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Wilhelm Wundt
1832 — 1920
The Leipzig professor who opened the first psychology laboratory in 1879 and trained its first generation. He timed the mind to the thousandth of a second, then spent twenty years arguing that language, myth and custom lie beyond any laboratory. He signed the German professors' war manifesto of 1914.
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William James
1842 — 1910
The father of American psychology, who talked himself out of despair by choosing to believe in free will. He coined 'stream of consciousness', founded pragmatism, and studied religious experience with a doctor's eye and a pilgrim's sympathy. He met Freud in 1909 and had doubts.
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Ivan Pavlov
1849 — 1936
The Russian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize for digestion and then discovered the conditioned reflex in dogs that drooled before the food came. Blunt, exacting and fearless with the Bolsheviks, he still took their money for his laboratories.
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Sigmund Freud
1856 — 1939
The Viennese neurologist who put the unconscious on the couch. Dreams, slips, repression, the Oedipus complex, id and ego — he gave the twentieth century the words it uses for itself, and broke with Jung over them. Driven out by the Nazis in 1938, he died in London. His science is still on trial.
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Pierre Janet
1859 — 1947
The Paris philosopher-physician who studied hysteria at the Salpêtrière, coined the word 'subconscious', and described how traumatic memories split off from the rest of the mind. He said psychoanalysis was built on his work; Freud never forgave him.
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John Dewey
1859 — 1952
The grocer's son from Vermont who opened a school in Chicago where children cooked and wove their way into arithmetic and history, and who spent fifty years arguing that thinking is inquiry and democracy a way of living together. He backed the war in 1917 and was answered by his own student. He came to think the student was right.
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Hugo Münsterberg
1863 — 1916
Wundt's student and William James's choice to run the Harvard laboratory, he took psychology into the courtroom, the factory and the cinema. He defended Germany in 1914, was shunned as a suspected spy, and died on the lecture platform.
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Mary Whiton Calkins
1863 — 1930
The Wellesley classicist who learned the new psychology from James and Münsterberg as a guest Harvard would not call a student, built the first laboratory at a women's college, invented the paired-associates method, and argued for forty years that psychology is the science of selves. Harvard refused her the doctorate she had earned. She refused the one Radcliffe offered instead.
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Alfred Adler
1870 — 1937
The Viennese doctor who walked out of Freud's circle in 1911 and founded Individual Psychology. He gave us the inferiority complex, birth order and social interest, ran child-guidance clinics in the schools of Red Vienna, and died on a lecture tour in Aberdeen.
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Carl Jung
1875 — 1961
Freud's chosen heir until he wasn't. He broke with the master in 1913 over what lies beneath — not a private cellar of repressed wishes, he argued, but a collective inheritance of archetypes shared by everyone. Spent the years after the break in a confrontation with his own unconscious, recorded in the Red Book. His conduct in 1930s Germany is still argued over.
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John B. Watson
1878 — 1958
The farm boy from Greenville County who declared in 1913 that psychology was the science of behaviour and had no further use for the mind, and who proved it, as he thought, by conditioning fear in an eleven-month-old child. Dismissed from Johns Hopkins in 1920, he sold coffee and cold cream with the same methods. He will not defend what he did to Albert.
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