Edward Segregator Titchener Essay

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Edward Bradford Titchener was born in England in 1867 and lived until 1927. Before Titchener received his doctorate, he had the opportunity to study under Wilhelm Wundt and his school of Voluntarism. However, after coming to America, Titchener broke away from many of Wundt's theories and founded the the school of thought known as Structuralism. Where Wundt was concerned with studying consciousness, Titchener simply wanted to describe an individual's current thoughts at any point in time. Within Titchener’s psychology of Structuralism, he believed that all thoughts can be broken down to basic elements, specifically, sensations. Titchener would say that when you identified the object, you put together memories of sensations from your past …show more content…

He reasoned that if a thought, like “this is a strawberry,” is a collection of elements, those elements or sensations should be identifiable. Much of his work focused on sensations, and he concluded that there are over 40,000 sensations that comprise thought, primarily related to vision and hearing. Moreover, structuralism focused on immediate mental experience. Titchener often stated that he was only concerned with the “is,” and that he left the “is for” to others. Essentially, he was stating that he was only concerned with facts and that to ask the question “is for?” was to delve into speculation, something that Titchener personally detested. He believed that for psychology to be accepted as a science, it needed to focus on facts. At the age of 25, Titchener received an appointment from Cornell University as a psychology professor and within a few years, he had developed the largest doctoral program in psychology in the United States. One of Titchener's students, Margaret Floy Washburn, became the first woman ever to receive a doctorate in psychology. Titchener was a charismatic speaker and strict authoritarian who was adored by his students. His notoriety quickly spread until he became recognized in his day as the foremost experimental psychologist in

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