Hall, G. Stanley

Hall, G. Stanley (1844–1924), psychologist and educator.Born and raised in rural western Massachusetts, Granville Stanley Hall in 1863 entered Williams College, where he developed an interest in the theory of evolution and in philosophy. After a brief stint at Union Theological Seminary, he studied philosophy and physics in Germany. In 1876 he began graduate work at Harvard where, under William James's direction, he earned the first American doctorate in psychology. Returning to Germany, he studied the new experimental, physiological psychology under Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig. When Hall returned to America in 1880, he found the field of education the most receptive to the new psychology. His lectures on pedagogy interested Daniel Coit Gilman, president of the recently founded Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who in 1883 appointed him America's first full‐time professor of psychology. There Hall established the first U.S. psychological laboratory, attracting students such as John Dewey and James McKeen Cattell, who would make lasting contributions to the profession, and founded the American Journal of Psychology (1887). In 1888, Hall was named president of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, a graduate research institution modeled on Johns Hopkins. While carrying out his administrative duties, he launched other psychological journals, helped organize the American Psychological Association (1892), and played a role in introducing psychoanalysis to the United States by bringing Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to Clark in 1909. Hall's most influential work, the two‐volume Adolescence (1904), a pioneering contribution to child study and educational psychology, reflected changing perceptions of human development in American culture.
See also Life Stages.

Bibliography

Dorothy Ross , G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet, 1972.

Kerry W. Buckley