The Persistent Problems of Philosophy

Mary Whiton Calkins, an American psychologist and philosopher, is best known for her system of self-psychology and her invention of the paired-association experimental technique for studying memory, which is still taught in research classes today. Calkins attended Smith College, where she studied philosophy and the classics, and then taught Greek at Wellesley College. After she became interested in psychology, she managed to gain access to Harvard University's psychology seminars and laboratory, but, although her professors considered her a brilliant student, the university denied a Ph.D., solely because she was a woman. Undeterred, she pursued her psychological investigations as a faculty member of Wellesley, where in 1891 she founded one of the earliest psychological laboratories in the United States.

Calkins challenged the then dominant doctrine that the empirical study of human psychology should be confined to elemental sensations, emotions, and images. Her personalistic theory of the self posited that each person possesses a complex, unitary, and unique self that is obviously present in conscious experience. Calkins spent 40 productive years at Wellesley and became the first woman president of the American Psychological Association.

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