Synopsis
Excerpt
Robert D. Kavanaugh
Betty Zimmerberg
Steven Fein
Williams College
This book celebrates the third in a series of symposia sponsored by the psychology department of Williams College honoring the memory of G. Stanley Hall, who graduated from Williams in 1867.
Hall was an enthusiastic student at Williams, drawn particularly to philosophy and political economics, whose wide-ranging extracurricular interests included participation in the college's choral group, chess club, theological society, and art association. He also served as editor of a quarterly magazine, and in his senior year was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Hall seems to have been thwarted only on the baseball field, where his ambition to make the varsity team went unfulfilled.
The promise that Hall demonstrated as an undergraduate blossomed shortly after he left Williams to become the first recipient of a psychology PhD in the United States under the auspices of William James. This was but one of many firsts in Hall's distinguished career. He founded the first officially recognized psychological laboratory in the United States, became the first president of the American Psychological Association, and was the editor of the first psychology journal in America. As a scholar, Hall demonstrated a wide range of interests that took him to Europe to study with Wundt and led him to launch the child-study movement in America with the newly devised questionnaire method. Hall was known also for his keen interest in bringing contemporary issues to the fore, perhaps best demonstrated by his 1909 invitation to Freud, Jung, and other leaders of the emerging European psychoanalytic movement to speak at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.