K

KESSEN, WILLIAM (1925–1999)

William Kessen was born in Key West, Florida, in

1925. Kessen’s many honors included memberships
      in the Society of Experimental Psychologists and the
      American Academy of Arts of Sciences. The only child
      of a ship’s engineer and a homemaker, his journey to-
      ward Yale began as a bespectacled youth who de-
      clared himself a Roosevelt liberal. The first in his
      family to attend college, Kessen entered the Universi-
      ty of Florida in 1941 to study history and acting.
      Drafted into the war when he was eighteen, Kessen
      served as a clerk-typist and read voraciously during
      his thirty-four months of service. After the war, and
      supported by the GI Bill, Kessen completed his un-
      dergraduate degree in psychology at the University of
      Florida. On his shifting interests toward psychology,
      Kessen wrote that he ‘‘became convinced that the ills
      of the world were not to be tackled by legal or histori-
      cal strategies, but by empirical and psychological
      ones’’ (1991, p. 287). Kessen went on to Brown Uni-
      versity to pursue masters and doctoral degrees with
      Gregory Kimble, who remains a leading expert on
      classical conditioning. At Brown, Kessen met his ‘‘best
      and truest friend,’’ Marion Lord. They fell in love and
      married in 1950. Following Kimble to Yale, Kessen’s
      1952 fifteen-page dissertation entitled ‘‘Response
      Strength and Conditioned Stimulus Intensity’’ was
      carried out in the tradition of the eminent behavioral
      psychologist Clark Hull.

During his graduate tenure at Yale, many promi-
nent social scientists, including Neal Miller, John

Dollard, and Robert Sears, joined in an effort to inte-

grate Ivan Pavlov and Sigmund Freud by transform-

ing Freudian concepts into a behaviorist framework.

At the same time, psychoanalyst Kaethe Maria Wolf

came to the Yale Child Study Center after having

worked with developmental psychologists Charlotte

Buehler and Jean Piaget. Large and powerful ideas

surrounded Kessen when he chose to do postdoctoral

work with Wolf. She introduced Kessen to the com-

plexities of Freud and Piaget during the heyday of be-

haviorism before her untimely death in 1957. In the

years to come, Kessen would pursue at least three dis-

tinct paths in psychology—all broke new ground and

generated young colleagues. Immediately after his

doctorate and with the first stirrings from the cogni-

tive revolution, Kessen turned from rats to babies,

first probing their earliest sensory and perceptual de-

velopment, and later their changing place in culture

and history. Kessen created and maintained a presti-

gious infant laboratory from the 1950s through the

1970s. He and many widely recognized students did

pioneering studies of the visual development of

human babies, focusing much on infant eye move-

ments in response to different shapes, colors, and

sizes. Studies of olfactory and taste preferences of

young babies also left their marks in the literature. As

time passed, questions of structure and context of

child development grew more pressing. His ‘‘histori-

co-conceptual’’ line was never far from sight.

In 1959 Kessen, together with his other lifelong

friend, George Mandler, published a philosophical

treatise The Language of Psychology. It was a deep and

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