What are the basic data of psychology? In the early years of
experimental psychology, they were reports of ''brighter'' or "heavier"
or other esti- mates of the magnitude of differences between the sensory
stimuli pre- sented in psychophysical experiments. Introspective
accounts of the ex- perience of seeing colored lights or shapes were
important sources of psychological data in the laboratories of Cornell,
Harvard, Leipzig, or Wiirzburg around the tum of the century. In 1910,
John B. Watson called for the objectification of psychological research,
even parodying the typical subjective introspective reports that emerged
from Edward Bradford Titchener's laboratory. For almost fifty years
psychologists largely eschewed subjective information and turned their
attention to observable behavior. Rats running mazes or pigeons pecking
away on varied schedules of reinforcement became the scientific
prototypes for those psychologists who viewed themselves as "doing
science. " Psychoanalysts and clinical psychologists sustained interest
in the personal reports of patients or clients as valuable sources of
data for research. For the psychologists, questionnaires and projective
tests that allowed for quantitative analysis and psychometrics seemed to
circum- vent the problem of subjectivity. Sigmund Freud's introduction
of on- going free association became the basis for psychoanalysis as a
therapy and as a means of learning about human psychology. Slips-of-the-
tongue, thought intrusions, fantasies, hesitations, and sudden emo-
tional expressions became the data employed by psychoanalysts in for-
mulating hypotheses about resistance, memory, transference, and a host
of presumed human wishes and conflicts.
