G. Stanley Hall

American psychologist (1844–1924), the organiser and impresario of psychology in the United States. Trained first for the ministry and then in Germany, he took under William James at Harvard in 1878 what is generally counted the first American doctorate in psychology, returned to Leipzig to work in Wundt's laboratory, and spent the rest of his life building institutions rather than theories: the laboratory at Johns Hopkins where Dewey, Cattell and Jastrow studied, the American Journal of Psychology (1887), the American Psychological Association, of which he was the first president in 1892, and Clark University, whose first president he was from 1889.

His own research programme was the child study movement, which collected questionnaires on the contents of children's minds by the tens of thousands, and his major book, Adolescence (1904), made that stage of life a subject of scientific and public attention for the first time, describing it as a period of storm and stress and as a recapitulation, in the individual, of the history of the race — an evolutionary framework that later work discarded while keeping the subject he had opened.

Senescence (1922) did the same for old age, and Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology applied the method to religion. His most consequential single act was an invitation: in 1909 he brought Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to lecture at Clark's twentieth anniversary, the only visit Freud ever made to the United States and the event that gave psychoanalysis its American audience.

Clark under Hall also awarded the doctorate to Francis Cecil Sumner, the first African American to earn one in psychology, though Hall's own writings on race and on women carried the hierarchical assumptions of his period and were contested in his own lifetime.