Wilhelm Wundt

12 Key excerpts on "Wilhelm Wundt"

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  eBook - ePub

  Companion to the History of Modern Science

  • G N Cantor, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie, M.J.S. Hodge, R.C. Olby(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  25 Wilhelm Wundt and the Emergence of Experimental Psychology K. Danziger DOI: 10.4324/9780203191873-31

  The name of Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) remains indissolubly linked to the origins of experimental psychology. This is so even though he cannot be credited with a single significant scientific discovery, any genuine methodological innovation or any influential theoretical generalisation. Recognition on such grounds is far more readily granted to other German experimentalists of the second half of the nineteenth century for their contributions to the emerging field of experimental psychology. Among these it is appropriate to mention Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87), the inventor of the field of psychophysics with its ‘psychophysical methods’, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94), remembered for his monumental work on vision and hearing; and Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), who pioneered the experimental study of memory.

  Nevertheless, there has always been a pervasive intuitive appreciation among experimental psychologists that it was Wundt rather than these others who played the crucial role in constituting the field. In other words, his role is felt to be intimately tied up with the emergence of the field as such, rather than with the emergence of specific issues within the field.

  At the most accessible level, Wundt’s achievements are clearly reflected in certain historical landmarks. From 1875 onwards, he occupied a chair in philosophy at the University of Leipzig, one of the largest and best-funded academic institutions in Germany. As such, it attracted a large number of foreign students who flocked to Germany during this period to complete their academic training. Wundt’s tenure happened to coincide with the period of Germany’s undisputed ascendancy in the field of higher learning, especially in the sciences. Over a period of about four decades Wundt supervised nearly two hundred Ph.D. theses, many of them by non-Germans. Thousands more attended his lectures and witnessed his demonstrations. His international reputation was assured, particularly in countries with inadequate but expanding systems of higher education. American research students were the most numerous, with the Russians forming another major group.

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  Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Psychology

  • Martin Farrell(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  C. H. Judd. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann. Wundt, W. (1910). Principles of Physiological Psychology , 2nd edn, trans. E. B. Titchener. New York: Macmillan. Wundt and the birth of experimental psychology 265 12 Titchener, introspection, and positivism Positivism Economical description Structuralism Introspection key topics Timeline 1841 New Zealand is made a British colony 1857 Indian Mutiny against British rule 1869 Mendeleyev publishes his periodic table of the elements 1901 First Nobel Prize ceremony is held in Stockholm 1911 Rutherford discovers the atomic nucleus 1928 All women over 21 given the vote in the UK Edward Bradford Titchener 1867 Born in Chichester, West Sussex 1885 Studies philosophy and physiology at Oxford 1890 Studies under Wundt at Leipzig 1892 Goes to Cornell as head of the new psychological laboratory 1904 Founds the Society of Experimentalists as an alternative to the American Psychological Association 1901 – 5 Publishes Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice (4 vols.) 1921 Publishes A Textbook of Psychology 1927 Dies in Ithaca, New York Ernst Mach 1838 Born in Chirlitz-Turas, Moravia 1867 Professor of Physics at the University of Prague 1886 Publishes The Analysis of Sensations 1895 Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Vienna 1901 Retires from academia; becomes member of the Austrian parliament 1916 Dies in Haar, Germany Introduction The importance of Wundt in the development of psychology was not con fi ned to his own research and writing, but in the large numbers of future psychologists who were trained in his laboratory. But these students did not always merely reproduce Wundt ’ s ideas; they took certain aspects of his thought and changed them to fi t in with their own philosophical presuppositions, which sometimes differed from those of Wundt.

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  Psychology

  Theoretical–Historical Perspectives

  • R. W. Rieber, Kurt Salzinger, R. W. Rieber, Kurt Salzinger(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  But first, we must reflect on the essence of that psychology. Wundt's Psychology The dominant school of psychological thought in mid-nineteenth-century Germany was that of J. F. Herbart whose theories were fundamentally mechanistic and associationistic though tempered with some native German 2. Wilhelm Wundt AND EARLY AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY 2 9 rationalism. Herbart's work was decidedly nonexperimental, for at heart he was a mathematician and a model-builder in his approach to psychology. It was in those days around midcentury, however, that the experimental method began to receive wide notice because of its successes in the hands of physiologists. The idea then came about quite naturally, and was frequently suggested in Germany, that these new methods—involving measurement, replicability, public data, and controlled tests—might be usefully applied to any and all problems of human knowledge. And in this way, the adjective 'physiological (physiologischen) came to mean experimental. Thus, there was talk of physiological pedagogy, physiological aesthetics, physiological linguistics, and physiological psychology. The young Wilhelm Wundt—then a laboratory assistant at Heidel-berg—took up the challenge of these proposals. And in so doing, his 60-year career as a scientific psychologist began one day in one of those moments of propitious insight. It happened at a time in his life when friends described him as an absent-minded, daydreaming young scholar of Heidelberg. One of the notions that was then occupying the wandering thoughts of young Wundt was the personal equation problem found in astronomers' research. If you do not remember, there had been systematic differences between astronomers in their measures of the passage of stars across grid lines in telescopes. These slight differences in measured star transits depended on whether the astronomer first focused his attention on the star or on his timing device.

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  A History of Modern Psychology

  • Duane Schultz(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Some of these early psychol-ogists disagreed with Wundt on a number of points but all shared his belief that introspection was the only proper method to be used in psy-chology. Some of them, rather paradoxically, came to influence structural psychology by their opposition to it rather than by any direct positive contributions to the position. Even though these early non-Wundtian psychologists had different points of view, all were engaged in the com-mon enterprise of developing the new psychology. Their endeavors made Germany the undisputed center of the new movement. However, while Germany was the focal point of the new science of psychology, there were simultaneous developments in England which were to give psychology an entirely new theme and direction. Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution and Sir Francis Galton began work on the psychology of individual differences. These influences were to direct the development of American psychology at least as much as the work of Wundt, and perhaps more so. In addition, early American psychologists (most of whom studied at Leipzig) returned home and made of the Wundtian psychology they had studied something uniquely American in form and temperament. But more of these developments later. The important point for now is that very shortly after its founding, psychology became divided into differing directions. Although Wundt had developed the psychology, it shortly became only one of several distinct varieties. We now turn to a discussion of Wundt's contemporaries in Germany. Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) Just a few years after Wundt stated that it was not possible to experi-ment upon the higher mental processes, a then unknown psychologist who worked alone, isolated from any center of psychology, began suc-cessfully to experiment upon these processes. Hermann Ebbinghaus became the first psychologist to experimentally investigate learning and memory.

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  Available until 4 Dec |Learn more

  Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology

  Volume III

  • Michael Wertheimer, Gregory A. Kimble(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Wundt was called to this professorship at a time when philosophy, which had always been very psychological in Germany, was widely viewed as suffering a prolonged lack of progress. A positivistic move developed in several universities there to bring methods of science into the service of philosophy. Wundt’s role, as one of a new generation of scientific philosophers, was to contribute to a new science-based philosophy at Leipzig. The result was experimental psychology.

  Although Wundt proclaimed experimental psychology to be a new science, he always saw it as a fundamental part of the philosophy department not a breakaway department, as was soon to be the pattern in American universities. In Germany it was the philosophers, threatened by the growing number of experimental psychologists in their midst, who eventually forced them out.

  That development led to the institutional crisis for German psychology that Wundt (1913) discussed in his essay, “Psychology’s Fight for Its Existence” (Die Psychologie im Kampf ums Dasein). In that work, Wundt was actually quite sympathetic to much of the philosophical opposition. He agreed that any limitation to one particular methodology for theory verification would be crippling for any discipline. With the movement toward experimentalism beginning to produce laboratory technical expertise to the degree that some experimental psychologists seemed more interested in apparatus than anything else, Wundt thought that these narrowly focused experimentalists, whom he was partly responsible for creating, would spend their time and talents better on improving the technology of sewing machines.

  The “Voluntarist’ School of Psychology

  Shortly after Wundt arrived in Leipzig, his school of thought became widely known, at least in Europe if not America, as the voluntarist school because of its emphasis on volition and self-control. This emphasis conformed to a strong accent in the language of the German philosophy of that day, but it is absent in most American textbooks. Most of those texts mistakenly assigned Titchener’s title for the Cornell school of thought—structuralism

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  A History of Modern Psychology

  • C. James Goodwin(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  (quoted in Blumenthal, 2001, p. 125) The Wundtian Legacy Because it was his intention to create a new way of conceptualizing psychology, Wundt is justifiably considered the first experimental psychologist of the modern era. Although it is difficult to identify a single Wundtian among the early American psychologists, he had a strong influence on the origins of American psychology. The Americans who studied with Wundt may not have returned as disciples, and Blumenthal (1980) suggested that most came back with little more than a laboratory floor plan and an apparatus list. Nonetheless, they emerged from Leipzig convinced that something new and exciting was in the air, and they wanted to be a part of it. American psychology quickly established its own distinc- tive and non-Wundtian shape, but much of the motivation for it derived from Wundt’s example. 6 The association/apperception difference was the key component of an important theory proposed by one of Wundt’s more famous students, the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926). Kraepelin devised a classification scheme for mental illness that produced the first clear description of what we call schizophrenia today. For more on Kraepelin and his system for diagnosing mental illness, see Chapter 12. THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY SPREADS 103 THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY SPREADS It should not be surprising to learn that Wundt did not hold a monopoly on the New Psychology. As you recall from the opening of this chapter, the Wissenschaft environment created an atmosphere conducive to the creation of a scientifically based examination of psychological phenomena. Sure enough, several German contemporaries of Wundt were actively engaged in exploring this new approach to understanding the human mind. We will examine the work of three of them here—Hermann Ebbinghaus, G. E. Müller, and Oswald Külpe. Chapter 9, on Gestalt Psychology, will describe the efforts of two others, Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf.

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  eBook - ePub

  Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology

  Volume III

  • Gregory A. Kimble, Michael Wertheimer(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Wundt was called to this professorship at a time when philosophy, which had always been very psychological in Germany, was widely viewed as suffering a prolonged lack of progress. A positivistic move developed in several universities there to bring methods of science into the service of philosophy. Wundt’s role, as one of a new generation of scientific philosophers, was to contribute to a new science-based philosophy at Leipzig. The result was experimental psychology.

  Although Wundt proclaimed experimental psychology to be a new science, he always saw it as a fundamental part of the philosophy department not a breakaway department, as was soon to be the pattern in American universities. In Germany it was the philosophers, threatened by the growing number of experimental psychologists in their midst, who eventually forced them out.

  That development led to the institutional crisis for German psychology that Wundt (1913) discussed in his essay, “Psychology’s Fight for Its Existence” (Die Psychologie im Kampf ums Dasein) . In that work, Wundt was actually quite sympathetic to much of the philosophical opposition. He agreed that any limitation to one particular methodology for theory verification would be crippling for any discipline. With the movement toward experimentalism beginning to produce laboratory technical expertise to the degree that some experimental psychologists seemed more interested in apparatus than anything else, Wundt thought that these narrowly focused experimentalists, whom he was partly responsible for creating, would spend their time and talents better on improving the technology of sewing machines.

  THE “VOLUNTARIST” SCHOOL OF PSYCHOLOGY

  Shortly after Wundt arrived in Leipzig, his school of thought became widely known, at least in Europe if not America, as the voluntarist school because of its emphasis on volition and self-control. This emphasis conformed to a strong accent in the language of the German philosophy of that day, but it is absent in most American textbooks. Most of those texts mistakenly assigned Titchener’s title for the Cornell school of thought—structuralism

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  Hergenhahn's An Introduction to the History of Psychology

  • Tracy Henley(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Holding in abeyance his views, we usually honor Wundt as the founder of scientific psychology for his tenacity in establishing it as an independent aca-demic discipline at Leipzig. As previously noted, he trained well over 100 doctoral students in psychol-ogy, including 14 Americans prior to 1900. As such, both his legacy and importance in the history of psychology is undisputed. Edward Bradford Titchener Born in Chichester, England, Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–1927) attended Malvern College, a prestigious secondary school. He then went to Oxford from 1885 to 1890, where his academic record was outstanding. While at Oxford, he devel-oped an interest in biology and then in experimen-tal psychology, and he translated the third edition of Wundt’s Principles of Physiological Psychology into English. Following graduation from Oxford, Titch-ener went to Leipzig and studied for two years with Wundt. During his first year at Leipzig, Titchener struck up a friendship with Frank Angell, a fel-low student who was to play an important role in bringing Titchener to the United States. Upon completing his studies with Wundt, Angell went to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, to estab-lish a psychological laboratory. After only one year, however, Angell decided to accept a position at Stanford University. When Titchener earned his doctorate in 1892, he was offered the job as Angell’s replacement. Titchener wanted the job at Oxford, but there he would have no labora-tory facilities. In 1892 he accepted the offer from Cornell and soon developed the largest doctoral program in psychology in the United States. When Titchener arrived at Cornell, he was 25 years old, and he remained there for the rest of his life. Beyond language, which was seen as the essence of social interaction, Wundt sought to understand such important questions as how morals arise within a culture, and how religion shapes our behavior.

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  A History of Modern Psychology

  • Duane Schultz(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  COMMENT We see, then, division and controversy enveloping psychology almost as soon as it was founded. But it must be emphasized that for all their differences, these early psychologists were united in theme and purpose. Wundt, Ebbinghaus, Brentano, Stumpf, and others had irrevocably changed the study of human nature. Because of their efforts, the new psychology was no longer a study of the soul, certainly not an inquiry by rational analysis into its simplicity, substantiality and immortality. It was a study, by observation and experiment, of certain reactions of the human organism not included in the subject matter of any other science. The German psychologists, in spite of their many differences, were to this extent engaged in a common 84 The New Psychology: Structuralism enterprise; and their ability, their industry, and the common direction of their labors all made the developments in the German universities the center of the new movement in psychology. (Heidbreder, 1933, p. 105) 7 O n e should not conclude that orthodox Wundtian structuralism was dead by the end of the nineteenth century. This was decidedly not the case, as we shall see from our discussion of W u n d t ' s stalwart standard-bearer, E. B. Titchener. SUGGESTED READINGS WUNDT Blumenthal, A. L. A reappraisal of Wilhelm Wundt. American Psychologist, 1975, 30, 1081-1088. Boring, E. G. On the subjectivity of important historical dates: Leipzig 1879. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1965, 1, 5-9. Bringmann, W., Balance, W., & Evans, R. Wilhelm Wundt 1832-1920: A brief biographical sketch. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1975, 11, 287-297. Cattell, J. McK. The psychological laboratory at Leipzig. Mind, 1888, 13, 37-51. Danziger, K. The positivist repudiation of Wundt. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1979, 15, 205-230. Leahey, T. H. Something old, something new: Attention in Wundt and modern cognitive psychology.

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  A History of Modern Psychology

  • C. James Goodwin(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  . . . All this, getting the apparatus and run-ning it, is very aggravating when one is in a hurry. (pp. 151–152) 96 CHAPTER 4 WUNDT AND GERMAN PSYCHOLOGY Throughout his career, Cattell never hesitated to speak his mind and was not known for modesty or discretion. In the following comment, made near the end of his time at Leipzig, he made it clear what he thought of Wundt’s laboratory. Letter to Parents, 22 January 1885 I worked in Wundt’s laboratory this afternoon probably for the last time . . . . Wundt’s laboratory has a reputation greater than it deserves—the work done is decid-edly amateurish. Work has only been done in two departments—the relation of the internal stimulus to the sensation [i.e., psychophysics], and the time of mental process [i.e., reaction time]. The latter is my subject—I started working on it at Balti-more [with Hall at Johns Hopkins] before I had read a word written by Wundt—what I did there was decidedly original. I’m quite sure my work is worth more than all done by Wundt & his pupils in this department, and as I have said it is one of the two departments on which they have worked. Mind I do not consider my work of any special importance—I only consider Wundt’s of still less. (p. 156) Rewriting History: The New and Improved Wilhelm Wundt In Chapter 1, you learned that histories are continually being rewritten in light of new information, new ways of interpreting information, and so on. Wundt’s psychology is a perfect illustration. If you had taken a history of psychology course about 50 years ago, you would have learned this about Wundt: • He founded the first “school” of psychology and called it structuralism. • The goal of Wundt’s structuralist school was to analyze the contents of the mind into its basic structural components or elements, using a highly complex form of introspection of mental con-tents as the chief method.

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  History of Modern Psychology

  A Global Perspective

  • C. James Goodwin(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  The Rediscovery of Wundt For two reasons, Wundt’s ideas began to be reexamined in the 1970s. First, as you recall from Chapter 1, during the late 1960s and early 1970s the history of psychology as a discipline gathered new momentum under the leadership of Robert Watson and others. To some extent, new scholarship directed at Wundt’s history reflects the increased interest in psychology’s history. The second reason is more subtle and provides another justification for the continual rewriting of history. As you will learn in Chapter 11, during the 1960s, cognitive psychology happened. That is, psychologists became increasingly interested in the experimental study of mental processes, a topic that had languished in America between 1930 and 1960, due to the influence of behaviorism. Some scholars versed in the new cognitive research saw connections between the cognitive psychology of the 1960s and the earlier Wundtian psychology. Indeed, some of the cognitive research methods essentially duplicated research completed at Leipzig, even though modern researchers seemed unaware of it. Psychologist–historians began examining Wundt’s work in light of the new cognitive psychology, producing papers that showed the connections between the two (Blumenthal, 1975; Leahey, 1979). The broader lesson is that histories can be strongly influenced by the context within which they are written. One effect of modern cognitive psychology was to view Wundt in a new light. In the days of behaviorism’s dominance, such a reexamination of Wundt would not have occurred. 112 CHAPTER 4 WUNDT AND GERMAN PSYCHOLOGY The Real Wundt The traditional but erroneous view of Wundt is that he was a structuralist. Now there is no question that one of Wundt’s goals for his laboratory work was to classify the elements of immediate conscious experience. After all, he was originally trained in medicine and physiology and had a natural penchant for classification.

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  An Historical Introduction To Modern Psychology

  • Gardner Murphy, Murphy, Gardner(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Physiological Psychology and established his laboratory, psychology was little more than a waif knocking now at the door of physiology, now at the door of ethics, now at the door of epistemology. In 1879, it was an experimental science with a local habitation and a name. Although he was unqualified to handle many phases of the new science, Wundt tried to bring together experimental psychology, child psychology, animal psychology, folk psychology; nothing that was psychology was foreign to him. He poured his energies into examination of nearly every corner of mental life. And even when he failed as an experimentalist, he stimulated a great quantity of research work, which led far beyond anything he was himself capable of imagining. It was through Wundt that the conception of an independent inductive psychology came into being. Through him, also, interchange of thought between persons working in the various branches of psychology was greatly facilitated.

  Such a synthesis, and the establishment of such an experimental movement were, of course, the natural outcome of the development of the biological sciences, especially within the German universities. Wundt was the fulfilment, not the origin, of the movement with which his name is associated. But to bring such a movement to its fulfilment, and to outline with vigour and earnestness the conception of an experimental psychology which should take its place among the natural sciences, was an achievement of such magnitude as to give him a unique position among the psychologists of the modern period.

  We have tried to emphasize the close relation between Wundt and his immediate followers, the fact that we cannot really distinguish between what Wundt himself did and what his pupils did. When we speak of the Wundtian laboratory we have to think of a group of individuals, drawn from many nations and speaking many languages, catching the master's enthusiasm for the creation of an experimental psychology, free both from its sister sciences and from philosophy. This viewpoint of Wundt inspired directly or indirectly a very large amount of research, and in discussing the work of individuals in the school it is a matter of opinion how far we should regard them, during their stay at Leipzig, as pursuing investigations in their own right. Work with the associationtest illustrates the point. Some of Wundt's pupils, however, began even while still with him the study of problems which were both envisaged and prosecuted with originality and relative independence.

  Cattell may be chosen as the most original and productive member of the Wundtian group. His work brilliantly exemplified the spirit of the school. This was partly through the fact that he succeeded in winning wide respect for the point of view and methods which he had seen at Leipzig; but he was also conspicuous for the versatility and volume of his own work, and the significance of the problems and results associated with his name.

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