The American psychologist and educator Granville Stanley Hall (1844-1924) pioneered in developing psychology in the United States. His wide-ranging and prolific writings reveal a central theme best characterized as genetic psychology or evolutionism.

On Feb. 1, 1844, G. Stanley Hall was born on his grandfather's farm in Ashfield, Mass. He graduated from Williams College in 1867 and then, apparently to please his mother, studied for a year at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. His lack of deep conviction must have been heard between the lines of his trial sermon, for at its close the members of the faculty knelt in prayer for the salvation of the young man's soul. With borrowed funds the heretic field to Germany, where for 2 years he wandered in poverty from one university to another in a constant state of intellectual ferment and euphoria.

On his return to America, Hall taught various subjects for 4 years at Antioch College, where, as he once said, he occupied not a chair but a whole bench. In 1878, under the guidance of his friend William James, he received from Harvard the first doctorate in psychology ever given in the United States. Hall then went back to Germany for 2 years, chiefly because he wanted to find out about the new psychology that was attracting so many scholars to Leipzig, and became Wilhelm Wundt's first American student.

In 1881 Hall was invited to lecture at Johns Hopkins University. As soon as he knew that his position there was reasonably secure, he set about building up the first American laboratory for psychology. In 1887 he founded and edited the American Journal of Psychology, the first journal of its kind in the United States.

When Jonas G. Clark, a wealthy merchant of Worcester, Mass., decided to found an institution of higher learning in his native city, he invited Hall to become its first president. Hall persuaded Clark that the institution should be exclusively for graduate students, and it opened in 1889. In a few years the distinguished faculty in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology made Clark University a unique and famous institution. In 1892 about 15 psychologists drew up plans for the American Psychological Association. Hall was its first president.

The twentieth anniversary of the founding of Clark had as one part of the celebration a conference attended by leading American and European psychologists, including Sigmund Freud. At that time Freud was almost unknown in academic circles.

Hall wrote scores of articles and dozens of books. Among his important works are Adolescence (1904), Founders of Modern Psychology (1912), and Senescence (1922). The theme of developmental psychology runs through almost everything Hall wrote in his application and extension of the doctrine of evolution to the growth of the individual, a view which Hall frequently referred to as recapitulation.

Further Reading

Hall's autobiography is Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (1923). A good biography is Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall:Psychologist as Prophet (1972). The standard work for the lives and writings of psychologists is E. G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (1929; 2d ed. 1950).

Additional Sources

Hall, Granville Stanley, Life and confessions of a psychologist, New York:Arno Press, 1977.

For more information on Granville Stanley Hall, visit Britannica.com.

1844–1924, American psychologist and educator, b. Ashfield, Mass., grad. Williams, 1867. G. Stanley Hall taught at Antioch and Harvard, studied experimental psychology in Germany, and in 1882 organized at Johns Hopkins a psychological laboratory that rapidly took a leading position in the field. He founded (1887) the American Journal of Psychology and was one of the organizers (1891) of the American Psychological Association. As first president (1889–1920) of Clark Univ., he raised it to prominence for its courses in education. Among his works are The Contents of Children's Minds (1883), which inaugurated the child-study movement in the United States; Adolescence (1904); Educational Problems (1911); Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology (1917); and his autobiography (1923).

Bibliography

See biographies by L. Pruette (1926, repr. 1970) and D. Ross (1972); R. J. Wilson, In Quest of Community (1970).

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.

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.

—FLORIAN HOUSSIER

(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.

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

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