Hall, G. Stanley

Arguably, no one person has contributed to mainstreaming adolescence more than G. Stanley Hall (1846–1924). It was with the publishing of Hall’s (1904a, 1904b) two-volume groundbreaking book Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education that the developmental stage of adolescence became popularized. Hall’s psychology of adolescence was largely influenced by Darwin’s biological theory of evolution and recapitulation theory. While Hall was not the first person of his era to use recapitulation theory, the manner in which he applied it to adolescent development was groundbreaking. According to Hall (1923), recapitulation theory posited that “every child, from the moment of conception to maturity, recapitulates, very rapidly at first, and then more slowly, every stage of development through which the human race from its lowest animal beginnings has passed” (p. 380). Hall believed that as a human developed from infancy to adulthood they psychologically reenacted human evolutionary stages. Within recapitulation theory Hall focused mostly on adolescence because he believed that adolescence was the stage between primitive and civilized beings and therefore the most significant of the developmental stages. Hall (1904a) asserted, “In some respects, early adolescence is the infancy of man’s higher nature, when he receives from the great all-mother his last capital of energy and evolutionary momentum. Thus the child is father of the man” ( p. 71). Following this logic, Hall believed that focusing on adolescence and tapping into adolescents’ savage state was necessary for the advancement of society.