Theoretical Psychology in the 1920s

In 1920, in America, psychology was dominated by two main currents. The first was a tendency to reduce life to habit, and the second was to establish differences between humans by test. Typifying the first tendency was John B. Watson’s (1878–1958) behaviorism, which tended to reduce life to its simplest terms of action and reaction.

The second tendency, toward testing, had burst suddenly on the scene with the coming of the Binet tests to America in 1905. By 1917 there were dozens of tests in use in business and industry, in psychiatry, and in schools (Devonis, 2013). With the coming of the First World War, tests were introduced into the U.S. Army, and the corresponding publicity, by psychologists and in the press, ensured that psychological testing would be a permanent part of the U.S. economy. By 1921 the Psychological Corporation was founded to distribute, for a profit, tests that since that time have been one of the essential elements of psychological activity in the United States.

It is tempting to write history in terms of struggles between opposites, and from some perspectives the three theoretical perspectives that form the framework of this story (theoretical, applied, and clinical psychology) could be seen then, and still can be seen today, as reactions against the simplistic conceptions of life that behaviorism and testing promoted. And each of these three connected with other tendencies in psychology that were present at the time and that have also had a continuous existence. The first of these, Gestalt psychology, appeared to some to be an exotic import. It is true that its major practitioners were all German. But where psychologists in America before 1920 went to Germany to learn their craft, here the German psychologists were coming to America to expand their horizons and reach, for already it was plain that psychology’s future as an applied science would be centered in America, which was providing rich funding and supportive academic environments for the endeavor (Sokal, 1994). Kurt Koffka’s (1886–1941) appointment at Smith College in 1927 was a portent for the inrush of psychologists from Germany over the next decade. A claim could be made that Adolf Hitler simultaneously destroyed German psychology and advanced it in America.

There wasn’t a great deal of similarity between the experimental interests of the major Gestalt psychologists. Wolfgang Koehler (1887–1967) had established himself as a primatologist interested in problem solving in apes; Kurt Koffka was interested in the ways in which the mind becomes organized developmentally; and Max Wertheimer (1880–1943) and Karl Duncker (1903–1940) were most interested in perception and cognition—why is it that incomplete series, for instance, seem to demand completion? Why do people develop mental blocks to seeing the solution to seemingly simple problems? Why do two lights flashing separately give rise to a perception of unitary motion?

Behind all of these surface differences of practice was the ethos of the Gestalt movement. We remember it today, not mistakenly, as “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” In terms of the human cognitive system, the active, inquisitive mind takes in the raw material of environmental stimulation and individual neurons and assembles it into complex, contextualized combinations that are recognized as wholes. A set of behaviors becomes perceived as a relationship, either of actions or between humans. The idea of contextualized relationships determined by perceptual interpretation challenged the notions that had sprung up around behaviorism that the brain was empty, functioning only as a router between environmental stimulus and motor response. The idea, still vivid in American psychology during the 1920s, that psychology was “the science of mental life” (as William James had termed it in 1890 and as the title of R. S. Woodworth’s textbook, the most popular psychology textbook of the 1920s, called it) was reinforced and extended by the diffusion of Gestalt psychology through American psychology over the coming decades, as the rest of these reviews of theory and practice will show.

Another way to show relationships between environment and behavioral output is to study the organ—the brain—that mediates that relationship. Most behaviorists—most psychologists in 1920, really—had little to go on besides the knowledge of brain anatomy and the rudiments of neural organization. Karl S. Lashley (1890–1958) was a student of John B. Watson and learned his trade in the rat maze lab, establishing habits and measuring the correlation between environmental manipulations—feeding, obstacles, and injury—and the acquisition and maintenance of habits. He also accompanied Watson on expeditions off Key West to study the behavior of nesting terns in the wild. Both he and Wolfgang Koehler had a background in behavior in naturalistic settings. During the 1920s, first at the University of Minnesota, then at Chicago, and eventually at Harvard University, Lashley began a series of studies designed to discover the representation of the maze habit in the brain. Enough was known about the brain at the time to localize the probable site of any such representation in the cortex and, fortunately enough, Lashley’s preferred experimental species, the rat, was at least minimally cortical. After training rats in maze problems, Lashley began systematically extirpating cortex, varying in location and amount, by suction and cautery. The outcome of these studies, which Lashley presented to the 9th International Congress of Psychology at Yale University in 1929—the first time that the conference had been held in the United States—demonstrated that if there were a connection between a neural representation of the maze and the motor behavior, it was distributed throughout the brain, since while the relative amount of cortex left after the operations determined the speed and skill of tracing the maze, the location of the lesions had no effect (Lashley, 1929). Why this should be the case is still not fully determined today (we see a similar situation in the recovery of functions after brain damage in humans). The effect of his findings was twofold. It provided evidence for the complexity of cortical coordination and integration and against the simple “telephone switchboard” model of stimulus response connection prevalent at the time, and it also reinforced the idea that the brain functioned the brain functioned holistically. This was a conclusion in accord with the findings of Kurt Goldstein (1878–1965), an unsung Gestaltist who had studied brain injuries for two decades in Germany and, after resettling to America, published in 1940 the very influential books The Organism and Human Nature in the Light of Psychopathology, which many American psychologists of that time had on their shelves.

The third lasting theoretical contribution of the 1920s was the result of the organizational skills of an immigrant from Sweden, Martin Luther Reymert (1883–1953), who in 1925 had accepted a post as an assistant professor of psychology at Wittenberg College, a Lutheran institution in Springfield, Ohio. For the ceremonies surrounding the dedication of the psychological laboratories in the new Chemistry–Psychology building in 1927, Reymert arranged for over 30 leading psychologists from Europe and America to convene in Springfield that October to present on the topic of emotion at the First Wittenberg Symposium on Emotion. In the usual telling of psychology’s history, emotion doesn’t find a niche. Some historians might even see some symbolism in the death, in August, of one of the symposium’s featured speakers, Edward B. Titchener. Titchener, one of the most well-known of the second generation of psychologists in America, was associated with a psychology that at the time was thought out of date—the last survivor, some thought, of the older introspective method in modern, objective, behaviorist times. Nonetheless, the conference went off as planned and was well attended. As it turned out, the symposium’s summary volume, Feelings and Emotions (Reymert, 1928), sold well and became, for many years until Reymert organized a second symposium in 1950, the main reference source for those psychologists who carried on with research on emotion. Though in 1933, Max Meyer, one of the original behaviorists (his 1911 text The Fundamental Laws of Human Behavior is considered by some to mark the start of behaviorism in the United States), pronounced emotion “that whale among the fishes” and thought that any psychologist studying it might be competing selfishly with “ministers of religion” in what they might offer as science (Meyer, 1933), today it is difficult to imagine a psychology that doesn’t center around the role of emotion in life. Emotions, their definition, experience, and proposals for their management, have been central to psychological theory and practice from B. F. Skinner advising, in a filmed interview in 1987, those who are depressed to “change how you feel” with a drug, to recent theories of the role of the feeling of terror in modifying perceptions. The ancient triads of perception–brain–emotion and thought–feeling–behavior persisted in the infrastructure of the field as the elements out of which all of psychology to come was constructed.

Applied Psychology in the 1920s

American prosperity in the 1920s was, like it is today, most visible in the tall towers of its institutions of financial management (or financial manipulation, as it was viewed in the following decade) and, like today, was grounded in its workforce. The classic photographs of work from the 1920s show mostly men: In 1920 women made up less than 25% of the U.S. workforce and were mostly employed in office/clerical, domestic service, or manufacturing, especially in what were then called the “needle trades”, the manufacture of cloth and clothing. Most work was done by men, and most men were employed in the manufacturing or transportation sectors. Work in a typical manufacturing setting, for both men and women, was typically dirty, monotonous, stressful physically and mentally, and actually dangerous. Streetcar drivers, for example, mostly men, stood for 8 to 12 hours either in a cramped, unventilated cab or on a semi-exposed platform in all weathers. Psychology had already been applied to the streetcar rider by Raymond Dodge, the first psychologist to identify and measure saccadic eye movements in 1896, when he recommended that riders facing outward not fix their gaze on the scenery streaming by in order to avoid disorienting nystagmus (Dodge, 1902). It was Hugo Münsterberg, William James’s German successor at Harvard, who conducted and published the first studies on streetcar drivers’ perceptual and motor skills, and it was Morris Viteles, employed by the Philadelphia Transit Company, who in 1924 inaugurated the first comprehensive program of employee selection, training, evaluation, and safety education, a prototype of the integrated human relations departments found in all large corporations today (Viteles,1932). The founding and expansion of psychology programs in universities large and small coast to coast resulted in a growing number of psychologists seeking employment themselves, as psychologists, naturally. The marketing of the new tests and programs for managing employees for greater efficiency and productivity caught on and became, during the 1920s, integral to the work process in the United States. As a side note, industrial consulting work was one of the areas that attracted many women psychologists and gave them their start in the field at this time (Koppes, 1997). Another collateral benefit of involvement with workplaces for psychologists was that they provided mass laboratories with vast numbers of experimental participants. The Hawthorne Works in Chicago, a massive factory producing electric switching apparatus for telephones, was the site of the “Hawthorne Studies,” demonstrating that simple knowledge of being observed could have a measurable effect on performance—often cited as the most salient example of experimenter effects in research (Hsueh, 2002).

That said, most work still remained unexamined by psychologists, and work in steel mills, mines, and other factories was no less dangerous and monotonous as before. Nor was work usually found by walking into a psychologist’s office in a human relations department, but by searching the “help wanted” ads in newspapers or on office or factory doors, a haphazard process that, however, worked fairly well when the skill levels for most jobs were low. However, as industry mechanized and as manufacturing and distribution processes became more technical and complex, finding a job became correspondingly more complicated. Along with the development of industrial psychology came the development of psychological intervention at the point of induction into the workforce. Much as psychology had gotten involved with the induction and classification of military personnel during the First World War, it saw in the hiring lines of the burgeoning American economy another opportunity for employing its tests. Donald Paterson (1892–1961), son of deaf parents who studied psychology with Rudolf Pintner (1884–1942), an early pioneer of mental testing at The Ohio State University, moved to the University of Minnesota in 1921 and began a long career there as a trainer of applied psychologists who put psychological principles to use in all areas of life. He was committed to the dissemination of psychology, sponsoring 88 dissertations and 300 master’s theses. Paterson studied the science of revealing human differences via testing, but alongside this, during the 1920s he began a program of student counseling aimed at identifying and improving all aspects of the fit of student and college environment. Paterson’s original work emphasized vocational counseling and career direction. But it evolved, for example through the efforts of one of his students, Leona Tyler, interested in psychology that would further the cause of peace, into the profession of counseling, providing advice and guidance in all areas of life (Held, 2010). Thus, as an offshoot of psychologists’ involvement with industry, the 1920s saw the beginning of the “counseling” area of “clinical-counseling” psychology so prominent today.

Psychologists in industrial and industrial-related consulting and counseling were the main promoters of applied psychology, for this decade and beyond, along with those psychologists employed in educational settings and in settings such as advertising (including John B. Watson, who became a vice president of a major New York ad firm after being censured and removed from his academic position in 1920). Their absolute numbers were small—probably only a thousand or so nationwide—but they came into contact with many more people via massive programs of testing, or as teachers or other education professionals in classroom or training settings. Gradually, psychology became well disseminated in culture, perceived as a source of guidance, counseling, and testing. Another channel that psychologists put to use to disseminate the new field was the media. In the 1920s there were hundreds of newspapers published daily, dozens of weekly magazines, along with books. Print media was the primary means of communication of information and ideas. Into this world came radio, which revolutionized communication virtually overnight. The first commercial radio broadcast occurred in 1920. By 1930, there were hundreds of radio stations, and by 1935, it could be confidently stated that every American household could be reached by radio.

Psychologists already had a public that hungered for advice about all aspects of their lives. How to choose mates, how to resolve marital disagreements, how to raise or discipline children, how to manage sex relations—all of these were areas where popular advice-givers including clergy, politicians, and “experts” of varying credibility and honesty had proliferated for decades. Now, psychologists, in possession of new knowledge about learning and memory, job prospecting, child development, and all other aspects of life realized that they had an opportunity to do more than share their findings with their colleagues in journals and conferences. The 1920s was a boom market for popular psychology treatments. In fact, Joseph Jastrow (1863–1944), long a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, when he gave the keynote speech after the banquet at the Wittenberg Symposium in 1927, railed against those psychologists who would allow you to “acquire a permanent wave of your psychic head-gear” while pocketing what he implied might be ill-gotten gains (Jastrow, 1928b, p. 435). Someday, he said, a psychologist will emerge with the qualities of Newton and Darwin, and “may he be greeted—Lo! The Great Psychologist!” (Jastrow, 1928b, p. 438). Anyone who didn’t know Jastrow would have taken him for a disgruntled academic psychologist, despairing over the perversion of science by commerce. In fact, Jastrow had a long pedigree as a popularizer of psychology. He had administered mental tests to all comers at a booth on the Midway of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, and by 1927 was already the author of several books of popular psychology, including Keeping Mentally Fit (Jastrow, 1928a). There, he punned on the current fad for purgatives by advising the stressed and stale worker to “Take a Relaxative!” When Jastrow left the podium, he headed back not to Wisconsin where he had been a faculty member for over 30 years, but to New York City and his syndicated newspaper column, and later his radio program, one of the first of its type among psychologists, and one that soon had many imitators. Psychology’s advance was guaranteed by the alliances its practical applicators forged with industry and the media during the 1920s, alliances that have continually strengthened since that time.

Psychotherapy in the 1920s

This was the era of the mental hospital in all its grimness. The American population exploded, life had become more complex and stressful, and new forms of diagnosis—“feeblemindedness,” determined by low scores on IQ tests—came into use. The building of the architectural monstrosities called the “Kirkbrides,” after their principal architect, the forbidding monitory asylums that rose up menacingly from otherwise placid rural landscapes, had determined that there would be ample spaces in which to house, and little more, those whom society could not manage or accept. In 1925, commitment to a mental hospital meant, whether for an elderly woman experiencing dementia, a young man experiencing a first-time schizophrenic episode, a middle-aged manic woman, or even an obstreperous colleague or relative, an easy admittance and often a life sentence in what was for all intents and purposes a place of incarceration.

There were some signs of hope: Rationally organized clinics such as that of the Menninger brothers in Topeka, Kansas, adequately staffed and with well-trained psychiatrists adept at relating to patients, were in place, but they were very few in number. For the most part, the role of psychiatrist in a mental hospital, even for those who still maintained their skills, was, because of the sheer number of admittances and the nearly complete lack of effective ways to manage patient behavior, a daunting and eventually crushing task.

Some forms of what would later be called clinical psychology had taken root in a few places: By 1927, books were available outlining the role of the clinical psychologist in taking histories, administering personality and other mental tests, and other tasks in support of diagnosis and treatment (e.g., Wells, 1927). Psychologists, however, were only infrequently found in mental hospitals, and when they were, they were often kept strictly separate from the medical staff. Autonomy and authority within a medical setting were yet to be achieved. But during this period, psychiatrists sympathetic to psychology—William Alanson White and Adolf Meyer— fostered collaboration between psychiatrists and psychologists that would eventually lead to a hybridization of psychiatry and psychology, though without full admittance to medical privileges such as prescribing drugs, which would become more and more a point of contention as pharmacology—primitive in the 1920s—became more important in therapy in the coming decades.

For those who could afford it and who were not institutionalized, some small amount of psychotherapy was available. Psychotherapy, as distinct from institutional psychiatry, had emerged from a confluence of religious and intellectual sources, mostly in New England toward the end of the 19th century (Taylor, 2009). A consensus was beginning to form around the idea that there were forms of mental illness that were tractable to being relieved, and possibly even cured, by some form of interpersonal interaction between the patient and doctor—the “psychotherapist,” so called because the process of cure occurred in the mind through talk. There were a few such practitioners by 1920, and also a larger number of Freudian-trained or influenced individuals who offered Freud’s more formalized system of psychotherapy. For the next 20 years, Freud’s system was the most prominent and well-documented system. An alliance had been formed between psychoanalysis and the medical establishment, ensuring that the practice of psychoanalysis would for a long time afterward be contingent on the possession of an MD, and effectively cut psychologists out of the practice of psychotherapy unless other pathways to it could be found. One pathway was to find alternate means of delivering psychotherapy systematically. Like contemporary automobile makes, psychotherapy brands began to proliferate in the 1920s. Henry Murray, a larger-than-life psychological adventurer, returned from Europe having made the acquaintance of Carl Jung and eager to introduce Jung’s Psychological Types to America—though Jung’s ideas had already been in circulation in artistic and feminist circles in New York for at least a decade (Sherry, 2012). Alfred Adler (1870–1937), ostracized and exiled from Freud’s inner circle, began lecturing in America in the 1920s. He was included in the Wittenberg Symposium. Witty and urbane, his down-to-earth realism about human affairs made him a popular speaker and helped him acquire many followers, who began to found Adlerian Institutes that would put some of his principles into practice. Also during the 1920s, Harry Stack Sullivan (1892–1949) developed his empathic style of psychotherapy, which, while it owed something to all of its predecessors, had at its core the intimate interpersonal relationship between psychotherapist and client. Sullivan had the ability to communicate with those clients who were unreachable by other means, and was able to pass this technique on to others who would fuse it, along with what they gleaned from the other psychotherapeutic systems and the accumulated experience of their own and others’ practices, into the eclectic individualized therapeutic styles characteristic of mid- and late-20th century psychotherapy.

Yet, even though many of the elements that would combine to produce clinical psychology were present, it was not born yet. Even if all the psychotherapists in America in 1927 had a full caseload weekly for the full year, the total number of clients served would have been in the low thousands. Psychotherapy was rare, and a person who was depressed, anxious, or otherwise troubled mentally would have to seek solace, during this decade, by traditional means, through religion or through self-medication.

The Family Story: Two Teenagers

Both Rose and Harry were lucky to have encountered psychology that made a real difference in their lives. For Rose, though she was bright, was a reserved and sometimes stubborn child that didn’t let many people get too close to her. Her immigrant status, especially in her new school in Queens, where she stood out from her peers by contrast, was another problem that could have resulted in a less-than-favorable school experience. Harry, on the other hand, was an obviously troubled young person. He had, by the time he was 15, several encounters with the police, and had begun hanging around with a gang in his old lower Manhattan neighborhood. It was only a step upward to real crime from petty youth vandalism and loitering, and it was one that was easy for Harry to take, since he had developed a hard toughness while trying to deal with the loss of his father.

They were lucky to each encounter helpful adults who had some psychological understanding of adolescence and education. They lived in New York, and the probability of encountering a teacher with psychological training from a teacher’s college—in each of their cases, Columbia University—was higher there than in other places in the United States, though by 1927 education schools were the prime conduit for the diffusion of psychological knowledge across the United States. One estimate is that one third of the graduates of psychology master’s and PhD programs at that time became employed in education, with a large proportion of those entering public education systems as teachers or guidance personnel (school guidance had developed rapidly as an ancillary profession by this time.)

In Rose’s case, the person who helped her was her high school English teacher, who had attended Columbia University for his master’s degree and became a teacher in order to have a steady income to get married. Columbia’s master’s education program, one offshoot of the Progressive Era in America, which led to the development of programs to advance literacy, health, and education, had long been a center for psychological interest in education, with John Dewey and Edward L. Thorndike as its most prominent leaders. By 1917, when Rose’s teacher entered Columbia, Leta Stetter Hollingworth (1886–1939) was there promoting her plan to institute programs for gifted and talented students in selected New York schools. Hollingworth was not the first to observe that schools were often doing a disservice to their most talented students: Before 1905, Alfred Binet (1857–1911) and Theodore Simon (1872–1961) in France had asserted, along with Ovide Decroly (1871–1932) in Belgium, that students at all levels of ability needed education tailored to their specific needs, and an American movement to develop gifted and talented education was under way in several places across America by 1914. Her plan bore fruit with the establishment of five such programs in New York between 1918 and 1922 (Pritchard, 1951).

Rose, however, was not in one of the relatively small groups of students who participated in these laboratory school programs for the gifted and talented. It was because her teacher had an interest in psychology that he took extra elective psychology credits and encountered one of the other progressive educators interested in the psychological needs of gifted students in a lecture course in 1920. Impressed by what he heard, he was sensitized, when he came to work in the classroom, to the signs of creativity in his students, and Rose was an early beneficiary of his acumen. He recognized right away the degree of writing talent Rose had, and encouraged her not only to excel in the classroom but also to begin to contribute to newspapers and magazines. Rose noted in a 1986 memoir that she was “hooked” on writing when she had letters published in the Jewish Daily Forward and the New York Times the same week in 1926. Her teacher encouraged her to apply to New York University and they both celebrated in May 1927, when she learned of her acceptance there.

Harry was lucky in different ways. One reason that he didn’t go “up the river” to Sing Sing or Dannemora was that his guardian was wealthy and could have access to both legal and judicial advice, which he engaged immediately after Harry’s burglary arrest in January 1927. These contacts led to Harry being examined in a pretrial diversionary program that was empowered to recommend lesser sentences for adolescents with mitigating circumstances. The counselor whom Harry saw was actually a social worker, much as would happen today. She had obtained her degree in Social Work at Indiana University and had moved to New York in 1925 with her husband, who took a job there in banking and securities management. Her training at Indiana was highly influenced by both the traditions of social work education that had evolved in the Midwest as social work developed as a profession in the years after Hull House was founded by Jane Addams (1860–1935) in 1889, and by the long-standing tradition of psychology that had been established by the person who was currently Indiana University’s president, William Lowe Bryan. She, and Harry through her, was the beneficiary of 30 or more years of the development of child and adolescent psychology both in Europe and America. The social worker was able to convincingly present Harry’s case to the presiding judge of the Juvenile Court as one of a troubled boy still trying to deal with the grief and loss connected with his father’s death. She was able to call Harry’s sister as a witness, and Rosa corroborated the social worker’s impressions that Harry was highly intelligent (she had tested him on the Stanford-Binet—then 10 years old and in wide practical use—on which he scored 133). The decision was ultimately made, the same week that Rosa graduated from high school, to sentence Harry to probation contingent on finishing high school and staying out of trouble until then.

That there was a juvenile court in which this could take place was another lucky break that would not have been available to Harry 15 years earlier. It was through the combined efforts of psychologist Augusta Bronner (1881–1966) and psychologist-neurologist–criminologist William Healy (1869–1963), along with many others in the legal and social science communities, that the first juvenile courts were established during the preceding decade (Boyd, 2004; Young, 2010). Programs such as mandatory counseling for first-time offenders, conditional release, programs of community service, and other programs appropriate to developing adolescents at the stage before they entered an irreversible course toward a life of crime and imprisonment became widely available over the next decades. Although not every case had as favorable an outcome, in Harry’s case the experience halted his slide toward crime and turned him inward to search for ways to control himself. He had missed enough school that he had to graduate a year late, but graduate he did, in May 1930.

There was no connection between the neuropsychology of Lashley and the theorizing of the Wittenberg Symposium on either Rose’s or Harry’s experience. A connection could have possibly been made between the developmental and organic theories of the Gestalt psychologists, but these were just coming into view: Kurt Koffka’s The Growth of the Mind (Koffka, 1925), one of the first comprehensive theories of development, had been published only 2 years earlier and was circulating only among academics, while Kurt Goldstein’s The Organism didn’t appear until 1939. Nor did vocational counseling or the advice-giving aspect of applied psychology come into play, although the well-established technology of testing did impact both Rose and Harry. Rose took the very first version of the College Entrance Examination Board’s test in conjunction with her college applications in the fall of 1926, and Harry’s high score on the Stanford-Binet was one factor in his favor when his case came before the judge. Although there was little if any clinical psychology as such at that time, both Rose’s teacher and Harry’s advisor in the judicial process practiced what we now know are counseling skills informed by knowledge of development, learning, and socialization. Had either Rosa’s teacher or Harry’s counselor been familiar with Alfred Adler—neither was, as Adler was just beginning to make his way in America as a popular lecturer in 1927—Adler could have certainly suggested ways to conceptualize Harry’s maladjustment and perhaps predict, based on Harry’s ability to compensate for his anger and loss, his future successes.

Here, in the effects of psychology on Rosa and Harry in this decade, are points in the development of several large streams of psychological activity that have continued to influence generations of people. Child development and adolescent psychology have become mainstays of the curriculum for students of psychology and education alike. Programs for nurturing talent evolved from the 1920s through the 1960s with Project Zero at Harvard and Julian Stanley’s (1918–2005) programs for identifying talent at Johns Hopkins University. Attention to the “gifted and talented” is a permanent part of the educational landscape. The question of how to adjudicate adolescents and how to apportion rights and responsibilities to them is as lively now as it was in 1927, when it informed the thinking of those concerned with Harry’s welfare. Both talent recognition programs and legal advisory programs for adolescents are parts of the permanent social infrastructure that psychology—along with social work, sociology, criminology, and the established professions of education and law—helped create and maintain.