He is credited with establishing psychology as an academic discipline. America's first psychological laboratory was opened in 1883 by G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins University. J. McKeen Cattell became America's first professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He had been a student of Wilhelm Wundt. Edward Titchener, another student of Wilhelm Wundt, introduced Structuralism in America.
Structuralism is a theory that attempted to identify the basic elements of mental processes.
In this manner, psychologists hoped to discover how these basic elements fit together to form the structure of a person's psychology. In his experiments, a bell is rung each time a dog is given food. After a while, the sound of the bell causes the dog to salivate even when food is not present. 1909 Sigmund Freud presented his concepts of psychoanalysis in America durring a series of lectures at Clark University. His talks focused on the repression of desires during childhood and their later affects on an individual's life.