Chicago School of Psychology

The Chicago School of Psychology was founded by Dr. Herbert A. Parkyn in June 1896, and was the first institution in the United States to teach the scientific and clinical application of Suggestive Therapeutics and Hypnotism. Emerging at a time when hypnosis was still regarded by many as a curiosity or stage performance, the school established a disciplined, medical approach to the subject and became the principal American center for experimentation in hypnotic suggestion. Its methods were rooted in the system of the Nancy School in France but expanded far beyond it through extensive clinical testing and practical application.

A central feature of the Chicago School was the free public clinic where students and physicians treated patients solely through verbal suggestion, without the use of drugs. These sessions demonstrated the practical results of suggestive therapeutics and provided the experimental basis for the school's teaching. The school was recognized as the parent institution of suggestive therapeutics in America and oversaw dozens of affiliated schools across the United States and Canada. More than a thousand students were trained and conferred the degree of Doctor of Psychology by the school, about one-third of them women, as well as several African American graduates.

Many of its graduates went on to found their own affiliated schools or became influential teachers, writers, and practitioners in the emerging New Thought and New Psychology movements. Among some of the most notable were, William Walker Atkinson, Sydney Blanshard Flower, Stanley Lefevre Krebs, and E. Virgil Neal. Through their writings, lectures, and founding of new learning and clinical centers, the many graduates of the Chicago School of Psychology carried its methods and philosophy across the United States, making it a central source from which modern suggestive therapeutics and early applied psychology in America developed.