55 Facts About Lightner Witmer

Lightner Witmer introduced the term "clinical psychology" and is often credited with founding the field that it describes.

Lightner Witmer contributed to numerous branches of psychology including school psychology.

Lightner Witmer is described as an introverted and private person.

Lightner Witmer was born to a devout Catholic mother and father: David Lightner Witmer, a Germantown pharmacist who graduated from a Philadelphia College in 1862; and Katherine Huchel, about whom little is known.

Lightner Witmer was the eldest of four children, followed by Albert Ferree, Lilly Evelyn, and Paul DeLancey.

Later in life, Lightner Witmer became a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania.

Lightner Witmer showed his intelligence and reasoning ability at Prep School.

In 1884, Lightner Witmer enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania to study art, but after a couple of years he transferred to the Finance and Economy department where he obtained a Bachelor's degree in 1888, aged 20.

Lightner Witmer decided to help him to correct his problem; the child progressed satisfactorily and was able to continue studying, eventually enrolling at the University of Pennsylvania.

Lightner Witmer intended to study law and to work towards an advanced degree in political science.

Lightner Witmer decided to resign from the Rugby Academy and attend graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania.

Lightner Witmer intended to get his doctoral degree under Cattell's supervision, but Cattell suddenly left the university, to obtain a higher-paying position at Columbia University.

Cattell helped Lightner Witmer to get a job as assistant to Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig in 1891, taking classes with Oswald Kulpe and Ludwig Strumpel.

However, it is said that while Lightner Witmer was Wundt's assistant, they had several disagreements.

One of those disputes was that Lightner Witmer desired to continue working on the study of reaction times he had previously started with Cattell, but Wundt insisted that they should study the aesthetic value of different visual forms, and other branches of psychology such as educational psychology and developmental psychology.

In 1892, Lightner Witmer left Germany and returned to the University of Pennsylvania, becoming the Director of The Laboratory of Psychology.

Lightner Witmer was interested in teaching Child Psychology and taught several different courses.

Lightner Witmer began conducting research on individual differences in sensory-perceptual variables and presented papers in experimental psychology.

Lightner Witmer was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1897.

Lightner Witmer married Emma Repplier, a prominent graduate from the Agnes Irwin School, in 1904.

Lightner Witmer was a writer who worked for the American Philosophical Society, to which both she and Witmer belonged.

Lightner Witmer founded the world's first speech clinic in 1914.

In 1904 Edward B Titchener accepted Witmer's proposal to separate Psychology from Philosophy, and decided to abandon the APA society and help Witmer create a society solely for experimental psychologists called The Society of Experimental Psychologists.

Lightner Witmer told Titchener that the association should be only for men and that women should be excluded because they were too emotional when discussing scientific issues.

Lightner Witmer eventually changed his attitude, and decided to teach female students; accepted women to work at his clinic, and later appointed a woman to manage it.

Lightner Witmer proposed that schools should become more involved with their students' classes and grades, that schools should have better educational tools, and that faculty members should receive teaching reflecting psychological findings.

Lightner Witmer opened the first Psychological Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania in 1896, with the purpose of studying children who had either learning or behavior problems.

Lightner Witmer's clinic was appreciated by many, as it proactively employed psychology.

Lightner Witmer would focus on particular problems and work with the child in that area, often improving several areas at once.

Lightner Witmer included definitions of retardation using two different terms: "physiological retardation" referred to individuals who had not acquired a normal development for their chronological ages, whereas the other term, "pedagogical retardation", referred to children who did not develop their full capacities when they reached adulthood.

Lightner Witmer always defended his ideas and beliefs, even if it seemed that he did not care about other points of view.

Lightner Witmer attacked Harvard University for using the theory of introspection and teaching psychology incorrectly, since Lightner Witmer refused the idea theory introspection and did not care much for pure experimental psychology.

Lightner Witmer criticized "Intelligence Tests" and encouraged his students not to trust them, because he thought those tests only gave a measure of the individual's efficiency, nothing else.

Lightner Witmer thought that people should not be referred to as normal or abnormal due to the results of such tests, as one could then say that an individual was "normal" or "abnormal", depending on if, for example, he or she knew how to write and read properly.

Lightner Witmer studied monkeys and a chimpanzee trained for theatre performance called Peter.

Lightner Witmer compared them with tests he used on children.

Lightner Witmer investigated Peter's ability to vocalise and found he could only say "mamma" though he doubted whether the "a" vowel was properly pronounced.

Lightner Witmer found Peter could string beads, light and smoke cigarettes, unlock padocks with keys hammer nails, turn on taps, and write the letter "W" with chalk on a blackboard.

In 1911 Lightner Witmer supported a bill in the state of Pennsylvania to sterilize severely retarded people, with the purpose of minimizing their offspring.

Lightner Witmer highlighted the concept of treating each client as an individual, and not simply as a physical manifestation of their problem or a phenomenon to be observed and explained.

Lightner Witmer emphasized examining each client's personal background history, as he believes it would allow clinicians to better and more fully understand their situation.

Lightner Witmer was one of the first psychologists to recognize that a client's problems could have environmental as well as hereditary factors, and because of this, he emphasized the importance that treatment should not end with returning the client into the environment from which their physical, mental, or moral problem originated unless something had been done to change it.

Lightner Witmer was responsible for major advancements in the field of school psychology and was cited as the founder of this discipline.

Lightner Witmer was the first psychologist to undertake and focus, on the treatment of those with mental, physical or moral handicaps with the goal of improving their deficits.

Lightner Witmer ensured that the treatment of children suffering from a deficit impairing their academic success would be a major focus of clinical psychology when he made one of the discipline's main goals the creation of psychological clinics and hospitals to treat impaired children.

Lightner Witmer was the first psychologist to realize teachers' integral role and began offering classes at his clinic for teachers.

Lightner Witmer opened up his clinic to those in medicine and social work and gave them the opportunity to observe and work with normal and impaired children.

Lightner Witmer offered these professionals courses that demonstrated how to practically apply his clinical methods.

On July 19,1956, at age 89, Lightner Witmer died at the hospital in Bryn Mawr from heart failure.

Lightner Witmer gained little recognition outside of clinical psychology and is little talked about.

Lightner Witmer's targets included the American Psychological Association, mon-experimentalists, psychology as a discipline, and his colleagues.

Lightner Witmer was highly critical of many popular trends in psychology and society during his career.

Lightner Witmer argued that education required personalization and a focus on students as individuals.

Lightner Witmer was highly critical of intelligence tests, which he claimed measured efficiency, rather than intelligence.

Lightner Witmer saw intelligence as having both hereditary and environmental components.