Edward B Titchener

Edward Bradford
Titchener(1867- 1927)
British and American experimental
psychologist
Born January 11, 1867 in Chichester,
Sussex, England.
 The son of Alice Field Habin and John
Bradford Titchener
They married in 1866 and his mother
was disowned by her prominent sussex
family.
They had five children and he was the
only boy among them.
His father worked as a clark
His father died by tuberculosis in 1879
when he was quite young.
When he was 9, he was sent to live with
his barrister grand father to get a good
education.
Education


He attended the Chichester prebendal
school and Malvern college.

After that he went to Brasenose
college, Oxford.

He graduated at the year of 1889with
a B.A degree in classiscs.

At Oxford, titchener first began to
He spent an extra year at oxford in
1890, working with Jhon Scott Burdon-
Sanderson, a physiologist.
In 1890 he went to Germany to study
experimental psychology in Wilhelm
Wundt’s laboratory in Leipzig.
He received his Ph.D. in 1892 with a
dissertation on binocular vision.
Career highlights
After that he returned to oxford and
Burdon-Sanderson where taught in the
oxford summer school.
In autumn 1892 titchener joined the
sage school of philosophy at coronell
university (1892 to 1927).
He was a lecturer teaching philosophy
and psychology
He was charismatic speaker and an inspiring
teacher.
He trained 56 doctoral students, including 21
women.
Among his pupils were:
Margaret Floy Washburn, the first women
psychologist, first women to be granted a phD
in psychology and was APA president in 1921
 And also J.P. Guilford, E.G. Boring, A.
Maslow.
Marital life
Titchener was married in 1894 to
Sophie Bedloe Kellog, a public school
teacher from Maine
She was an artist, and she provided
drawings for his books.
They had four children ( 3 girls, 1 boy).
Contributions
Founder and head of the structural school of
psychology (structuralism), that described
the elemental structures of consciousness
based on introspection
He attempted to classify the structures of
the mind in the way a chemist breaks down
chemicals in to their component parts.
He considered sensations and thoughts as
structures of the mind.
According to Titchener a sensation had
four distict properties: intensity, quality,
duration, and extent.
He stated that the main task of
psychology is to discover of the
elemental components of consciousness,
to analyze the complex experience of
every day life into their elements and
then to understand the nature of
compounding.
Introspection
The main tool that he used to try to
determine the different components of
consciousness was introspection.
The precise examination and systematic
discription of conscious experience.
Titchener had very strict guidelines for
the reporting an introspective analysis.
He coined the word “empathy” in 1909
as a translation of the german word
“einfuhlungsvermogen”.
He proposed the core context theory of
meaning: a new mental process acquired
its meaning from the context of other
mental processes within which it occurs.
The law of prior entry, postulated that
“the object of attention comes to
consciousness more quickly than the
objects which we are not attending to”
Wundt emphasized the relation ship
between elements of consciousness,
Titchener focused on identifying the
basic elements themselves.
In his text book An Outine of
psychology(1896), Titchener put
forward a list of more than 44,000
elemental qualities of conscious
experience.
Honors
He was american editor of mind (1894-
1917)
Co-editor of the american journal of
psychology(1895-1925)
In 1904 founded the group “The
experimentalists”, which continue today
as the “society of experimental
psychologists”.
Major figure in the establishment of
experimental psychology in U.S
Titchener received honorary degrees
from Harward, Clark, and Wisconsin.
 He became a charter member of
the American Psychological Association
 Translated Wundt’s and  Külpe's
Outlines of Psychology and other
works.
Major works
An Outline of Psychology (1896)
 A Primer of Psychology (1898)
 Experimental Psychology: A Manual of
Laboratory Practice(4 volumes, 1901-05)
 Lectures on the elementary psychology
of feeling and attention (1908)
 Lectures on the experimental
psychology of the thought-processes
(1909)
 A Textbook of Psychology (2 volumes,
1909-10)
 A Beginner’s Psychology (1915)
Systematic Psychology (1929).
He published over 200 articles and
books over 35 years.
Critics


Titchener called thought as a mental element that is probably an
unanalyzed complex of kinesthetic sensations and images.

This imperative gave rise to the "imageless thought controversy," in which
other psychologists, (Oswald Külpe, Alfred Binet, and Robert S.
Woodworth) argued the possibility of thought processes without discrete
mental images.
He argued that the contents of the mind
could be reduced to the elements of
sensation.
This analytic model of psychology
ultimately led to reduction of the
sensations to their corresponding stimuli.
The integrity of psychology was lost, and
psychology was logically reduced to
physics.
Death

He died in 3 august 1927, Ithaca, New

York, U.S.A at the age of 60.
He was died by brain tumor.
His brain was contributed to the wilder
brain collection at Cornell.