The psychologist who named teenage storm and stress also branded only children misfits
G. Stanley Hall earned America's first psychology doctorate, opened one of its first labs and brought Freud to the United States. He also popularised the idea that adolescence means storm and stress. Yet many of his theories, from only children as permanently maladjusted to racial eugenics, have aged badly or been rejected outright.
Hall grew up on a Massachusetts farm, teaching students older than himself by the age of 16. After Williams College and a spell at a theological seminary, he was inspired by Wilhelm Wundt's work on physiological psychology and went to Harvard, where he met William James. His 1878 doctorate there was the first in psychology awarded in the country. Finding no jobs in the new field, he studied in Berlin and briefly in Wundt's Leipzig laboratory, then in 1883 set up a formal psychology laboratory at Johns Hopkins.
He became an institution builder. He founded the American Journal of Psychology in 1887, became the first president of Clark University in 1889, holding the post until 1920, and was elected first president of the American Psychological Association in 1892. In 1909 he invited Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to lecture at Clark, offering Freud an honorary degree; it was Freud's only visit to America and drew criticism from colleagues who considered his ideas unscientific. Hall also joined his assistant Amy Tanner in testing the famous medium Leonora Piper and concluded her spirit personalities were invented.
His theories leaned on Ernst Haeckel's recapitulation idea: that a child's mind passes through the stages of human evolution. He used it to argue that young children were savages who needed discipline, including physical punishment, rather than reasoning, and that high schools should instil patriotism, service and obedience instead of intellectual achievement. He championed eugenics and forced sterilisation, and his 1896 study of only children called being one a disease in itself, a verdict repeated by academics and advice columnists for decades.
His most durable legacy is the phrase storm and stress, borrowed from German Romanticism and first applied to adolescence by his colleague William Burnham in 1889. Modern researchers accept a qualified version: conflict with parents, mood swings and risky behaviour are more likely in the teenage years, but they are not universal, and culture and individual differences matter.
Source: G. Stanley Hall
