Granville Stanley Hall (February 1, 1844 – April 24, 1924[1]) was an American psychologist and educator who earned the first doctorate in psychology awarded in the United States of America at Harvard College in the nineteenth century.

A 2002 survey by Review of General Psychology ranked Hall as the 72nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, in a tie with Lewis Terman.

[3] Afterward, Hall could find no academic jobs available in psychology, so he went to Europe to study at the University of Berlin, and spent a brief time in Wundt's Leipzig laboratory in 1879.

He was also responsible for inviting Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to visit and deliver a lecture series in 1909 at the Clark University Vicennial Conference on Psychology and Pedagogy.

Hall promised Freud an honorary degree from Clark University in exchange, and the two shared the same beliefs on sex and adolescence.

[9] Hall believed that the process of recapitulation could be sped up through education and force children to reach modern standards of mental capabilities in a shorter length of time.

[10] Hall even commended high ranking African Americans in society as being "exception to the Negro's diminished evolutionary inheritance".

[17] Hall and his assistant Amy Tanner from Clark University were notable debunkers of spiritualism and carried out psychological and physiological tests on mediums.

[18] The book documented the tests carried out by Hall and Tanner in the séance sittings held with the medium Leonora Piper.

[20] Hall was deeply wedded to the German concept of Volk, an anti-individualist and authoritarian romanticism in which the individual is dissolved into a transcendental collective.

He is popularly known today for supervising the 1896 study Of Peculiar and Exceptional Children, which described a series of only child eccentrics as permanent misfits.

For decades, academics and advice columnists alike disseminated his conclusion that an only child could not be expected to go through life with the same capacity for adjustment that siblings possessed.

As the child burns out the vestiges of evil in his nature, he needs a good dose of authoritarian discipline, including corporal punishment.

Hall popularized the phrase "storm and stress" with reference to adolescence, taken from the German Sturm und Drang movement.

As was later the case with the work of Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget, public interest in this phrase, as well as with Hall's role, faded.

In its three aspects, recent evidence supports storm and stress, but only when modified to take into account individual differences and cultural variations.

[10] Hall's major books were Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime and Religion (1904) and Aspects of Child Life and Education (1921).

[24] In 1904, Hall published "Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education".

In this 2-volume study, based on the idea that child development recapitulates human evolution, Hall took on a variety of issues and synthesized scholarship from a wide range of disciplines.

This important account has been labeled "prophetic" in its recognition of an emerging "crisis of aging" in the 20th century, in which longer lifespan, narrowing family roles, and expulsion from the workforce combined to dramatically isolate the elderly and restrict their active participation in public life.

[26] Hall railed against this process, arguing that the wisdom conferred by old age meant that the elderly had valuable and creative contributions to make to society.

[27] His stirring call for a better understanding of the aging process anticipated the development of gerontology, and his critique of the marginalization of the elderly still resonates today.

[25] Hall viewed masturbation as an immoral act and a blemish of the human race that interfered with moral and intellectual growth.

Interested in comparative religion, he took a position at the city missionary society and attended multiple types of religious services.

Hall included openly anti-Semitic statements in his writings such as in his book On the Aspects of German Culture in which he discussed the supposed destruction of Western civilization by "rapacious Jews", though such statements were more often made to criticize than to condone anti-Semitism, as suggested in the quote: "they [the Jews] have been made the scapegoat for evils which they have not caused."

Hall remarked, perhaps out of anti-Semitic feeling, that the psychoanalytic focus on "sex" in addition to this approach's "rapid growth ... found outside the circle of specialists [academic experimental psychologists]" made psychoanalysis and "the number of out-and-out disciples" to be a form of a "cult" (p. 412).

In his book Jesus, the Christ, In the Light of Psychology Hall openly praised eugenics and discussed that the presence of supposedly evolutionary unfit people (i.e., the poor, racial minorities, immigrants) served the purpose of teaching the evolutionary fit people (i.e., Nordic wealthy Whites) virtues of caring for the lower classes.

Other openly eugenic writings by Hall include his 1903 article entitled "The White Man's Burden versus Indigenous Development of the Lower Races" in The Journal of Education.

An important contributor to educational literature, and a leading authority in that field, he founded and was editor of the American Journal of Psychology.

Hall was, from his student days to his death, interested in philosophy, psychology, education and religion in every one of their aspects which did not involve detailed experimentation, intricate quantitative treatment of results, or rigor and subtlety of analysis.