Home > International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis > Hall, Granville Stanley (1844-1924)

Psychologist, educator, and philosopher Granville Stanley Hall was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts, on February 1, 1844, and died on April 24, 1924 in Worcester, Massachusetts.

The son of Congregationalist farmers, he spent his adolescence in rebellion against the strict authority of his father, a model of moral and religious values. He attended Williams College and Union Theological Seminary before abandoning religion for the emergent discipline of psychology. During two trips to Europe, Hall familiarized himself with currents in philosophy, became conversant with the scientific trends in physiology and psychology, and studied with biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel. In 1878 at Harvard University he was awarded the first American doctorate in psychology by William James himself. In Leipzig during 1879-80, he also worked with Wilhelm Wundt, who was just then establishing the first laboratory of experimental psychology. There he participated in word association tests based on Francis Galton's psychometric experiments, which Carl Jung would later modify to confirm Freud's theory of neuroses in a laboratory setting.

After returning to the United States, in 1880 Hall began his career as an educator and psychologist, devoting himself to a systematic study of child and adolescent development. He edited several journals, the most important of which was the American Journal of Psychology, which eventually became a forum both to disseminate his own ideas and to publish articles on psychoanalysis. He taught at Johns Hopkins from 1883, and his interest in the human sciences and in education led to his appointment as president of Clark University in 1888, where he was also professor of philosophy and psychology and launched more reviews, including the Journal of Applied Psychology. In 1892 he also served as president of the newly founded American Psychological Association.

In 1909, Hall invited Freud to deliver the series of lectures that launched the psychoanalytic movement in the United States. The correspondence between the two men, from 1908 to 1923, includes some thirty-one letters. For Hall, Freudian theory was a boon to the hereditarian approach to studying children and adolescents. Like Freud, with whose works he had been familiar since 1894, Hall was inspired by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and he shared a lively interest in understanding sexuality. He was electrified by Freud's lectures in Worcester, and believed that they reduced to ashes much of the flimsy theoretical structure upon which philosophically-based laboratory psychology of the time relied.

However, in a letter to Freud four years later (September 26, 1913) Hall indicated areas of skepticism and disagreement with psychoanalytic theory. Rather prophetically, he suggested that one day "specific [hereditary] influences" would be discovered to operate on individuals. He was also critical of extravagant use of sexual symbolism. Subsequently, he made it clear that he regarded as significant the contributions of Alfred Adler, who had rejected castration anxiety as central to the fears and anxieties of childhood.

Learning of Hall's friendly relationship with Adler, Freud wrote that he was sharply stung by what he viewed as a serious defection. However, Hall continued to support psychoanalysts in the American Psycho-pathological Association, and from 1917 to 1920 he served as president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Several years later, responding to Freud's admonition that Adler's ideas were incompatible with psychoanalysis, Hall defended his eclecticism, suggesting that Freud should be more generous toward rebellious children of psychoanalysis like Adler and Jung.

Hall's autobiography, published in 1923, indicates that he tried self-analysis and underwent some psychoanalysis; he was apparently disappointed with the results but did not disclose them. In general, while exasperated by religious and moral restrictions upon happiness and artistic creation, Hall hoped to protect the essential virtues of the ideology that he fought—the cult of work and the intricacies of moral conscience. The influence of psychoanalysis is perceptible in his 1904 two-volume work on adolescence and in his life of Jesus Christ, published in 1917.

Hall died from pneumonia at eighty years of age. He is generally considered, with William James, to be one of the founders of psychology as a scientific discipline in the United States.

FLORIAN HOUSSIER

See also: Clark University; Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis; North America; Ontogenesis; Psychology and psychoanalysis.