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Page 1: Recollections of Clark's G. Stanley Hall

Journal of fhe History of the Behavioral Sciences Volume 26, April 1990

LAWRENCE A. AVERILL, Born in I891 and died in 1988, received his Ph.D. in 1915 at Clark University where he spent three of h t years there training under G. Stanley Hall for advanceddegrees.

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RECOLLECTIONS OF CLARK’S G. STANLEY HALL LAWRENCE A. AVERILL

The author recalls his days as a graduate student under G. Stanley Hall at Clark Univer- sity, describing the state of psychology in those early years, his impressions of Hall, and the effect the latter had on his lifework.

In 1889 G. Stanley Hall was summoned from a professorship at Johns Hopkins to Massachusetts, where he was charged wtih establishing a new university in Worcester. The opportunity to organize the advanced institution, endowed by Jonas G. Clark, a wealthy industrialist, and to bear his name, appealed strongly to Hall. With an original endowment of remarkable size for the times, and with the promise of the remainder of Clark’s fortune to be channeled into the university by his will, Hall proceeded to create a graduate school in which his own specialty would predominate. Since Jonas Clark himself had been denied higher education, he evisaged for Clark a school where men of little means could earn the bachelor’s degree. President Hall delayed in fulfilling the founder’s intentions, however, until his own dream of a graduate institution could be thoroughly established. To implement his overweening purpose, he gathered around him a galaxy of distinguished professors to head up the several departments, thus building a new scientific mecca at Clark.

Hall had studied in Germany under Wilhelm Wundt, and now his own Depart- ment of Psychology gave tremendous impetus to a horizontal spread of graduate work in this field in other American universities. G. Stanley Hall was a pioneer, envisaging psychology in the first instance as profoundly philosophical. Beyond that historical and empirical base, he turned his genius into the exploration of every human area and rela- tionship: genetics, childhood, adolescence, family, education, aberration, and religious phenomena.

Hall was a man of powerful build, standing taller than six feet. He was frequently seen operating his hand lawn mower along the three-foot bank that sloped from his front yard down to the sidewalk. His stance was always the same. Striding easily along the top edge of the slope, his left hand in his pocket, he manipulated the mower up and down with his right, in successively brisk push and pull from one end of the bank to the other, a good one hundred feet away. Sometimes as he moved he carried on a conversation with a student pacing the sidewalk beside him.

He lived in the President’s House, an imposing brick residence near the campus. His study, located upstairs in the large front room, was more cluttered than any un- catalogued repository or helter-skelter receiving wing of a museum one might ever ex- pect to see. Its walls were completely lined with shelves that seemed grudgingly to by- pass the two windows and the small rectangular cubicle through which a supplementary ventilation flue opened to the outside. Every available inch of shelving was stuffed with books, brochures, bulletins, papers, reports, and scientific publications in half a dozen

Editor’s Note: This article was published originally in the October 1982 issue of JHBS. Although it is JHBS policy not to publish previously printed articles, 1 have made an exception with Lawrence Averill’s article because it is so appropriate for this special issue on Clark University.

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126 LAWRENCE A. A V E W L

languages and as many fields-all so hopelessly disorganized as to give the whole area the appearance of a jungle. As if that were not enough, the entire floor - save for a narrow path between the door and his desk- was carpeted with an equally heterogeneous mass of similar materials piled in dizzy bunches. No doubt his study precincts must have possessed for the burrowing denizen some meaningful coherence, but by anybody else crossing the threshold they could only be regarded as havoc wrought in no-man’s-land.

On the floor below the study, however, Hall’s living quarters were as orderly as the most fastidious could wish. Around the sides of the two large intercommunicating front rooms was neatly arranged a row of comfortable armchairs. It was here that his famous Monday evening seminar met. Positioned to the side in the central archway was his personal chair in which he presided at these formal meetings, which extended over more than four decades of brilliant inquiry. None of the hundreds of pursuers of the graduate gleam who ever experienced the intellectual ravishment of these soul-stirring seminars of Stanley Hall ever forgot them.

The meetings got underway promptly by 7:30, and they might be over by 10:30; more likely, they disbanded well after eleven o’clock. Although the programs varied, they usually comprised general auditioning of reports by two candidates for the doc- torate, outlining their methods, results, and tentative conclusions to that point. Following each dissertation, the meeting was thrown open to free discussion by those present, in- cluding the entire graduate student body and several faculty members. Through these means not only did each investigator have his attention called to inadequacies or un- supportable conclusions in his research, but every auditor was introduced to many areas other than his own.

As soon as the free-for-all began to slow down after a candidate’s contribution had received a full round of discussion from the floor, Hall opened his deceitfully half-closed eyes to express his interest in the student’s research. Then, for a half-hour or longer, depending on the importance he attached to the theme, he presented from his armchair in the central archway a masterly critique of the research just reported and added to it new illumination from fresh angles that sometimes left his auditors gasping. The reporter was left chafing as he realized that the prelimary approval expressed by Hall had changed to a subtle but not too carefully concealed barb before the master was through with him!

At the close of the evening, a servant brought in a generous tub of ice cream, which either Mrs. Hall, a male student’s wife, or a female student assisted in serving.

After the intellectually provocative evening was ended, many of the graduate students set off for their boarding-places but found themselves so moved by the galvanism of their emotions that only a long walk near midnight and a warm bath before retiring could relax them enough to permit them to sleep.

In an autobiographical reference to Hall’s seminars, Dr. Lewis Terman, later to become a noted leader in mental testing at Stanford University, declared that he “always went home dazed and intoxicated, took a hot bath to quiet his nerves, then lay awake for hours rehearsing the drama. . . . As for Dr. Hall, he, as I later learned, always went upstairs to his den and finished his day by reading or writing until 1:OO A.M. or later.”’

My pursuit of the doctorate at Clark came at a time when psychological inquiry was still in its romping clothes, as it were. Great names in the field included, besides Hall, contemporary pioneers in American universities, most notably James Rowland Angell, William James, William McDougall, E. B. Titchener, and Edward Thorndike. The introspective method was sacrosanct, deriving from the laboratory method of ex-

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periment along the traditional lines of sense perception, psychophysical processes, and memory. Students were all but lost in a labyrinth of exploration of the smallest possible fragments of consciousness. Instincts were in their absurdly prolonged heyday. Thorn- dike, one of their foremost apologists, recognized more than fifty, which he anlayzed with the greatest care in one of his hefty volumes.

Beyond these classic areas, the psychological terrain was still virgin soil. I. P. Pavlov’s brilliant work on the conditioned reflex in his laboratory dog did not become available to American students until 1920. J. B. Watson was probing for the foundations of behaviorism, but little was heard of it before 1919. Alfred Binet’s pioneer work in men- tal testing, although well underway in France, was only barely coming to be known on this side of the ocean. Objective testing and educational measurement were still in the early processes of conception and would not attain stature until after World War I, when army psychologists demonstrated the feastibility of group testing for classifica- tion purposes.

Aside from a few graduate schools like Clark, nobody had ever heard of mental hygiene and psychiatry. Even in large mental hospitals surprisingly little attention was devoted to case studies and psychotherapy. Wide popular interest in mental illness and humane treatment of its victims had, however, already been gathered in a good many circles by Clifford Beer’s A Mind That Found Itself,’ which was convincing many thoughtful people that the old institutional psychiatry- still the order of the day in many state hospitals - needed to be reexamined. The same situation obtained with regard to feeble-mindedness. The first wide-scale interest in its mounting problems was just being aroused at university levels by the publication of H. H. Goddard’s Kallikak F ~ r n i l y . ~

For the time being, however, at Clark the Freudian hypothesis overshadowed all other psychological innovations. Hall had been so favorably impressed that, in 1909, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the founding of Clark University,he had invited Sigmund Freud to come from Vienna to the Worcester campus for a week of commemorative sessions attended by leading American psychologists. The Freudian concept was given tremendous emphasis on this side of the Atlantic. In subsequent years, following the visit of the noted Austrian at Clark, Hall watched his psychoanalytic career in Vienna with the greatest interest, lecturing weekly on it and his interpretation of its tenets.

While permitting professors under him complete academic freedom to carry through their psychological research as they saw fit, Hall himself was totally committed to the developmental psychology of the child and the adolescent, and in that general area he built his enduring fame. The child became, as it were, his laboratory. The methodical observation and study of all ages and phases of childhood was to mushroom phenome- nally in the coming decades. The great American child-study movement had its incep- tion in his work. Most of his own staggering amount of research was published either in monographs and books or in the Pedagogical Seminary, a journal Hall established and edited for many decades thereafter at Clark University

Hall was an abominable penman. To the dismay of those who must read them, he always insisted on writing his research papers himself in longhand. He would rarely entrust a manuscript to an amanuensis.

I recall having chanced one day to be in the copy room of the master printer to whom Hall always delivered his manuscripts to be set in type. Overheating the angry printer’s rank denunciation of Hall, I found it difficult to restrain myself from uproarious laughter when the poor printer cried vehemently: “May the devil in hell take every man

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128 LAWRENCE A. AVERILL

of science, including Stanley Hall, for using penmanship as though it were the undecipherable crawling of a worm trapped in a child’s mud pie!” After this blast, the man digressed from his study of a newly arrived Hall manuscript which he was at the moment in the process of decoding, to hiss at me through clenched teeth that he was the only man on the printing staff who could decipher Hall’s hieroglyphics, and that when one of the Hall abominations arrived he himself was obliged to take a day off to translate it into readable language before it could be passed on to the compositors.

An amusing instance in which Hall’s chirography showed up poorly stemmed from a postcard reply to a letter he had received in midwinter from a western school superinten- dent who had attended his summer school year back home; the superintendent came upon a situation in his own establishment that floored him. He recalled that Hall, in one of his lectures to the schoolmen, had mentioned a certain reference that bore directly on the problem that he was now facing. He had neglected, however, to include it in his notes, and now wrote to Hall and asked him to send along to him the name of the author and source which he had cited on the particular theme in question.

Receiving a postcard reply and unable to decipher the information it bore but con- cluding that it sounded like a German title, the superintendent bethought himself of a local druggist who was reputed to be not only proficient in German but an obliging fellow as well. At the pharmacy he passed the postcard to the counter boy and asked him to find out what his boss could make of it. After a brief conference in the back room where the druggist was at work compounding a prescription, the clerk returned and handed the card to the inquirer, remarking: “The boss says he’s out of this stuff just now, but if you want to leave the card with him he’ll be glad to order it out of his drug supply house in Chicago.”

When Hall came into the room for a lecture and advanced to the podium, he usually carried in one hand a single sheet of paper bearing no more than half a dozen random words written in his own scrawl. As he talked, it appeared that he was deriving his in- spiration from these slender cues. Yet he never failed to hold his auditors in fascinated unbelief at his boundless psychological insight. Quite at home in all languages of any significance for his science, he dropped sometimes into strangely exotic diction, or fail- ing to find in his inexhaustible mental storehouse exactly what he wanted, he had no hesitancy in manufacturing on the spur of the moment original words or phases. Fre- quently he actually compounded them into a most bewildering mongrel diction.

Yet in less formal discourse, as for example in his seminar, he reverted quite naively and wholly unconsciously to the vernacular of rural Massachusetts where he had grown up. On one such occasion he was queried by a student about the details of any early experiment in which he had participated. Hall wrinkled his brow in deep thought for a moment. Then, perfectly naturally and without the slightest inhibition, he shook his head and replied: “I’ve plumb forgot!” Thus did the refreshing air of Ashfield commingle with the more rarified air of the seminar.

Work for the doctorate under Hall in 1914-1915 was still unillumed by the radical new developments in psychology that were to occur in the immediately following years. Younger men on university faculties were beginning to indicate dissatisfaction with what they more or less justifiably considered the old sterility of the psychological soil. Even some of Hall’s own widely acclaimed theories were being reassessed. His recapitulation hypothesis that a child in his or her development runs through all the successive stages through which the race has passed was found to have loopholes. His saltatory theory that the dawn of adolescence ushers in a sharp new unswing in the rate of growth was

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likewise being called into question. Though still respected, they were both doomed to be discarded later on. His inspired and sometimes almost romantic prose was beginning to lose its earlier appeal as objectivism replaced subjectivism in mental research.

In my time, notwithstanding, Hall was still a greater master, a brilliant lecturer, and an imaginative researcher. These were proud distinctions which younger and lesser lights - destined by and by to develop their own brilliance - could hardly gainsay. Founder and first president of the American Psychological Association, he continued in the forefront of psychological thought and achievement for all the years down to his death and graced the highest echelon of the science.

In a very real sense, nonetheless, my matriculation for my doctorate at Clark oc- curred at the end of an era. My university work antedated intelligence testing, educa- tional measurement, animal experimentation, statistical practice, psychotherapy, and Gestalt psychology. The study of mental disease and abnormality was still largely oriented to institutional and detentional purposes.

In common with other doctoral candidates at Clark, however, I developed an already lively interest in mental health and adjustment through the opportunity I had of attend- ing biweekly clinics at the state hospital. These sessions were to give shape and color to my professional lifework in the after years. They were conducted under the joint instruction of Hall and the superintendent of the asylum. In this remarkable institution constant case study, case history, and demonstration of the varying types of psychosis through contact with patients provided me with an intimate acquaintance with mental derangement that I could have gained in no other way at the graduate level. In the vast and untrodden desert of institutionalism, the Worcester State Hospital was an oasis among American asylums.

Coming as it did at the end of an era, my graduate school work equipped me well enough in conventional psychology. But conventional psychology was not forward looking-at least not in many areas. Following World War I and the upsurge it gave to many elusive facets of the human psyche, I found it necessary to enroll in brief sup- plementary courses elsewhere. I needed to fill in certain voids in my Clark years in order to keep my own college classes up to date and effective in the new fields of measure- ment, statistics, and so forth, to extend my knowledge of new schools of psychological theory and research, and, incidentally, to enrich my private practice as a consultant. Nevertheless, I was never to regret my good fortune of having been a product of Hall’s stimulating Department of Psychology during the fruitful Clark years when it was at its peak, and of having been instilled professionally with something of the master’s per- sistent scientific humility, an instance of which comes at once to mind.

One evening at the seminar, another graduate student and I were presenting research papers on two great European educators: J. H. Pestalozzi and J. G. von Herder. As always, Hall listened carefully to both of us during our presentations, his eyes characteristically half-closed. My paper concluded strongly that the Swiss Pestalozzi had unquestionably “discovered the child.” The other student - an apologist for Herder - inclined to a no less positive conclusion regarding the German. After the general free- for-all discussion following, Hall tucked a gentle barb in his deceptively complimentary remarks about the “scholarship” of we two investigators by affirming emphatically : “I shall have to disagree with both gentlemen in the wrongful identification of either Pestalozzi or Herder as ‘discoverer of the child.’ I find these quite monstrous assertions, for nobody has very yet ‘discovered’ him! Childhood is a vast terrain, my enthusiastic young friends, whose deep lodes we have yet scarcely begun to mine!” It was a valuable

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130 LAWRENCE A. AVERILL

lesson for his aspiring young doctors to learn, not only to impose a scholarly restraint on hasty deductions but also to realize the profundity of the unplumbed psyche of the human child.

And now, approaching my ninety-first birthday and being gravely handicapped by rapidly diminishing eyesight, I can no longer keep up with the exciting advances in the exploration of the human mind being contemporaneously reported from laboratories and research centers. In consequence, I find my thoughts constantly reverting to earlier explorations of behavior made by former investigators in the field, among whom no person stands out more brightly in memory than does G. Stanley Hall, at whose feet I sat as a graduate student more than half a century ago. In professional practice since those remote days, I have been stimulated continuously by the invigorating spirit of this remarkable man. It occurs to me in my reviewing of the earlier decade of this science that modern workers in the field might care to reflect on at least one of his earlier graduate’s recollections of him. I shall never forget that commencement day in 1915 when on the podium Hall placed in my trembling hands the academic diploma, remark- ing with extreme cordiality: “My sincere congradulations to you, Dr. Averill, and welcome to our mutually challenging field of human engineering that has never been so fruitful for cultivation as it is at the present time.” I had just turned twenty-four, and this designa- tion as a fellow worker has ever since been for me a beacon in my own labors in the vineyard of psychological research, and though my gleanings have been far more meager than those of the genius who first inspired me to enter it, I have profited for a long lifetime from my early commitment to the analysis of the human mind by the example and encouragement of G. Stanley Hall. Although my own studies have been only meager when viewed in the brilliant light of the voluminous output of his pioneer work in the foundations and evolution of psychoanalysis, they have been in considerable measure the fruitage of his monumental research.

NOTES I . Lewis M. Terman, “Trails of Psychology,” in A History of Psychology in Aufobiography, vol. 2 , ed. Carl Murchison (Worcester, Mass.: Clark University Press, 1932), p. 316. 2. Clifford Beers, A Mind That Found Itself: An Autobiography, 5h ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960; originally published in 1908). 3. H. H. Goddard, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the History of Feeble-Mindedness (New York: Mac- millan, 1913).