman, who developed the Stanford-Binet Scales of Intelligence, Henry H. Goddard, who was a pioneer student of the mentally re tarded, and Arnold Gesell, who did so much pains taking research on the mental and physical development of children.

Their work indicated that Hall’s own interest had shifted from experimental to developmental psychology, although he continued eloquently to defend laboratory work of all sorts. While at Hop kins he had published a paper entitled “Content of Children’s Minds” (1883). With the aid of a questionnaire technique, which he was the first to apply in the United States, he unearthed a variety of information about the thinking of children. He questioned them about such matters as the sense of self, religious experience, fears, and favorite foods. This approach generated great public en thusiasm and before long led to the so-called child study movement. Large numbers of parents and teachers, outside of Hall’s personal sway, uncriti cally and dogmatically used his technique to secure information about children. Hall lost interest in the technique and not long afterward a reaction, both within psychology and from the public itself, set in and the movement disappeared. It did have the salutary effect of bringing to the public some awareness of the importance of child study and, by its very excesses, created a more critical attitude toward research in child psychology (Bradbury 1937).

Hall had a more sustained interest in adoles cence. His monumental and influential work, Ado lescence (1904), contained the most complete statement of his particular theory of recapitulation in development. The individual child was seen as repeating the life history of the race: when a child played at cowboys and Indians, for example, he was seen as behaving at the level of primitive man. In his old age Hall returned to the problem of development and published a volume entitled Senescence (1922).

Along with his research, writing, teaching, and administrative duties, Hall was concerned with Psychology on the national scene. In July 1892 he called the meeting which resulted in the founding of the American Psychological Association (Dennis & Boring 1952). Almost as a matter of course he was elected its first president. The scientific pur pose of this organization was firmly established un der his guidance. He founded and edited still other journals: in 1891 the Pedagogical Seminary (now the Journal of Genetic Psychology), in 1904 the Journal of Religious Psychology, and in 1917 the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Hall was one of the first Americans to arrange for a hearing of Freud’s views and to teach his theories. Indeed, Freud’s only visit to the United States was at Hall’s invitation to the twentieth anniversary celebration of Clark University in 1909. In view of the suspicion and dislike that the psy choanalytic movement raised at this time, the invitation showed courage on Hall’s part.

Hall’s administrative-organizational efforts continue to live on: the American Psychological As sociation that he founded had 24,000 members by 1966; Johns Hopkins and Clark University depart ments of psychology each went through a series of unsettling experiences but at present are among the strong graduate departments; the journals he founded, in all but one instance, continue to flourish. He was very modern in his stress on de velopment despite the fact that his way of using Haeckel’s discredited biogenetic principle has disappeared without a trace. He has had little direct effect upon current intellectual traditions, but his enthusiasms, his broad convictions, and his emphasis on developmental issues were transmitted to his students, many of whose formulations are very much part of the current scene.

Robert I. Watson

[Other relevant material may be found inAdolescence; Aging, article onpsychological aspects; Developmental psychology; Intellectual de velopment; and in the biographies ofBaldwin;Cattell; Gesell; Seashore; Terman; Wundt.]

WORKS BY HALL

1883 Content of Children’s Minds. Princeton Review 11: 249–272.

1904 Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Reli gion and Education. New York: Appleton.

1922 Senescence: The Last Half of Life. New York: Appleton.

1923 Life and Confessions of a Psychologist. New York: Appleton.

Letters of G. Stanley Hall to Jonas Gilman Clark. Edited by N. Orwin Rush. Worcester, Mass.: Clark Univ. Library, 1948.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bradbury, Dorothy E. 1937 The Contribution of the Child Study Movement to Child Psychology. Psychological Bulletin 34:21–38.

Cattell, James Mckeen 1890 Mental Tests and Measurements. Mind 15:373–381.

Cattell, James Mckeen 1943 The Founding of the Association and of the Hopkins & Clark Laboratories. Psychological Review 50:61–64.

Dennis, Wayne; and Boring, Edwin G. 1952 The Founding of APA. American Psychologist 7:95–97.

Harper, Robert S. 1949 Tables of American Doctorates in Psychology. American Journal of Psychology 62: 579–587.

Watson, Robert I. 1963 The Great Psychologists: From Aristotle to Freud. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Hall, Granville Stanley

(b. Ashfield, Massachusetts, 1 February 1846; d. Worcester, Massachusetts, 24 April 1924)

psychology, education.

Born on his grandfather’s farm, Hall grew up in a conservative, rural environment. His parents, Granville Bascom Hall and Abigail Beals Hall, were descended from earliest New England colonists. Both had taught school but had moved onto a farm near Ashfield, Massachusetts, soon after their marriage. They urged education and instilled its value into their three children. Hall’s father was a state legislator on the Know-Nothing ticket and active in civic affairs. His mother was especially pious.

For his early schooling Hall attended several oneroom schools in and near Ashfield. He taught at such schools himself for a year but, determined to continue his education, attended Williston Academy in Easthampton, Massachusetts, for college preparation and in 1863 entered Williams College. He had overcome his shyness at his first entry into the wider world and at Williams was active in school events, especially in debates and in a literary club that he helped found. During his college years he developed a lifelong habit of omnivorous reading, chiefly in philosophy, literature, and all aspects of evolution. Professors at Williams, especially John Bascom, A. L. Perry, and Mark Hopkins, encouraged his wide-ranging selections. Hall received his B.A. in 1867 and M.A. in 1870.

Considering entering the ministry, Hall attended Union Theological Seminary in 1867 and took advantage of its location to explore thoroughly New York City. He became acquainted with Henry Ward Beecher, who, by arranging a loan, provided the young man with the chance to fulfill his keenest ambition, a trip to Europe. From 1868 to 1871 Hall studied at Bonn, Berlin, and Heidelberg. For the rest of his life he held European universities and teaching methods, especially German ones, in the highest regard.

On his return to the United States, uncertain of his future plans, Hall taught in boys’ schools and tutored the family of banker Jesse Seligman. In 1872 he accepted an offer to teach English literature at Antioch College, and he later added modern languages and philosophy to his courses there. Very impressed by Wilhelm Max Wundt’s Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (1874), Hall resigned to study under Wundt but postponed the trip for a year to be an instructor of English at Harvard, where he began an acquaintance with William James. For the next two years he studied in Leipzig under Wundt, Carl Ludwig, and others, and in Berlin under Helmholtz and Hugo Kronecker; he also visited other European countries and centers of learning.

On his second return from Europe, Hall completed his work for the Ph.D. at Harvard, under Bowditch in physiology, then wrote and lectured until 1881, when an offer to give a semipublic lecture series at Johns Hopkins University led to his becoming professor of psychology and pedagogy there. In 1888 he accepted the presidency of Clark University, then being founded in Worcester, Massachusetts, by Jonas G. Clark, who proved to be rich but unpredictable. Hall spent the remainder of his career, until retirement in 1920, at Clark University, where he struggled against the early financial setbacks to establish a graduate and research institution of outstanding faculty. Much of his early effort was lost to the more securely financed fledgling University of Chicago.

Hall was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, received a B.D. degree from Union Theological Seminary in 1871, and was awarded the LL.D. by the University of Michigan (1888), by Williams College (1889), and by Johns Hopkins University (1902).

From his studies in philosophy, physiology, and psychology, Hall began his professional work “intensely impressed with the idea... of subjecting psychic processes to the control of scientific and experimental methods” (Life and Confessions of a Psychologist, p. 355). This work was directly influenced by G. T. Fechner’s work in sensory stimuli, Helmholtz’s measurements of visual and auditory responses, and especially by Wundt’s experimental studies in physiological psychology. At Johns Hopkins, Hall established the first formal laboratory in psychology in the United States, one which drew to it such brilliant workers as John Dewey, Joseph Jastrow, and James McKeen Cattell. The studies were chiefly aimed at measuring psychic responses precisely. Hall encouraged others in these studies and participated in them somewhat, but his own early enthusiasm in laboratory work waned.

He turned his attention to what is considered his greatest contribution: studies of the mental development of children and adolescents. He adopted the questionnaire method of the German philosopher Moritz Lazarus to determine what children think and know but modified and enlarged his questionnaires to cover all aspects of a child’s world, including such diverse subjects as toys, animals, and religion. The questionnaires were used especially in schools in Baltimore, Boston, and Worcester. Hall’s pioneering work in this field, especially his early paper “The Contents of Children’s Minds” (1883), gave a great impetus to many other studies on the development of children. Hall and his students, both at Johns Hopkins and at Clark, made great use of the 60,000 sheets of child-gathered information on traits of schoolchildren previously accumulated by E. H. Russell. Adolescence. Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (1904) is considered Hall’s most influential publication.

Hall’s studies of children led him into pioneering work on educational methods. His approach to education and to teaching was historical, his interest chiefly in the development, or what he preferred to call the evolution, of education. His studies of children convinced him that education, which he considered the salvation of the world, must be adapted to the natures and needs of children, not the reverse. Hall participated in the development and extensive use of psychological and intelligence testing of students, an advance in educational psychology that considerably improved teaching methods. He was tolerant of, but not an advocate of, John Dewey’s educational techniques.

A uniform philosophy running throughout all of Hall’s publications was evolution. While a student he discovered Darwinism and the writings of many evolutionary philosophers, such as Thomas Henry Huxley, Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ernst Heinrich Haeckel; and he developed a personal philosophy of evolution from the beginning of the cosmos to what he considered the ultimate product, man and his soul. His studies of children and his attitudes toward education, psychology, and religion were unified by his belief in a continual evolution. Children, he believed, recapitulated the development of the human race in their development. For many years Hall taught a broad course, which he called psychogenesis, in evolution, and another on the psychology of Christianity.

In psychology Hall was not a proponent of Freudianism—in fact, he was skeptical of its value, though he enjoyed taking psychological tests himself and was psychoanalyzed. His interest in psychology was concerned much more with the normal than the abnormal person.

Hall founded and for many years edited the first American journal in his profession, American Journal of Psychology (1887). In 1904 he began Journal of Religious Psychology but, to his regret, it survived only eleven years. At Clark University he helped found Journal of Applied Psychology (1917).

A pioneer in the application of psychology to education in the United States, Hall in his lifetime saw the profession advance from a scattered handful of workers to a multitude. His influence on education practice was extensive: through his many writings, through even more public speeches, through a great number of students at two universities, and through the emphasis he gave to educational research at Clark University.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Work. of more than 400 publications, Hall’s most significant books were Adolescence... (New York, 1904); Education Problems (New York, 1911); Founders of Modern Psychology (New York, 1912); Jesus the Christ in the Light of Psychology (New York, 1917); Senescence; the Last Half of Life (New York, 1922); and two refreshing autobiographical accounts: Recreations of a Psychologist (New York, 1920) and Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (New York, 1923). His especially significantarticle “The Contents of Children’s Minds,” in Princeton Review, 11 (1883), 249–272, was reprinted in several other publications. A full bibliography is in Thorndike (see below).

II. Secondary Literature. Life and Confessions of a Psycholgist (see above) provides a great deal of biographical material and an explanation of the early problems at Clark University. Other biographical material and an unusual assessment of Hall as a psychologist is in the memorial to him by Edward L. Thorndike in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 12 (1925), 133–180.

Elizabeth Noble Shor

HALL, G. STANLEY (1844–1924)

The "father of adolescence," G. Stanley Hall is best known for his prodigious scholarship that shaped adolescent themes in psychology, education, and popular culture. Granville Stanley Hall was born in a small farming village in western Massachusetts, and his upbringing was modest, conservative, and puritan. He began his scholarly work in theology, but traveled to Germany to study physical psychology. He would produce over 400 books and articles and become the first president of Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, but his greatest achievement was his public speaking about childcentered research, education, and adolescence to a society in transition.

With the 1883 publication of "The Contents of Children's Minds," Hall established himself as the leader of the "child-study" movement, which aimed to utilize scientific findings on what children know and when they learn it as a way of understanding the history of and the means of progress in human life. Searching for a source of personal and social regeneration, Hall turned to the theory of evolution for a biologically based ideal of human development, the optimum condition of which was health. His pure and vigorous adolescent countered the fragmented, deadening, and routinized qualities of urban industrial life. Hall theorized adolescence as the beginning of a new life and welded this vision to a scientific claim that this new life could contribute to the evolution of the race, if properly administered.

Hall's work lent scientific support to the "muscular Christian" approach to education, an intersection of morals, physical health, and economic productivity that was popular among the reformers who started the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), Boy Scouts, and other character-building organizations. Central to this view of health attainment was a rational inventory and investment of limited energies in profitable activities. The reformers of boys were vigilant in their denunciation of masturbation as wasteful sexual activity. As president of Clark University, Hall sponsored Freud's visit to the United States in 1909 and likely accepted Freud's ideas about sexuality, motivation, and the problems of repression. However, Hall also believed that freely expressed sexuality would too often lead to debauchery, so the sexualized energies of boys needed to be promoted yet protected, managed, and channeled.

Fittingly, Hall recommended schooling that mixed Rousseau's emphasis on covert control of male pupils with a strict social efficiency attachment to education for future lives and roles. Hall's educational prescriptions for adolescents emphasized the following six areas:

• Differentiated curricula for students with different futures, that is, an efficient curriculum, includingan education for girls that emphasized preparation for marriage and motherhood
• The development of manhood through close supervision of the body, emphasizing exercise and team sports and minimizing draining academic study
• An education that drew upon and utilized the expression of (boy-stage) emotions through emphases on loyalty, patriotism, and service
• A curriculum sequence informed by recapitulation theory or cultural epochs (i.e., study of the stages believed to have been key developmental points of the race. A cultural epochs curriculum focused upon "great scenes": sacred and profane myths and history, from folklore and fairy tales to Robinson Crusoe and bible studies, ending with St. Paul and Luther and the powerful stories of reformation and nationalization. Stories of great men would be used throughout to draw boys into the tales and to build on their natural interest.)
• A school program that kept boys as boys and discouraged precocity or assuming sexual adult roles at a young age
• An administrative gaze schooled to watch youthful bodies

Hall and other "boyologists" identified play as central to creating young men who had disciplined spirit and would obey superiors. Play was revered for making children and adolescents moral and strong via direct and efficient processes, unlike the passive, unfocused, and feminized school curriculum. Cognitive approaches to civilized behavior were deemed unsatisfactory. Play invoked muscles directly, and muscles were believed to be the location of automatic, instinctual morality. Muscles, if properly prepared, carried civilized morality, instantly accessible. Expertly organized play would promote discipline and control, qualities lacking in the immigrant children who were the play reformers' main targets. The play reformers, like the Boy Scouts, consciously nurtured peer relations to replace "unsatisfactory" families and extend expert influence by promoting boys watching over other boys.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, public schools, private philanthropic endeavors, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, and juvenile courts participated in an enlarged and intensified discourse about adolescence. Modern facts of adolescence, produced by G. Stanley Hall and his colleagues and students, emerged in a social context of worries over degeneracy and progress. Although adolescence had been demarcated before the late 1800s, the youth/adult boundary became sharper, more intently watched, and democratically applied to all youth. Hall emphasized adolescence as a new birth and the last chance for race improvement. Slow, careful development at adolescence must be vigilantly guarded; precocity had to be prevented. He and his colleagues issued "pedagogical imperatives," that is, disciplinary and instructional techniques that were essential for each stage of boyhood and adolescence. Thus, laissez-faire approaches to youth were deemed likely to lead to moral anarchy, and the administrative gaze of teachers, parents, psychologists, play reformers, scouting leaders, and juvenile justice workers was cultivated everywhere.

Hall's work has commonly been assessed as discredited and outdated, buried along with recapitulation theory by the 1930s. However, Hall's ideas and their applications in education, scouting, and team sports remain foundational. Hall's work defined adolescents in modern, scientific terms, that is, as natural and outside of social relations and history. The shapers of the modern, scientific adolescent made growing bodies and sexuality primary foci and the measures to prevent precocity enhanced youth's economic dependence. At a time when movie theaters, dance halls, and other new, urban pleasures beckoned, public focus on youth revolved around misuse of leisure time. Finally, Hall contributed to scientific knowledge about adolescents that catapulted youth ever more firmly into their peers' company (expertly guided by psychologists, social workers, and teachers). Hall's ideas continue to shape contemporary discussions of adolescent biology, growing bodies, peer-orientation, and problematic leisure time.

See also: Adolescent Peer Culture; Educational Psychology.

bibliography

Bederman, Gail. 1995. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hall, G. Stanley. 1883. "The Contents of Childen's Minds." Princeton Review 2:249–272.

Hall, G. Stanley. 1903. "Coeducation in the High School." National Education Association Journal of Proceedings and Addresses 42:442–455.

Hall, G. Stanley. 1904. Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, 2 vols. New York: Appleton.

Hall, G. Stanley. 1977. Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (1923). New York: Arno.

Lesko, Nancy. 2001. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. New York: Routledge Falmer.

Ross, Dorothy. 1972. G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Strickland, Charles, and Burgess, C., eds. 1965. Health, Growth, and Heredity: G. Stanley Hall on Natural Education. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.

Nancy Lesko

HALL, GRANVILLE STANLEY (1844-1924)

Psychologist, educator, and philosopher Granville Stanley Hall was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts, on February 1, 1844, and died on April 24, 1924 in Worcester, Massachusetts.

The son of Congregationalist farmers, he spent his adolescence in rebellion against the strict authority of his father, a model of moral and religious values. He attended Williams College and Union Theological Seminary before abandoning religion for the emergent discipline of psychology. During two trips to Europe, Hall familiarized himself with currents in philosophy, became conversant with the scientific trends in physiology and psychology, and studied with biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel. In 1878 at Harvard University he was awarded the first American doctorate in psychology by William James himself. In Leipzig during 1879-80, he also worked with Wilhelm Wundt, who was just then establishing the first laboratory of experimental psychology. There he participated in word association tests based on Francis Galton's psychometric experiments, which Carl Jung would later modify to confirm Freud's theory of neuroses in a laboratory setting.

After returning to the United States, in 1880 Hall began his career as an educator and psychologist, devoting himself to a systematic study of child and adolescent development. He edited several journals, the most important of which was the American Journal of Psychology, which eventually became a forum both to disseminate his own ideas and to publish articles on psychoanalysis. He taught at Johns Hopkins from 1883, and his interest in the human sciences and in education led to his appointment as president of Clark University in 1888, where he was also professor of philosophy and psychology and launched more reviews, including the Journal of Applied Psychology. In 1892 he also served as president of the newly founded American Psychological Association.

In 1909, Hall invited Freud to deliver the series of lectures that launched the psychoanalytic movement in the United States. The correspondence between the two men, from 1908 to 1923, includes some thirty-one letters. For Hall, Freudian theory was a boon to the hereditarian approach to studying children and adolescents. Like Freud, with whose works he had been familiar since 1894, Hall was inspired by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and he shared a lively interest in understanding sexuality. He was electrified by Freud's lectures in Worcester, and believed that they reduced to ashes much of the flimsy theoretical structure upon which philosophically-based laboratory psychology of the time relied.

However, in a letter to Freud four years later (September 26, 1913) Hall indicated areas of skepticism and disagreement with psychoanalytic theory. Rather prophetically, he suggested that one day "specific [hereditary] influences" would be discovered to operate on individuals. He was also critical of extravagant use of sexual symbolism. Subsequently, he made it clear that he regarded as significant the contributions of Alfred Adler, who had rejected castration anxiety as central to the fears and anxieties of childhood.

Learning of Hall's friendly relationship with Adler, Freud wrote that he was sharply stung by what he viewed as a serious defection. However, Hall continued to support psychoanalysts in the American Psycho-pathological Association, and from 1917 to 1920 he served as president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Several years later, responding to Freud's admonition that Adler's ideas were incompatible with psychoanalysis, Hall defended his eclecticism, suggesting that Freud should be more generous toward rebellious children of psychoanalysis like Adler and Jung.

Hall's autobiography, published in 1923, indicates that he tried self-analysis and underwent some psychoanalysis; he was apparently disappointed with the results but did not disclose them. In general, while exasperated by religious and moral restrictions upon happiness and artistic creation, Hall hoped to protect the essential virtues of the ideology that he fought—the cult of work and the intricacies of moral conscience. The influence of psychoanalysis is perceptible in his 1904 two-volume work on adolescence and in his life of Jesus Christ, published in 1917.

Hall died from pneumonia at eighty years of age. He is generally considered, with William James, to be one of the founders of psychology as a scientific discipline in the United States.

Florian Houssier

See also: Clark University; Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis ; North America; Ontogenesis; Psychology and psychoanalysis.

Bibliography

Esman, Aaron H. (1993). G. Stanley Hall and the invention of the adolescence. Adolescent Psychiatry, 19, 6-20.

Hale, Nathan G. Jr. (1971). Freud and the Americans: The beginnings of psychoanalysis in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hall, G. Stanley. (1923). Life and confessions of a psychologist. New York: Appleton.

——. (1904). Adolescence: Its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education. New York: Appleton.

——. (1917). Jesus, the Christ, in the light of psychology. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.

Houssier, Florian. (2003). G. S. Hall (1844-1924): un pionnier dans la découverte de l'adolescence. Ses liens avec les premiers pschanalystes de l'adolescent. Psychiatrie de l'enfant, 46, 655-668.

Rosenzweig, Saul. (1992). Freud, Jung, and Hall the king-maker: The historic expedition to America (1909). St. Louis: Rana House.

Hall, Granville Stanley (1844–1924)

A founder of the academic discipline of psychology in the United States and the first promoter of the scientific study of the child, Hall received a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard with William James. In 1888, he became president and professor of psychology at the new Clark University. At Clark, where he remained for the rest of his career, Hall trained such prominent child psychologists as Arnold L. Gesell, Henry H. Goddard, and Lewis M. Terman. He authored hundreds of books and articles, established several academic journals, helped organize the American Psychological Association, and brought Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to Clark in 1909. Hall's ideas shaped child psychology from the 1880s through the 1910s.

Hall popularized an instinct psychology that stressed the importance of natural impulses and biological imprinting. He thought that a child's innate nature unfolded over time through an evolutionary process, in which the development of the child recapitulated the development of the human race. Young children were like "primitive races" who advanced as they grew, achieving the level of the most "civilized races" by adulthood.

This theory of human growth had practical applications. Parents who understood what behavior to expect at certain ages could guide their children appropriately. Hall argued that young children were like animals who should be treated with indulgence and freedom. He recommended that children be kept away from school until the age of eight, since formal schooling might harm a young child's development. Young children should roam the countryside to learn the ways of nature or satisfy their instincts in informal settings free from adult standards of proper behavior. Guided by their own natural impulses, children would pass through the stages of childhood to become self-controlled adults.

In the early twentieth century Hall turned his attention to adolescence, a term he introduced into widespread use. In his monumental study Adolescence (1904), he described a period of turmoil in which a child's instinctive, primitive nature struggled with more evolved characteristics. Hall concentrated on boys as he analyzed this critical stage of physical, mental, and emotional development.

Hall's ideas were widely disseminated and influenced the early child study movement, particularly the work of the National Congress of Mothers (later the Parent-Teacher Association), founded in 1897 as the first national group devoted to parent education. Hall was a frequent speaker at the organization's conventions and served as its chief scientific authority. Members of the group became participants in Hall's research, filling out detailed questionnaires about their children's behavior and speech for his research projects.

The instinct theory of child development came under attack in the 1920s as a new progressive orientation in social science stressed environmental over biological explanations of human development. Hall's research methods were challenged as unscientific, impressionistic, and sentimental. Child study leaders in the 1920s adopted more rigorous scientific techniques and highlighted cultural influences on child development. By the 1920s, Hall's studies were largely discredited, though his ideas continued to have an influence on views of development as well as adolescence.

See also: Child Development, History of the Concept of.

bibliography

Ross, Dorothy. 1972. G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schlossman, Steven L. 1976. "Before Home Start: Notes toward a History of Parent Education in America, 1897–1929." Harvard Educational Review 46: 436–467.

Diana Selig