American psychologist.

Granville Stanley Hall played a decisive role in the organization of American psychology. He invited Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to America, thus contributing to the diffusion of psychoanalysis. Above all, he gave a crucial impetus to the study of the child and the life cycle (his last psychological book dealt with senescence, the process of becoming old). Hall stressed the social relevance of empirical developmental research, and authored the first major treatise on adolescence. His theories and methods have since been superseded, but the life-span, stage-based perspective typical of this thinking became a central component of modern psychology.

Hall was born in 1844 in rural Massachusetts, the son of educated farmers. He studied at Williams College and at the Union Theological Seminary; in 1878 he received a Ph.D. from Harvard University for a thesis on the role of muscular sensations...