Edward B. Titchener

British-American psychologist (1867–1927) who carried Wundt's experimental method from Leipzig to Cornell and built out of it the school called structuralism. He read classics and physiology at Oxford, spent two years in Wundt's laboratory, and in 1892, finding no post in England, took the chair at Cornell that he held until his death, translating Wundt's Physiologische Psychologie into English and presenting himself for thirty years as the true representative of the German programme in America.

His own version was narrower and more severe than Wundt's: psychology, as he defined it, studies conscious experience as dependent on the experiencing person, and its task is to analyse that experience into its elementary components — sensations, images and affections — to determine their attributes of quality, intensity, duration and clearness, and to state the laws of their combination.

The instrument was trained introspection, a discipline that took months to acquire and forbade the stimulus error of describing the object instead of the experience; the results were catalogues of thousands of elementary sensations. His four-volume Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice (1901–1905) trained a generation of American experimenters whatever their theoretical loyalties, and it was Titchener who gave English the word empathy, coined to render Theodor Lipps's Einfühlung.

He supervised more than fifty doctorates, among them that of Margaret Floy Washburn, the first woman to take a psychology doctorate in the United States, while excluding women from the private club of experimentalists he founded in 1904 — a contradiction his students noted at the time. Structuralism did not survive him: attacked from the functionalist side and then swept aside by behaviourism, it ended with his death, but the laboratory rigour he imposed outlived the doctrine.