Pan Shu

Introduction

Pan Shu (潘菽, 1897–1988) is the closest thing modern Chinese psychology has to a founder-father figure, and the title was earned institutionally rather than rhetorically. A Chicago-trained experimentalist — PhD in 1926 — he spent three decades teaching at what became Nanjing University, of which he was the first president after 1949. In the 1950s he built the two structures on which the discipline still runs: he chaired the Chinese Psychological Society from 1955 across consecutive terms, and in 1956 became director of the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences when it was re-established, leading a migration of Nanjing psychologists north to form its backbone. His own theoretical program — psychology as a "middle science" straddling nature and society, and the systematic excavation of psychological ideas in ancient Chinese texts — gave the discipline a sense of its own identity at precisely the moment it was most exposed to outside pressure.

Early Life and Education

Pan was born on July 13, 1897, in Yixing, Jiangsu (birth name Pan Younian). He graduated in philosophy from Peking University in 1920, went to the United States in 1921, took an MA in psychology at Indiana University in 1923, and completed his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1926.

Academic and Professional Career

From August 1927 he taught in the psychology department of Fourth Zhongshan University (later National Central University), twice serving as its chair, and stayed with the institution as it became Nanjing University. There he served as dean of academic affairs, chairman of the university affairs committee, and president of Nanjing University from 1951. In 1956 he moved to Beijing as the first director of the CAS Institute of Psychology, was its honorary director from 1983, and chaired the Chinese Psychological Society from 1955 for terms running to the end of his life, latterly as honorary president. He was elected a CAS academician in 1955, co-founded the Jiusan Society — one of China's recognized minor parties — and sat on the National Committee of the CPPCC. He died on March 26, 1988, at ninety, mourned in an obituary in Acta Psychologica Sinica that reads as the discipline's own family notice.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Building the discipline's institutions

The Society and the Institute are the twin pillars of organized Chinese psychology, and Pan led both for their decisive decades. With Cao Richang — the Institute's first director in its earlier 1951 incarnation — and the northern traditions represented by Lu Zhiwei, the formula "Pan in the south, Lu in the north" memorializes the generation that made psychology a national enterprise rather than a few university laboratories.

A theoretical identity for Chinese psychology

Pan argued that psychology is a "middle science," neither natural science nor social science but straddling both — an argument with real consequences, since it told the discipline where it could stand during periods when purely biological or purely ideological framings threatened it. He replaced the classical knowledge–emotion–will triad with a cognitive–conative dichotomy, and he opened the systematic study of psychological ideas in ancient Chinese texts (human nature, mind–body, knowing and acting), the vein later mined in the history of Chinese psychology project.

The long view

His Brief Notes on Psychology (《心理学简札》), written and revised largely through the Cultural Revolution years when the discipline barely existed, kept a theoretical voice alive through the silence — one reason he is remembered less for a single finding than for having kept the field itself in being.