Abstract

Relatively little has been published about the life and contributions of Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930), fourteenth president of the American Psychological Association. A student of William James, Josiah Royce, and Hugo Münsterberg at Harvard in the 1890s, Calkins completed all the requirements for the Ph.D. but was not granted the degree because she was a woman. Calkins’s contributions to psychology include the invention of the paired-associate technique, the founding of one of the early psychological laboratories, and the development of a system of self-psychology. She published prolifically in both psychology and philosophy but was always more interested in theoretical and philosophical issues than in laboratory psychology. Although in the latter half of her career Calkins moved away from psychology into philosophy, her work contained a unifying theme: the emphasis on the importance of the self