What is the study of consciousness called?

Edward Bradford Titchener, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Edward Bradford Titchener answers

The study of consciousness, approached with scientific rigour, is what I call experimental psychology — or, more precisely, structural psychology, whose task is the analysis of consciousness into its elementary processes.¹ The psychological experiment is not a test of power or faculty or capacity; it is a dissection of consciousness, an analysis of a piece of the mental mechanism, carried forward until the complex whole reveals itself as a compound of elements beyond which analysis cannot go.¹

Those elements, reached by this dissection, are sensations — the structural units of mind, as the cell is the structural unit of bodily tissue.² The data of consciousness are always complex, and the work of experimental psychology is precisely to analyse them into the elementary psychical processes of which they are composed.³ The method proper to this science is introspection — not the casual looking-within of the untrained observer, but a disciplined self-observation conducted under controlled conditions.⁴

And it must be systematic: direct introspection of a process still running its course is, as a matter of fact, entirely worthless, for the act of observation alters the very experience one sets out to examine.⁵ The science is built on that constraint, not in spite of it.

Sources

1. the psychological experiment is 'not a test of power or faculty or capacity, but a dissection of consciousness, an analysis of a piece of the mental mechanism.'

   Experimental Psychology Vol I Part 1 Students Manual Qualitative

2. The sensation, then, is the structural unit or structural element of these consciousnesses, — just as the cell (so the anatomists and physiologists tell us) is the structural element of our bodily tissues.

   Experimental Psychology Vol I Part 1 Students Manual Qualitative

3. The data, the items of this subject-matter, are always complex, and the task of experimental psychology is to analyse them into 'the elementary psychical processes.'

   Systematic Psychology Prolegomena

4. The special method employed by psychology is that of introspection or self-observation. We 'look into' the mind, each for himself; or we observe ourselves, — in order to find out what processes are going on at the time, and how they are influencing one another.

   An Outline of Psychology

5. Direct introspection — observation of a process which is still running its course — is, as a matter of fact, entirely worthless; it defeats its own object.

   An Outline of Psychology