History and Systems of Psychology

When the new German psychology of Wundt was introduced to the United States, it immediately took on a particular American character. With the exception of Titchener, who remained a strict adherent of Wundt's formulations, the American psychologists who had been trained in Germany imposed a functional interpretation on structural psychology when they returned to America. Briefly, functionalism was an orientation in psychology that emphasized mental processes rather than mental content and that valued the usefulness of psychology. Ironically, it was Titchener who in 1898 coined the term functional psychology, to distinguish such views from his own “true’’ structural psychology.

Functional psychology was not a formal system of psychology in the way represented by structural psychology or later systems of Gestalt psychology, behaviorism, or psychoanalysis. Functional psychology did not provide a comprehensive view of psychological activity with underlying philosophical assumptions and prescribed research strategies and goals. Rather, it differed from structural psychology in a spirit or an attitude that emphasized the applications and usefulness of psychology. As Boring (1950) suggested, it was not so much that the functional psychologists did different experiments than the structural psychologists. Rather, it was their reason for doing an experiment that distinguished them from the structuralists. The functionalists wanted to know how the mind works and what uses the mind has, not simply what contents and structures are contained in the mind.

Functional psychology changed the new German science by adding influences historically absent from the German intellectual milieu. Specifically, while accepting the underlying Lockean assumptions of the mind inherent in Wundt's formulation, the Americans retained a general commitment to other prevailing aspects of British thought. Most notable was the strong influence of Darwin's theory of evolution. Functional psychology valued the importance of adaptation of both the species and the individual to environmental influences. Adaptation as a survival mechanism was amenable to the American national experience as a pioneering enterprise that saw itself as having transplanted the best of European civilization and left behind the shortcomings of European society in the attempt to tame a wild continent.

American functionalism was a relatively short-lived movement. It introduced to America Wundt's attempt to identify a new science, but in the process of importing structuralism, the functionalists discarded the rigidity of Wundt's system.