Edward B. Titchener

Edward Bradford Titchener (11 January 1867 – 3 August 1927) was an English psychologist who studied under Wilhelm Wundt for several years. Titchener is best known for creating his version of psychology that described the structure of the mind: structuralism. After becoming a professor at Cornell University, he created the largest doctoral program at that time in the United States. His first graduate student, Margaret Floy Washburn, became the first woman to be granted a PhD in psychology (1894).

Titchener's parents, Alice Field Habin and John Titchener, eloped to marry in 1869 and his mother was disowned by her prominent Sussex family. His father held a series of posts as a clerk or in accountancy before dying of tuberculosis in 1879. The family, of five surviving children (4 girls, 1 boy), moved at least 10 times during this time. When he was 9, Titchener was sent to live with his paternal grandparents and two aunts. His namesake grandfather was a successful solicitor and investor and also an ex-mayor of Chichester. He ensured that Titchener was first privately tutored and then given a grammar school education. However, his investments collapsed in 1881 and he died a few months later. In the reduced financial circumstances, Titchener's subsequent education was funded by scholarships, paid employment and entrepreneurial activities.

Titchener attended The Prebendal School and Malvern College and then went on to Oxford (Brasenose College) from 1885 to 1890. He graduated with a rare 'double first' BA degree in classics in 1889. His interests began to change to biology. At Oxford, Titchener first began to read the works of Wilhelm Wundt. During his time at Oxford, Titchener translated the first volume of the third edition of Wundt's book Principles of Physiological Psychology from German into English. He spent an extra year at Oxford in 1890, working with John Scott Burdon-Sanderson, a physiologist to learn scientific methodology. Titchener went on to Leipzig in Germany to study with Wundt in autumn 1890. He completed his doctoral program in 1892 with a dissertation on binocular vision. In summer 1892 he returned to Oxford and Burdon-Sanderson where he taught in the Oxford Summer School.

In autumn 1892 Titchener joined the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University as an untenured lecturer teaching philosophy and psychology. He developed a psychology laboratory, gained editing positions and in 1895 gained tenure, a full professorship and independence from the Sage School. He taught his views on the ideas of Wundt to his students in the form of structuralism.

Titchener was married in 1894 to Sophie Bedloe Kellogg, a public school teacher from Maine. They had four children (3 girls, 1 boy). Once Titchener had a position at Cornell he gave financial support to his mother for the rest of his life. She, and his sisters, had lived in difficult circumstances after the death of his father, with his sisters spending time in an orphanage and then entering domestic service.

Titchener's ideas on how the mind worked were heavily influenced by Wundt's theory of voluntarism and his ideas of association and apperception (the passive and active combinations of elements of consciousness respectively). Titchener attempted to classify the structures of the mind in the way a chemist breaks down chemicals into their component parts—water into hydrogen and oxygen, for example. Thus, for Titchener, just as hydrogen and oxygen were structures, so were sensations and thoughts. He conceived of hydrogen and oxygen as structures of a chemical compound, and sensations and thoughts as structures of the mind. A sensation, according to Titchener, had four distinct properties: intensity, quality, duration, and extent. Each of these related to some corresponding quality of stimulus, although some stimuli were insufficient to provoke their relevant aspect of sensation. He further differentiated particular types of sensations: auditory sensation, for example, he divided into "tones" and "noises." Ideas and perceptions he considered to be formed from sensations; "ideational type" was related to the type of sensation on which an idea was based, e.g., sound or vision, a spoken conversation or words on a page.

Titchener believed that if the basic components of the mind could be defined and categorised that the structure of mental processes and higher thinking could be determined. What each element of the mind is, how those elements interact with each other and why they interact in the ways that they do was the basis of reasoning that Titchener used in trying to find structure to the mind.

The main tool that Titchener used to try to determine the different components of consciousness was introspection. Unlike Wundt's method of introspection, Titchener had very strict guidelines for the reporting of an introspective analysis. The subject would be presented with an object, such as a pencil. The subject would then report the characteristics of that pencil (color, length, etc.). The subject would be instructed not to report the name of the object (pencil) because that did not describe the raw data of what the subject was experiencing. Titchener referred to this as stimulus error.