Wilhelm Wundt

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The German psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Max Wundt (1832-1920) was the founder of experimental psychology. He edited the first journal of experimental psychology and established the first laboratory of experimental psychology.

Wilhelm Wundt was born on Aug. 16, 1832, in Baden, in a suburb of Mannheim called Neckarau. As a child, he was tutored by Friedrich Müller. Wundt attended the gymnasium at Bruschel and at Heidelberg, the University of Tübingen for a year, then Heidelberg for more than 3 years, receiving a medical degree in 1856. He remained at Heidelberg as a lecturer in physiology from 1857 to 1864, then was appointed assistant professor in physiology. The great physiologist, physicist, and physiological psychologist Hermann von Helmholtz came there in 1858, and Wundt for a while was his assistant.

During the period from 1857 to 1874 Wundt evolved from a physiologist to a psychologist. In these years he also wrote Grundzüge der physiologischen psychologie (Principles of Physiological Psychology). The two-volume work, published in 1873-1874, stressed the relations between psychology and physiology, and it showed how the methods of natural science could be used in psychology. Six revised editions of this work were published, the last completed in 1911.

As a psychologist, Wundt used the method of investigating conscious processes in their own context by "experiment" and introspection. This technique has been referred to as content psychology, reflecting Wundt's belief that psychology should concern itself with the immediate content of experience unmodified by abstraction or reflection.

In 1874 Wundt left Heidelberg for the chair of inductive philosophy at Zurich, staying there only a year. He accepted the chair of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, and in 1879 he founded the first psychological laboratory in the world. To Leipzig, men came from all over the world to study in Wundt's laboratory. In 1879 G. Stanley Hall, Wundt's first American student, arrived, followed by many other Americans. From this first laboratory for experimental psychology a steady stream of psychologists returned to their own countries to teach and to continue their researches. Some founded psychological laboratories of their own.

In 1881 Wundt founded Philosophische Studien as a vehicle for the new experimental psychology, especially as a publication organ for the products of his psychological laboratory. The contents of Philosophische Studien (changed to Psychologische Studien in 1903) reveal that the experiments fell mainly into four categories: sensation and perception; reaction time; time perception and association; and attention, memory, feeling, and association. Optical phenomena led with 46 articles; audition was second in importance. Sight and hearing, which Helmholtz had already carefully studied, were the main themes of Wundt's laboratory. Some of the contributions to the Studien were by Wundt himself. Helmholtz is reported to have said of some of Wundt's experiments that they were schlampig (sloppy). Comparing Wundt to Helmholtz, who was a careful experimentalist and productive researcher, one must conclude that Wundt's most important contributions were as a systematizer, organizer, and encyclopedist. William James considered Wundt "only a rather ordinary man who has worked up certain things uncommonly well."

Wundt's Grundriss der Psychologie (1896; Outline of Psychology) was a less detailed treatment than his Principles, but it contained the new theory of feeling. A popular presentation of his system of psychology was Einführung in die Psychologie (1911; Introduction to Psychology). His monumental Völkerpsychologie (1912; Folk Psychology), a natural history of man, attempted to understand man's higher thought processes by studying language, art, mythology, religion, custom, and law. Besides his psychological works he wrote three philosophical texts: Logic (1880-1883), Ethics (1886), and System of Philosophy (1889). Wundt died near Leipzig on Aug. 31, 1920.

Further Reading

Virtually all histories of psychology report on Wundt. George Sidney Brett, Brett's History of Psychology, edited and abridged by R. S. Peters (1953; 2d rev. ed. 1965), is a standard account. A longer one, written by Wundt's first American student, is G. Stanley Hall, Founders of Modern Psychology (1912). J. C. Flugel, A Hundred Years of Psychology (1933; rev. 1965), which includes a good account of the development of experimental psychology from its systematic and philosophic antecedents, contains a chapter on Wundt's work. A more scholarly treatment of the same development is Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (1929; 2d ed. 1950). Recommended among the more recent works are Henryk Misiak, History of Psychology: An Overview (1966), and Benjamin B. Wolman, Historical Roots of Contemporary Psychology (1968).

Additional Sources

Wundt studies: a centennial collection, Toronto: C.J. Hogrefe, 1980.

Wundt, Wilhelm (1832-1920) German psychologist and polymath. Wundt taught physiology at Heidelberg, where he acted as assistant to Helmholtz. In 1875, the same year as William James began experimental philo-sophy at Harvard, he founded his psychological laboratory in Leipzig, where he was newly professor. He did not confine himself to the experimental study of stimuli and sensations, but wrote widely on philosophy, mythology, cultural practices, rituals, literature and art. His ten-volume Volkerpsychologie, published between 1900 and 1920, delineates stages of cultural development, from the primitive, to the totemic, through the age of heroes and gods, to the age of modern man.

(1832–1920). Wilhelm Wundt, the 'father' of experimental psychology, was born at Neckerau in Baden and educated at Tübingen and Heidelberg. He studied physiology at Berlin with Johannes Müller and Du Bois-Reymond before qualifying in medicine at Heidelberg, where he became a docent in physiology shortly before Hermann von Helmholtz's arrival as professor and head of the physiology department. Although Wundt held Helmholtz in high esteem, it seems probable that the two men were never close. Whereas Helmholtz did not regard himself explicitly as a psychologist, Wundt became increasingly preoccupied with philosophical and psychological issues and for many years held lectures on psychology directed primarily at students of philosophy.

Wundt's most important book is Grundzüge der physiologische Psychologie, which was first published in 1873–4 and went into six editions. It presented psychology as an independent scientific discipline complementary to anatomy and physiology though in no sense reducible to them. The first and largest part of the fifth edition was translated into English by his former doctoral student and great admirer Edward Titchener, under the title Principles of Physiological Psychology. Although it has been said that, in this book, anatomy and physiology were only marginally related to psychology, the book none the less established the principle that experimental psychology will find its future in close alliance with the anatomy and physiology of the central nervous system.

Wundt was appointed professor of physiology at Leipzig in 1875 and, in the same year, established the first laboratory in the world expressly dedicated to the advancement of experimental psychology: the Institute for Experimental Psychology. This laboratory very soon became a focus for those who held a serious interest in psychology, at first mainly for those who had studied philosophy and psychology in other German universities, but soon for graduates of several American and a few British universities. All subsequent psychological laboratories were closely modelled in their early years on the Wundt model.

Understandably, the activities of Wundt's laboratory closely reflected both the physiological background and the more recent philosophical preoccupations of its founder. On the more philosophical side, these were represented by the study of attention and what, following J. F. Herbart, was termed apperception; on the more psychological side, one might specify the study of sensory processes, psychophysics, and the measurement of reaction times.

In this approach to experiment in psychology, Wundt's subjects were invariably adults who had undergone an intensive training in the technique of introspection (as it was understood by Wundt) in order that the facts of immediately apprehended conscious experience should not be contaminated by previous knowledge or anticipation. Even though this alleged purity of introspective report was taken to extremes, bordering on the ridiculous, there is no doubt that it did provide a genuine training in precise and consistent subjective observation that contrasted strongly with the often haphazard and poorly controlled observations that had characterized much earlier work on sensory thresholds and psychophysics. Whether, however, such an approach to scientific psychology is truly applicable to the investigation of human personality and its development, or to abnormal states of mind, is an altogether different and far more controversial affair. None the less, it is important to bear in mind that Wundt did not himself believe that experimental method is applicable to all aspects of human psychology. In particular, he had no doubt that our understanding of language and its development must be sought through our understanding of history and culture rather than through experimental analysis. Wundt himself wrote voluminously on such issues in his later years, though very little of this work has appeared in English. It is, however, clear that the 'founder of experimental psychology' was neither a reductionist nor a dualist and that he believed that the field of application of experiment in psychology was distinctly limited.

Wundt's autobiography, Erlebtes und Erkanntes (1920), gives a straightforward account of his life and career and describes in some detail the establishment of his Institute for Experimental Psychology. This narrative outlines in a most interesting way Wundt's relations with a number of his contemporaries, not least E. H. Weber and G. T. Fechner, both of whom resided in Leipzig and both of whom he came to know well, despite the fact that Weber was a very old man at the time when Wundt first made his acquaintance. Fechner, on the other hand, was still active and directly inspired some of the experimental work in psychophysics that Wundt set in train in his new laboratory.

For a reassessment of Wundt seen through modern eyes, see

Bibliography
• A. L. Blumenthal, 'A Re-appraisal of Wilhelm Wundt', American Psychologist (1975).
• Also relevant is R. W. Rieber(ed.), Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of Modern Psychology (1980);

of particular interest is K. Danziger's chapter in this volume on 'Wundt's theory of behaviour and volition'. An older, if possibly unduly fulsome, account of Wundt's psychological system and the work of his laboratory is to be found in

Bibliography
• E. G. Boring, History of Experimental Psychology, 1st edn. (1925)

, ch. 15.

(Published 1987)

— O. L. Zangwill

Bibliography
• Rieber, R. W., and Robinson, D. K. (2001). Wilhelm Wundt in History: The Making of a Scientific Psychology.

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