Delivered APA presidential address on self-psychology

In 1906, Mary Whiton Calkins delivered her presidential address to the American Psychological Association, in which she articulated and defended her theory of self-psychology before her professional peers. This address represented the mature statement of a theoretical framework she had been developing since around 1900.

In the address, Calkins argued forcefully against purely elementalist and structuralist accounts of consciousness, insisting instead that psychology must recognize the self as an irreducible unit of analysis. She contended that all psychological experience is inherently experience of and by a self in relation to other selves and objects, a position that placed her in dialogue with, and often in opposition to, dominant trends in early twentieth-century American psychology.

This address was significant not only for its intellectual content but for its symbolism: a woman scholar, denied a doctoral degree by Harvard on account of her sex, standing before the nation's most prominent psychological organization to deliver a major theoretical statement as its president. It underscored the gap between her genuine scholarly stature and the formal recognition still withheld by academic institutions.

Calkins's self-psychology, as articulated in this address, would go on to influence later developments in personalistic psychology and continues to be studied by historians of psychology as an important, if underappreciated, theoretical alternative to the structuralist and behaviorist paradigms that came to dominate the field.