Please verify the following information regarding the founder(s) of the major schools of psychology:

Structuralism - Wilhelm Wundt, William James, and E. B. Titchener Functionalism - J. R. Angell, John Dewey, Harvey Carr Gestalt - Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, W. Kohler, Fritz Perls Behavioral - John Watson, B. F. Skinner, and Joseph Wolpe Psychoanalysis- Sigmund Freud Humanistic - Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers Multiculturalism - ????

Any assistance you can provide will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Angie

-- Angie Barnes (ABARNES@ENTERGY.COM), January 24, 2002

Answers

Structuralism was really Titchener's alone. He claimed to be following Wundt faithfully, but recent research has shown that this was not really the case, and that it would be incorrect to classify Wundt as a Structuralist (see relevant articles by A. Blumenthal and by K. Danziger). William James was *certainly* not a structuralist. He was influential upon the functionalists, but his approach was too broad and eclectic to be so-classified. The Chicago school of functionalism was founded by Dewey and Angell. Carr led the school later -- after Angell had gone to Yale and Dewey to Columbia. The person who originally engaged Titchener in the debate that led to the structuralism-functionalism split, however, was James Mark Baldwin, then of Princeton (earlier Toronto, later Johns Hopkins). There was another functionalist school at Columbia, where James McKeen Cattell was chair, and where Edward L. Thorndike and later R. S. Woodworth were active. Even G. Stanley Hall, I believe, sometimes refered to his work as being functionalist. It was a very broad term that was used by a wide variety of people.

Fritz Perls was *not* a member of the Gestalt school. He adopted the term for his approach to psychotherapy, but neither studied with them nor was true to their principles. See Mary Henle's paper about the (non-)relation between the two at http://www.enabling.org/ia/gestalt/gerhards/henle.html.

Skinner was a behaviorist, but certainly not a founder (except of his own brand of "operant" behaviorism). He was significantly younger than Watson, for one. Second, Watson gets a great deal more credit for "founding" behaviorism than he probably deserves because he was the editor of Psych. Review, from which he was able to make his behaviorist pronouncements to a wide audience. There were are large number of people founding behaviorism. See the introductory essay of Robert Wozniak's series of volumes on behaviorism.

I have never heard "multiculturalism" referred to before as a "school" of psychology. It is a recent trend in some psychology, to be sure, but we are long past the era of "schools".

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), January 24, 2002.