FUNCTIONALISM V. STRUCTURALISM
Myrna Davis WashingtonUniversity of the Rockies Abstract
In this paper, we compare and contrast the theories of Structuralism, which was structuralismdeveloped out of early attempts to establish psychology as a separate discipline from philosophyand biology, and Functionalism, which was developed by American psychologists in response tothe theory of Structuralism. Additionally, this discussion includes the contributions andrelevance of these theories to contemporary psychology.
The theories of structuralism and functionalism (“America’s psychology”) were psychology’s first theoretical approaches. Both “structural” psychology and “functional” psychology were the “mind-children” of E. B. Titchener, a former graduate student of Wilhelm Wundt who had only been in the United States for six years when he wrote an article entitled “The Postulates of a Structural Psychology” which appeared in an 1898 issue of the journalPsychological Review (Goodwin, 2008). In the article, Titchener presented an approach he named “structural” psychology and contrasted it with what he called “functional psychology”, the psychology he saw being taught at American universities (Goodwin, 2008). Structural psychology, he postulated, was analogous to anatomy in that its purpose was to analyze thehuman mind and organize into its basic units or conscious elements (thoughts). Structuralism, or experimental psychology , used self-reflective introspection to explore the relationship between the mind’s immediate sensations, images, and feelings and its function. It examined the structural elements of the human conscious experience by using Wundt’s psychological experimentation to observe cognitive functioning. The biggest problem with structuralism wasthat, as Goodwin (2008) stated, introspection is inherently subjective. In other words, theexperimental process