Psychoanalysis in Textbooks of Introductory Psychology: A Review

The fields of psychoanalysis and of academic psychology were born within a decade of one another at the end of the nineteenth century. The founder of the discipline of academic psychology is generally considered to be Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1902). After more than twenty years working to develop “physiological psychology” under the direction of Hermann von Helmholtz at the University of Berlin's Institute of Physiology, Wundt established the first institute of psychology at the University of Leipzig in 1879. The new institute was granted official status in 1883.

In the United States, the first university-based instruction in psychology was offered by the Harvard philosopher William James (himself a student of Helmholtz in the late 1860s), who began lecturing on the subject of German physiological psychology in 1875. The first university-based psychology laboratory in America was established at Johns Hopkins by G. Stanley Hall in 1883. The first professorship of psychology was established at the University of Pennsylvania in 1888. A year later, James himself was named Professor of Psychology (as opposed to Philosophy) at Harvard. Within two decades, at least two dozen American universities were offering courses in psychology, many taught by former students of Wundt. By 1902 three psychology journals were being published, and in that year the American Psychological Association was established. In 1909, when Freud visited Clark University at the invitation of G. Stanley Hall (by then president of that university and himself a former student of Wundt), he was not venturing into terrain where no psychologist had ever gone.

Many authors have examined the relationship between the disciplines of academic psychology and psychoanalysis in the United States. According to most, this relationship began on a reasonably friendly note. When William James made his trek to Worcester in the year