Where the ideas came from, including the discredited ones.
9 topics · 17 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Autobiography of Mary Whiton Calkins
Mary Whiton Calkins · 1930
Recounts her training under William James and Hugo Munsterberg, her invention of the paired-associate technique for studying memory, and her repeated…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Postulates of a Structural Psychology
Edward B. Titchener · 1898
Argues psychology's first task is to analyse consciousness into its basic elements by trained introspection, before asking what those elements are…
+8 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Principles of Psychology
William James · 1890
The book that founded psychology in English, on habit, attention and the stream of consciousness — still quoted because it is still right.
+5 more at this level
12 of 17 works
Mary Whiton Calkins
Recounts her training under William James and Hugo Munsterberg, her invention of the paired-associate technique for studying memory, and her repeated denial of the Harvard PhD she had earned because Harvard would not grant degrees to women, despite going on to become the first woman president of the American Psychological Association.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Abraham H. Maslow
Proposes that human needs form a rough hierarchy - physiological, safety, love, esteem, self-actualisation - in which lower needs generally have to be reasonably satisfied before higher ones become motivating, the founding statement of humanistic psychology's alternative to psychoanalysis and behaviourism.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Edward B. Titchener
Argues psychology's first task is to analyse consciousness into its basic elements by trained introspection, before asking what those elements are for - the structuralist programme functionalism was defined against.
link checked 17 Sept 2026James Rowland Angell
Argues psychology should study what mental processes do for the organism's adaptation to its environment, not just what consciousness is made of, setting functionalism against Titchener's structuralist programme.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John B. Watson
Declares introspection and consciousness off-limits to a scientific psychology, proposing that only observable behaviour, predicted and controlled like any other natural phenomenon, is a fit subject for the field.
20 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026John B. Watson & Rosalie Rayner
Conditions a fear response in an infant, 'Little Albert', by pairing a white rat with a loud noise, and reports the fear generalising to other furry objects - a founding demonstration of conditioned emotion whose single-subject design, ambiguous follow-up and ethics have all been challenged since.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Abraham H. Maslow
Studies a small sample of people Maslow judged to be living unusually full lives and describes traits they shared - realism, spontaneity, autonomy from others' approval - proposing self-actualisation as an empirical case study rather than only a theoretical endpoint.
Noam Chomsky
Argues Skinner's attempt to explain language purely through reinforcement history cannot account for the fact that children produce and understand sentences they have never heard before, a critique widely credited with helping turn psychology away from strict behaviourism toward the cognitive study of mental representation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Hazel Rose Markus & Shinobu Kitayama
Argues many findings taken as universal facts about cognition, emotion and motivation instead depend on whether a culture construes the self as independent from others or as fundamentally interdependent with them, a distinction that changes what counts as a normal, well-adjusted self.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Martin E. P. Seligman & Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Argues psychology has spent a century studying what goes wrong with people and almost nothing studying what makes life worth living, and calls for a science of positive subjective experience, positive traits, and positive institutions to correct the balance.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Barbara L. Fredrickson
Proposes the broaden-and-build theory: positive emotions widen a person's momentary thought-action repertoire and, over time, build lasting physical, social and psychological resources, unlike negative emotions' narrow fight-or-flight response.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William James
The book that founded psychology in English, on habit, attention and the stream of consciousness — still quoted because it is still right.
link checked 17 Sept 2026