Clark University and the Birth of American Psychology

Clark University opened its doors on October second, eighteen eighty-nine, and it did something no American university had done before: it opened as an all-graduate institution. No undergraduates, no prep school departments, just advanced research and doctoral study. The founder, Jonas Gilman Clark, a Worcester businessman who had made a fortune in the hardware trade in California, wanted to build something modeled on the German research university, a place devoted purely to the advancement of knowledge.

The first president was a psychologist named Granville Stanley Hall, and his influence shaped Clark into one of the most consequential intellectual addresses in early American science. Hall founded the American Psychological Association at Clark in eighteen ninety-two. That was just the beginning.

In September of nineteen oh nine, Hall organized a conference to celebrate Clark's twentieth anniversary. He invited the world's leading psychologists and intellectuals, and the list reads like a roll call of intellectual history. Carl Jung was there. William James of Harvard attended. And for the only time in his life, Sigmund Freud came to the United States.

Freud delivered five lectures in German, without notes, over the course of five days. They were the only American lectures he ever gave. Clark awarded him an honorary doctorate, the only honorary degree Freud ever received. The lectures were published in English in the American Journal of Psychology in nineteen ten, and they introduced psychoanalysis to an American audience that had barely heard of it.

Solomon Carter Fuller, widely recognized as the first African American psychiatrist, also attended the nineteen oh nine conference. Robert Goddard, Worcester's own rocketry pioneer, earned his doctorate here and later taught physics at Clark.

The campus you are near has been a consistent site of radical intellectual ambition since the day it opened.