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First 100 Years of Clinical Psych

Lightner Witmer is considered the founder of clinical psychology. In the late 19th century, he opened the first psychological clinic to help children with academic problems. Over the following century, the field developed in ways Witmer did not anticipate. It began to emphasize IQ and other types of testing over helping with academic skills. It also started focusing more on psychotherapy for adults rather than children. However, Witmer's original emphasis on helping individuals, collaborating with other professionals, and working with children's academic issues did influence the development of the field in its early years.

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Julian Alberto Calderon
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72 views

First 100 Years of Clinical Psych

Lightner Witmer is considered the founder of clinical psychology. In the late 19th century, he opened the first psychological clinic to help children with academic problems. Over the following century, the field developed in ways Witmer did not anticipate. It began to emphasize IQ and other types of testing over helping with academic skills. It also started focusing more on psychotherapy for adults rather than children. However, Witmer's original emphasis on helping individuals, collaborating with other professionals, and working with children's academic issues did influence the development of the field in its early years.

Uploaded by

Julian Alberto Calderon
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Lightner Witmer and the First 100 Years of Clinical Psychology

Donald K. Routh University of Miami


Clinical psychology has developed over its first century in certain ways that Witmer's work anticipated. These
include clinicians' emphases on trying to help individuals and on collaboration with physicians and other
professionals and at least some continued emphasis on children's academic problems. In other respects, the
field developed along lines Witmer did not anticipate: Clinical psychology as it developed emphasized first
the IQ, then other kinds of testing, including projective and neuropsychological assessment, and most recently
clinical psychology has emphasized psychotherapy with adults more than children.
Clinical psychologists honor Lightner Witmer as a pioneer and celebrate 1996 as the centennial of his
founding of their field (he is also appropriately honored as a founder of school psychology, of clinical child
psychology, and of pediatric psychology). Witmer originated the first psychology clinic in 1896 and gave the
field of clinical psychology its name ( Witmer, 1907). In 1907, Witmer also founded the first scholarly journal
in this field, The Psychological Clinic, and trained most of the first generation of clinical psychologists. His
students included E. B. Twitmyer (University of Pennsylvania), Stevenson Smith (University of Washington),
Francis N. Maxfield (Ohio State University), and David Mitchell (the first clinical psychologist in
independent practice). Witmer also served twice as president of the Pennsylvania Association of Clinical
Psychologists, the forerunner of the Pennsylvania Psychological Association, which was one of the earliest
state psychological associations ( Knapp, Levin, ∧ French, 1993).
However, it is obvious to the contemporary observer that the field of clinical psychology has, in its first
century, developed in a number of directions not anticipated by its founder. It is the purpose of this article to
discuss some ways in which Witmer's work both did and did not serve as a model for the subsequent
development of clinical psychology.
Witmer as a Role Model for Clinical Psychology
Emphasis on Children's Academic Problems
Before he entered the field of psychology, Witmer taught history and English at a private preparatory school
in Philadelphia ( Collins, 1931). There he encountered an otherwise talented student with verbal deficits and
tutored him. This young man went on to successful work in college (though still struggling with some
difficulties), undoubtedly encouraging some of Witmer's optimism that a dedicated teacher could be helpful to
such an individual. This proved to be a formative experience for Witmer.
As is well known, the first "case" to be seen in Witmer's psychological clinic at the University of
Pennsylvania in March 1896 was "Charles Gilman," a school child with spelling problems. In fact, the child's
problems were broader than this terminology would imply and included reading and language more generally
( Fagan, 1996, this issue). After the child's visual difficulties were discovered and corrected, his educational
difficulties proved to be remediable, and he went on to academic and vocational success, confirming Witmer's
belief that the field of psychology had something to offer in such cases.
It has often been stated that Witmer worked mostly with "mentally retarded" children. This statement
overlooks the fact that Witmer often used the term retardation to describe the situation in which a child has
been retained in grade a number of times and, hence, is retarded in terms of school placement. In Witmer's
view, some such children were indeed feeble-minded and largely beyond the help of the kind of intervention
he favored, but others had remediable difficulties. It was these retarded but not feeble-minded children who
were the focus of his efforts. In other instances, Witmer used the term retardation in a more general way, for
example, to describe delinquents as being retarded in their moral development.
Contemporary clinical psychologists tend to focus, much more than Witmer did, on the emotional and social
aspects of human life, rather than emphasizing academic skills so much. Even in Witmer ( 1920 ) famous case
of "Don," who would now probably be described as an autistic child, he emphasized the success of his
treatment in terms of the youngster's subsequent academic progress ("today he is a normal boy, not quite
seven years old, reading, writing, and doing the number work of the second school year," p. 97). A
contemporary therapist treating
Helpful comments on a preliminary draft of this article were provided by Thomas K. Fagan, Annette M. La
Greca, Kristin Lindahl, Paul McReynolds, John Popplestone, John Reisman, Marion Routh, and C. Eugene
Walker.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Donald K. Routh, Department of Psychology,
University of Miami, P.O. Box 248185, Coral Gables, FL 33124.

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