‘A bud from the tree of life’: William McDougall’s response to Freud

Abstract

In the interwar period, William McDougall, Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at Oxford, then Professor of Psychology at Harvard and Duke universities, was probably Britain’s pre-eminent psychological theorist. While he has been little studied in recent times, he developed a complex and detailed system of psychology centred on instinct and social relations that was very widely circulated in his day. A distinctive aspect of his approach is that he largely rejected reductionism and associationism, preferring a psychological model with a strong note of personalism. He was active in identifying the parallels between his approach and Freud’s, and his non-reductive intuitions generate an interesting rejoinder to Freud. This paper reviews McDougall’s system of psychology, discusses the points of intersection he identified with Freudian ideas, and comments on McDougall’s complaint about the narrowness of the Freudian focus on sex.