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Titchener

Titchener. And Structuralism. The Subject Matter of Psychology. Psychology, for Titchener is about conscious experience AS IT IS DEPENDENT UPON the person who is actually experiencing it.

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Titchener

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  1. Titchener And Structuralism

  2. The Subject Matter of Psychology • Psychology, for Titchener is about conscious experience AS IT IS DEPENDENT UPON the person who is actually experiencing it. i.e. NOT objective time, but time as it is experienced, and sometimes one hour seems longer than another, though the "objective" reality is the same.

  3. The Stimulus Error • Confuses the mental process with the object we are observing.

  4. Observing Illusions • …is a good way to differentiate between the "object' and the mental experience. Look for example at the moon illusion: the moon appears bigger on the horizon.

  5. Reducing the Complex • Titchener started w/ a complex experience, and tried to REDUCE it into smaller parts. • Wundt tried to make a SYNTHESIS from smaller parts.

  6. A Mechanistic View • Titchener thought observers could operate like "machines", they were like measuring instruments • Similarly, people were viewed as machines: elements combine automatically etc…

  7. Titchener's System • Titchener identified 44,500 individual sensation qualities, of which 32,820 were visual, and 11,600 were auditory. Each sensation quality could vary in intensity, duration, clearness, and sometimes extensity. • Affective states could vary in quality, intensity and duration.

  8. Toward Phenomenology • In later years, Titchener gave up his "elements" to think in terms of larger dimensions. • By 1920, he was shifting toward a more phenomenological approach, and that may be where he would have ended up, had he not died in 1927.

  9. Structuralism Beyond Titchener • Titchener's structuralism was not very sophisticated in the sense that he was not reflecting upon the nature of structure itself, upon the relation of the terms with each other. • Other structuralists build systems, and think more carefully about the relationship of the elements with each other.

  10. Structuralism in the Social Sciences • Two "founders": • A linguist: Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) (language as a system of phonemes) • An anthropologist: Claude Levi-Strauss (1908- ) (culture and kinship systems, myth analysis) • A structuralist psychoanalyst: Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)

  11. THE END

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