Mary Whiton Calkins: Biography Of This Psychologist And Philosopher

Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930) was an American philosopher and psychologist, a pioneer in experimental psychology and the first woman president of the American Psychological Association. Furthermore, and in the context of contradictions between the social demands assigned to women, Calkins was one of the pioneers in the fight for women’s participation in higher education and science

In this article we will We will review a brief biography of Mary Whiton Calkins and we will see some of their contributions to gender equality and experimental psychology.

Mary Whiton Calkins: biography of an experimental psychologist

He was born March 30, 1863 in Hartford Connecticut. She was the daughter of Charlotte Whiton Calkins and a Presbyterian minister, Wolcott Calkins, and the eldest of five siblings with whom she was very close. She grew up and lived in Buffalo, New York, and later in Newton, Massachusetts.

In 1882 Calkins began her studies at Smith College for women, a year before the death of her sister Maud; event that marked part of her later training. She stayed at home for a while, where she also took care of her mother, and took private Greek classes. It was in the year 1884 when He returned to Smith College, and graduated with honors in classical philosophy

Two years later he traveled through Europe, where he took the opportunity to continue studying Greek. Upon returning to the United States, her father had prepared an interview for her at the newly created Wellesley College, a women’s college in Massachusetts, where she sought to work as a professor and researcher.

Calkins and the first Wellesley psychology laboratory

In 1888, Mary Whiton Calkins began teaching philosophy at Wellesley College for Women. At the same time, the specialty of scientific psychology was opened and the lack of teachers prepared to teach courses in it was recognized.

To remedy this, one of the psychologists offered Calkins, a philosopher by training with significant teaching skills, a position as a psychology professor. She thus had the opportunity to create Wellesley’s first laboratory.

She accepted with the commitment to train in the area for at least a year. However, this created a new problem: where to study. At the moment Opportunities for women were almost non-existent and, besides, Calkins had assumed family commitments, so he did not want to leave the city.

From “special student” to APA President

At Harvard University, and in a context where psychology and philosophy were not formally divided, but the participation of women was categorically denied in any case, there were several philosophers and psychologists who began to receive them as “listeners”, both in their classes and in the laboratories. For example, William James and Josiah Royce were examples of faculty who did so, as they took a strong stand against Harvard’s policies of exclusion of women.

In 1889, Mary Calkins began taking classes in Physiological Psychology with James , and Hegelian philosophy with Royce, within Harvard University but as a “special student.” In the following year, Calkins worked together with Edmund Sanford of Clark University, and founded the first psychology laboratory at Wellesley College, which despite various barriers he managed to combine with teaching.

At the same time, during 1984 and 1985, Mary Whiton Calkins trained at Harvard University and developed research that significantly influenced modern experimental psychology. All this even after Harvard University responded with a resounding refusal to the request to officially recognize his doctoral studies Instead, they offered him recognition from Radcliffe College, which was the “annex” college of the same university. Calkins rejected the latter because he did not want to legitimize Harvard’s lack of legitimacy for female students.

She continued working at Wellesley College, as an assistant professor, then a professor of psychology and finally, the year before her death and once she had retired, she was recognized as a professor-researcher, without the official recognition of her doctorate from Harvard..

During the strong policies of academic and scientific exclusion of women, Mary Whiton Calkins She was elected in 1905 as the first woman president of the American Psychological Association Upon completion, in 1918, she served as president of the American Philosophical Association.

The associated pair technique and self psychology

His first works in psychology were focused on the study of memory. Among other things and as a result of her doctoral thesis, Mary Whiton Calkins laid the foundations for what we know as “associated pairs technique” or “associated pairs task” , currently used in cognitive evaluation tests. Broadly speaking, it consists of the proposal that we can learn and memorize them completely, until we are presented with some stimulus that results in the withdrawal of another.

Subsequently, he focused on the development of a “psychology of the self”, from which he suggests that mental processes exist independently of the Self; That is to say, they are processes that belong to an “I”.

Calkins said that the self is something indefinable , but which can be understood as an object of everyday consciousness in reference to different characteristics: totality, singularity, identity, variability, and the relationship of the self with other organisms or objects. In the constitution of the mental processes associated with the Self, Calkins was critical of functionalist psychology that included mental activities without “mental actors.”

Self psychology, for her, is a type of introspectionist psychology , which led him to differentiate between two types of psychological systems. On the one hand, there is impersonal psychology that tends to deny the Self when it focuses on the contents of consciousness and mental processes, and on the other hand, there is personal psychology that is based on the study of the self or the person. Calkins located his proposals within the latter, in turn divided into a biological and a psychological dimension, closely related to each other.

By bringing into dialogue different perspectives of psychology and philosophy, as well as the criticisms he received about his work, Calkins continued to significantly develop and update self psychology.

His studies on the self were presented in 1900, and from then on published four books and more than 50 articles , which gave him a lot of prestige at a national and international level. Among his most important works are the The Persistent Problems of Philosophyfrom 1907, The Self in Scientific Psychology from 1915 and The good man and the goodfrom 1918.