Social views Hall was deeply wedded to the German concept of
Volk, an anti-individualist and authoritarian romanticism in which the individual is dissolved into a transcendental collective. Hall believed that humans are by nature non-reasoning and instinct driven, requiring a charismatic leader to manipulate their herd instincts for the well-being of society. He predicted that the American emphasis on individual human right and dignity would lead to a fall that he analogized to the sinking of
Atlantis. Hall was one of the founders of the child-study movement in the 1880s. A national network of study groups called Hall Clubs existed to spread his teaching. He is popularly known today for supervising the 1896 study
Of Peculiar and Exceptional Children, which described a series of
only child eccentrics as permanent misfits. For decades, academics and advice columnists alike disseminated his conclusion that an only child could not be expected to go through life with the same capacity for adjustment that siblings possessed. "Being an only child is a disease in itself", he claimed. Hall argued that child development recapitulates his highly
racialized conception of the history of human evolutionary development. He characterized pre-adolescent children as savages and therefore rationalized that reasoning was a waste of time with children. He believed that children must simply be led to fear God, love country, and develop a strong body. As the child burns out the vestiges of
evil in his nature, he needs a good dose of authoritarian discipline, including corporal punishment. Hall consistently argued against intellectual attainment at all levels of public education. Open discussion and critical opinions were not to be tolerated. Students needed indoctrination to save them from the individualism that was so damaging to the progress of American culture. Hall popularized the phrase "storm and stress" with reference to
adolescence, taken from the German
Sturm und Drang movement. His colleague William Burnham had published this phrase in relation to adolescence in an 1889 article titled 'Economy in Intellectual Work'. The concept's three key aspects are conflict with parents, mood disruptions, and risky behavior. As was later the case with the work of
Lev Vygotsky and
Jean Piaget, public interest in this phrase, as well as with Hall's role, faded. Recent research has led to some reconsideration of the phrase and its denotation. In its three aspects, recent evidence supports storm and stress, but only when modified to take into account individual differences and cultural variations. Currently, psychologists do not accept storm and stress as universal, but do acknowledge the possibility in brief passing. Not all adolescents experience storm and stress, but storm and stress is more likely during adolescence than at other ages. Hall had no sympathy for the poor, the sick, or those with developmental differences or disabilities. A firm believer in selective breeding and forced sterilization, he believed that any respect or charity toward those he viewed as physically, emotionally, or intellectually weak or "defective" simply interfered with the movement of natural selection toward the development of a super-race. After his retirement in 1920, Hall wrote a companion volume on aging. This important account has been labeled "prophetic" in its recognition of an emerging "crisis of aging" in the 20th century, in which longer lifespan, narrowing family roles, and expulsion from the workforce combined to dramatically isolate the elderly and restrict their active participation in public life. Hall railed against this process, arguing that the wisdom conferred by old age meant that the elderly had valuable and creative contributions to make to society. Yet, the stigma of aging meant that, instead, many were engaged in the foolish pursuit of youth, trying to avoid being excluded from full participation in their communities. In the conclusion of the book, Hall expressed a tangible sense of personal anger against this form of discrimination. His stirring call for a better understanding of the aging process anticipated the development of gerontology, and his critique of the marginalization of the elderly still resonates today.
Religious views Hall is listed in the
Cambridge Companion to Atheism as having been an atheist. Hall was a pioneer in the school of religious psychology. He was exposed to Christianity by his pious mother as a child. While he attended Williston Seminary School, he joined the college church and instructed adult bible classes. He is quoted as saying, "highest choice of free will is self surrender to the service of God", as well as "love fixed in the highest being, God". He moved on to attend Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1867. Interested in comparative religion, he took a position at the city missionary society and attended multiple types of religious services. After graduation, Hall served at a small church in Pennsylvania for a short while, before leaving to further his studies. Hall promoted religion as the reinstatement of the individual into their true place in the world, a return to health and wholeness. Hall would later teach religious psychology at Johns Hopkins and Clark School of Religious Psychology. He also founded a library department for religious psychology.
Views on eugenics Hall expressed openly
eugenic views in many of his writings. He was listed in numerous American eugenic organizations as its leader. The
Eugenical News (1916–1922) celebrated the development of new American eugenic scholarly organization by highlighting that its roster included such as in the following announcement about "new active members of Eugenics Research Association ...
C. C. Brigham, Psychological Laboratory, Princeton, N. J., G. Stanley Hall, Clark University,
C. E. Seashore, State University of Iowa,
Lewis M. Terman, Stanford University, Calif.,
John B. Watson, Johns Hopkins Hospital" (p. 53). Although Hall is credited with bringing notable psychoanalytic scholars to the U.S., including
S. Freud and
C. Jung, Hall expressed openly anti-psychoanalytic views in his writings that emphasized his eugenic commitments. For example, in the first issue of the
Journal of Applied Psychology, of which Stanley G. Hall (1917) was an editor, his opening article proclaimed that the U.S. psychology had to "draw any lesson ... from the present war, in which the great Nordic race which embraces the dominant elements of all the belligerent nations is committing suicide" (p. 9) The most significant of these lessons, according to Hall, was for American psychology to fight against the "revisionary conceptions of Freud ... that it is ... normal for man at times to plunge back and down the evolutionary ladder" (p. 12). Hall included openly anti-Semitic statements in his writings such as in his book
On the Aspects of German Culture in which he discussed the supposed destruction of Western civilization by "rapacious Jews", though such statements were more often made to criticize than to condone anti-Semitism, as suggested in the quote: "they [the Jews] have been made the scapegoat for evils which they have not caused." Hall remarked, perhaps out of anti-Semitic feeling, that the psychoanalytic focus on "sex" in addition to this approach's "rapid growth ... found outside the circle of specialists [academic experimental psychologists]" made psychoanalysis and "the number of out-and-out disciples" to be a form of a "cult" (p. 412). Moreover, Hall stated that the "Freudian theory of therapy ... is mistaken" (p. 12), giving a warning example of how an individual's culturally unacceptable sexual desires and behaviors could be justified through psychoanalytic interpretations rather than "cured by the very modesty" based on cultural or religious norms (p. 13). Hall held Victorian moral positions in regard to sexuality which regarded all divergent sexual experiences as amoral, including masturbation, same-sex sexuality, sex outside of marriage, and so forth. Hall claimed that psychoanalytic treatment would "destroy" this religious "morality" during the process of analysis (p. 13). In his book
Jesus, the Christ, In the Light of Psychology Hall openly praised eugenics and discussed that the presence of supposedly evolutionary unfit people (i.e., the poor, racial minorities, immigrants) served the purpose of teaching the evolutionary fit people (i.e., Nordic wealthy Whites) virtues of caring for the lower classes. Other openly eugenic writings by Hall include his 1903 article entitled "The White Man's Burden versus Indigenous Development of the Lower Races" in
The Journal of Education. A majority of American eugenic organizations listed Hall as the leader in this thought (e.g.,
American Eugenic Society,
American Eugenic Research Organization). His students included many notable eugenicists, including
H. H. Goddard,
Robert Yerkes,
Lewis Terman, and many others. ==Literary activities==