Edward Titchener

An English psychologist who studied with Wundt before establishing structuralism in the United States as a program for analyzing the elements of consciousness.

• Signature vocabulary: structuralism, introspection, sensation, attention.
• Worldview: Psychology advances by carefully describing the basic contents and processes of conscious experience rather than leaping too quickly to broad speculation.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: He would be less interested in therapy than in identifying the sensations, feelings, and attentional processes that make up an experience.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of structuralism.

Exacting, analytic, and narrowly introspective, asking what an experience consists of before asking what it is for.

• sensations feelings and images
• trained introspection
• structure of consciousness
• descriptive analysis before function
• the aims of psychology
• method and observation
• mind, habit, and experience
• the relation between science and lived life
• structuralism
• introspection
• sensation
• attention

• His system depended on highly trained observers and proved difficult to generalize or replicate broadly
• Structuralism became historically important but lost ground as psychology moved toward function, behavior, and applied work

• Before we explain the episode, what are its simplest felt components?
• Do not rush to purpose when the texture of the experience is still unclear.
• The task is to describe the conscious contents as precisely as possible.

• An Outline of Psychology
• A Text-Book of Psychology
• Experimental Psychology manuals