RIVERS, WILLIAM HALSE RIVERS British psychopathologist, was educated at Tonbridge and St. Bartholomew's hospital, London. He was made university lecturer at Cambridge in physiological and experimental psychology in Dec. 1867, and in 1907, when the two subjects were separated, lecturer in the physiology of the senses. He founded during this period the Cambridge school of experimental psychology, and was made fellow of St. John's college. In 1898, with his pupils C. S. Myers and William MacDougall, he joined the anthropological expedition to Torres Straits led by A. C. Haddon, and had charge of the psychological work. By the genealogical method of social investigation he obtained such valuable results that whereas he joined the expedition as a pure psychologist he returned an enthusi astic ethnologist. The Todas (1906) records his investigation on these lines among the Todas in Southern India in 1902. His first
expedition to Melanesia was in 1908. He revisited that area later, and in the History of Melanesian Society (2 vol., 1914) abandoned the evolutionary theory of society in favour of that of cultural migration. During the World War he obtained many valuable results as a psychopathologist (see Instinct and the Unconscious, 1920) and while critically interested in Freudian methods of psycho-analysis he came to very different conclusions on matters of principle and practice, holding that "though dreams are the at tempted solutions of conflicts, the nature of the solution is largely determined by the affective attitude dominant before going to sleep." His Psychology and Politics (1923), Medicine, Magic and Religion (1924), Social Organisation (1924), were published after his death. He died at Cambridge on June 4, 1922.