Mary Whiton Calkins
Autobiography of Mary Whiton Calkins [*]
First published in Murchison, Carl. (Ed.) (1930). History of Psychology in
Autobiography (Vol. 1, pp. 31-61).
Republished by the permission of Clark University Press, Worcester, MA.
I
1) I began the serious study of psychology with William James. Most unhappily
for them and most fortunately for me the other members of his seminary in
psychology dropped away in the early weeks of the fall of 1890; and James and I
were left not, as in Garfield's vision of Mark Hopkins and himself, at either
end of a log but quite literally at either side of a library fire. The
Principles of Psychology was warm from the press; and my absorbed study of those
brilliant, erudite, and provocative volumes, as interpreted by their writer, was
my introduction to psychology. What I gained from the written page, and even
more from tête-à-tête discussion was, it seems to me as I look back upon it,
beyond all else, a vivid sense of the concreteness of psychology and of the
immediate reality of "finite individual minds" with their "thoughts and
feelings. James's vituperation of the "psychologist's fallacy" -- the "confusion
of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his
report" -- results directly from this view of introspection as immediate
experience and not mere inference from experience. From introspection he derives
the materials for psychology. "Introspective observation," he expressly asserts,
"is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always...."[1]
Of specific doctrines, those which I now recall as most impressing me, in this
early study of the Principles, are the criticisms levelled against the
conception of "Unconscious Thought" and against automatism; the nativistic space
doctrine; the emotion theory; the reiterated teaching (obviously an anticipation
of the Gestaltpsychologie) that a percept has a unity of its own and is no mere
aggregate of sensations; and the emphasized conception of consciousness as in
its very nature impulsive. R·lore significant, as events proved, for my own
system of psychology are the doctrine of the transitive feelings of relation,
the feelings of and, if, and but,[2] and the concept of consciousness as tending
to the "personal form."[3] The truth is, however, that each chapter of this
incomparable treatise left some impress on my mind so that, to this day, I can
turn with assurance to the chapter and page in which James considers this or
that topic. [p. 32]
I was equally fortunate, in this same fall of 1890, in entering on laboratory
work under the guidance of Edmund Sanford, a teacher unrivalled for the richness
and precision of his knowledge of experimental procedure and for the prodigality
with which he lavished time and interest upon his students. Besides training me
in the detail of laboratory experiments, Dr. Sanford started me upon a "minor"
research problem, based on the records which, during seven weeks, he took of his
dreams and I of mine. The study of these records constituted in itself a course
in general psychology from the vantage ground of a systematic introspection of
these dream phenomena and with the constant stimulus of Dr. Sanford's
suggestion. The distinguishing features of the study were these: We, the
observers, waked ourselves (by the use of alarm-clocks) at different hours of
the night; we recorded our dreams at the instant of waking and each morning
studied with care all the records, whether slight and trivial or seemingly
significant. We took account of the different types of dream experience,
discovering elements of all sense modes, emotions of every sort, and occasional
examples of dream reasoning and dream volition; and we considered also the
relation of the dream to the waking life, distinguishing in particular the
persons and the places of our dream experiences. The conclusion which I reached,
that the dream merely reproduces "in general the persons, places and events of
recent sense perception" and that the dream is rarely "associated with that
which is of paramount significance in one's waking experience,"[4] is almost
ludicrously opposed to the nowadays widely accepted Freudian conception of the
dream; in fact, my study as a whole must be rather contemptuously set down by
any good Freudian as superficially concerned with the mere "manifest content" of
the dream. It is, however, of interest to me to notice that my old dream study
does anticipate more than one of the findings of the psychoanalysts. In
agreement with them, for example, it vigorously disputes the assertions of
people who report that they never dream; and this on strictly empirical grounds.
For I had more than one instance of waking without the faintest memory of having
dreamed and of discovering by my side the night record of one dream or of
several.[5][p. 33]
A second fruit of the first year of graduate work in psychology was a paper on
association which I wrote for Dr. James. I had first- proposed 'attention' as my
topic, but he frowned on this (if I rightly remember) for the highly
characteristic reason that he was sick of the subject. Quite at random I next
chose 'association,' thus determining my chief interest for a number of years.
This paper turned out to be my first published contribution to psychology. It
appeared, suitably condensed, in an early issue, July, 1892, of the
Philosophical Review. The paper takes its start in the conception of association
as observable connection between succeeding objects (or contents) of
consciousness; proceeds, after James's fashion, to reduce so-called association
by similarity to contiguity association; and is largely concerned with a
classification in which, modifying that of James, it lays stress on what it
calls the persisting element in cases of 'multiple' and 'focalized' partial
association. I can hardly hope ever again to be so puffed with pride as when I
found this distinction approvingly referred to in a footnote of the second
edition of "little James," the name by which, at this time, we all knew the
Briefer Course in Psychology.
Chronologically third of my great teachers in psychology was Hugo Münsterberg, a
man of deep learning, high originality, and astounding versatility, interested
alike in systematic psychology, in the setting and solution of experimental
problems, and, years later, in the applications of psychology. In the very fall
of 1892, when I had planned to ask admission to his Freiburg Laboratory, he came
instead to Harvard; and for parts of three years I worked under his inspiring
direction in the old Psychology Laboratory of Dane Hall. The Laboratory was
infelicitously situated within hearing on the one side of the hand-organs and
the street-car bells of Harvard Square and on the other of the often vociferous
outbursts of Professor Copeland's "elocution" classes, but it was none the less
the scene of absorbing work. I shall not let this opportunity pass by to record
my gratitude for the friendly, comradely, and refreshingly matter-of-fact
welcome which I received from the men working in [p. 34] the Laboratory as
assistants and students, by whom the unprecedented incursion of a woman might
well have been resented. My abiding gratitude to Dr. Münsterberg, who swung the
Laboratory doors open to me, is supplemented by my appreciative memory of Edgar
Pierce and Arthur Pierce, of Robert MacDougall and James Lough -- to name no
others -- who, throughout these years, were my mechanicians, subjects,
counsellers[sic], and friends.
I interrupt myself to interpolate a frivolous reminiscence, of a much later
date, which sets off in bold relief the friendly tolerance of my Harvard
fellow-students. I was a member in 1905 of the Executive Committee of the
American Psychological Association. Dr. Münsterberg had planned a lunch-meeting
of the Committee at the Harvard Union, but the burly head-waiter stoutly
protested our entrance. No woman, he correctly insisted, might set foot in the
main hall; nor was it possible to admit so many men, balanced by one woman only,
to the ladies' dining-room. It was almost by main force that Professor
Münsterberg gained his point and the Committee its lunch.
My problem for experimental investigation was a comparison of frequency,
recency, and vividness as conditions of association. In brief, I showed that, in
direct competition, recency yields to vividness, and both vividness and recency
to frequency. Concretely stated -- in showing series of colors paired with
numerals I found that a numeral which had repeatedly appeared in conjunction
with a given color was more likely than either a vividly colored numeral or than
the numeral last paired with the color, to be remembered, on a reappearance of
the given color. Perhaps more significant than these results is the method,
since known as that of right associates, which I employed. For I discovered
presently, to my unbounded surprise, that I had originated a technical
memorizing method. G. E. Müller, who sharply criticized and greatly refined, but
in essence adopted the method, calls it the ...
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