Edward Bradford Titchener

Edward Bradford Titchener was born on January 11, 1867 in Chichester, England and attended Malvern College on a scholarship. While his family originally intended for him to enter the clergy, Titchener's interests were elsewhere. In 1885, he began studying at Oxford. He initially focused on biology, but he soon shifted to the study of comparative psychology. During his time at Oxford, he began to read the writings of Wilhelm Wundt and later translated the first volume of Wundt's famous text...See more

Edward Bradford Titchener was born on January 11, 1867 in Chichester, England and attended Malvern College on a scholarship. While his family originally intended for him to enter the clergy, Titchener's interests were elsewhere. In 1885, he began studying at Oxford. He initially focused on biology, but he soon shifted to the study of comparative psychology. During his time at Oxford, he began to read the writings of Wilhelm Wundt and later translated the first volume of Wundt's famous text Principles of Physiological Psychology from German into English. Titchener graduated from Oxford in 1890 and then began studying with Wundt in Leipzig, Germany. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Leipzig in 1892. Career: After earning his Ph.D., Titchener took a position as a professor of psychology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. It was here that he established the psychological school of thought known as structuralism. Titchener believed that by systematically defining and categorizing the elements of the mind, researchers could understand the structure of the mental processes. While he is often described as an apostle of Wundt's, Titchener's ideas differed from those of his mentor. He utilized Wundt's method of introspection but under much more stringent guidelines. He was only interested in things that existed in the consciousness, so things such as instincts or the unconscious were of no interest to him. Introspection was a technique that relies on self-observation. Trained observers were presented with different objects or events and then asked to describe the mental processes they experienced. Based on this kind of research, Titchener concluded that there three essential elements that made up all conscious experiences: feelings, sensations, and images. See less