Hall, G. Stanley
HALL, G. STANLEY (1844–1924), was an American psychologist and educator. Granville Stanley Hall was born in western Massachusetts, in a conservative Protestant environment. He was educated at Williams College, at Union Theological Seminary (New York), at several institutions in Germany, and finally at Harvard, where he studied under William James. Hall was a significant figure in the early period of American psychology. He is remembered primarily as an organizer, teacher, and editor, and as the president of Clark University. He founded North America's first formally accepted university psychology laboratory, the continent's first psychology journal, and its first professional organization for psychologists.
Early in his career, Hall was influential in promoting experimental over "philosophical" methods in psychology. He was a key figure in the "child study" movement, which was influential in introducing questionnaire techniques and the direct observation of children into psychology, and which also spurred the development of "progressive" educational methods. With his two-volume work Adolescence (1904), Hall gave the psychological concept of adolescence its first formal articulation. He was instrumental in bringing psychoanalysis to American attention by inviting Freud for his only visit to the New World.
Through his own work and, more importantly, through the work of his students E. D. Starbuck and James Leuba, Hall was influential in creating psychology of religion as an empirical discipline. He pioneered the empirical study of individual religious experience by assembling data on the religious experiences of children, and in 1904 he founded The American Journal of Religious Psychology and Education. Hall's most important substantive contribution to the psychology of religion was his observation that most conversions occur in adolescence. This observation developed into a characteristic theme in Hall's work: the linking of adolescence, conversion, and the life of Jesus. Hall argued that to complete adolescence successfully, a person must undergo a transformation in which "the older, lower selfish self is molted and a new and higher life of love and service emerges." Religious conversion is the most effective and "natural" vehicle of this transformation and "the Gospel story is the most adequate and classic, dramatic representation of … [this] most critical revolution of life" (Adolescence, vol. 2, p. 337).
Bibliography
The two major works by Hall that deal with psychology of religion are Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, 2 vols. (New York, 1904), and Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology, 2 vols. (Garden City, N.Y., 1917). Dorothy Ross's G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago, 1972) is the definitive biography and a study of Hall's work in psychology.
New Sources
Bringmann, W. G. "G. Stanley Hall and the History of Psychology." American Psychologist 47, no. 2 (1992): 281–290.
"G. Stanley Hall." Journal of Genetic Psychology 152, no. 4 (1991): 397–404.
Hulse, Stewart H., and Bert F. Green. One Hundred Years of Psychological Research in America: G. Stanley Hall and the Johns Hopkins Tradition. Baltimore, 1986.
Kemp, H. Vande. "G. Stanley Hall and the Clark School of Religious Psychology." American Psychologist 47, no. 2 (1992): 290–299.
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