Reply to Post #1: Donald Mullen.
Since the publication of Titchener’s article in 1898 (Titchener, 1898), psychology has had the opportunity to evolve as an independence branch of science and as you say almost by the end of your post, it gave birth to schools of thought such as psychoanalysis and humanism. The attempts of Titchener and his colleagues to organize and give form to this new science were not in vain. I found it very interesting how he managed to make an analogy with the biological sciences. Although the main article focuses on structuralism -or experimental psychology- and descriptive psychology –the branch that studies function-, there was a third type of individual psychology within this classification: ontogenetic psychology, which I believe slowly transformed into our current developmental psychology.
The interesting and a bit ironic thing about the debate that Titchener stated, is that by the 1920s, he began to question the term of “structural psychology”, and ended up inclining towards examining experience without trying to decompose it (Schultz & Schultz, 2011).
Reply to Post #2: Maria Engermann.
I am afraid I may have to disagree on several ideas that you state on your post. First, the classification proposed by Titchener (1898) divides psychology into individual and collective psychology. Furthermore, it subdivides each of these categories into structural, functional, and growth psychology. For individual psychology, Titchener (1898) proposes the equivalent of experimental, descriptive, and ontogenetic psychology. Therefore, experimental and structural are two distinct names for the same category of classification within individual psychology.
Second, while I agree with your statement that experimental psychology can be compared with anatomy, I disagree in the explanation provided. Anatomy studies the structure of organisms, and neuroanatomy studies the structure of their brains. Similarly, as proposed by Titchener (1898), experimental psychology studies the structure of ideas, not the brain. Furthermore, it would be the task of functional psychology to study how the structure of these ideas works.
References
Schultz, D., & Schultz, S. (2011). A history of modern psychology. Cengage Learning.
Titchener, E. B. (1898). The postulates of a structural psychology. The Philosophical Review, 7(5), 449-465.
