Unit 3

When Wilhelm Wundt was around 29, he began his investigations into what could be labeled psychology. He was interested in the “personal equation” errors identified by Frederick Bessel. In these early studies he was trying to determine if he could pay attention to two things at once: the answer, he concluded, is ‘no.’

For many reasons, Wundt is the designated founder of psychology. “He established the first laboratory, edited the first journal, and began experimental psychology as a science.” Although Fechner’s scientific work came earlier and has been more enduring, Wundt deliberately set out to found the discipline and promoted the idea of systematic experimentation.

As a boy Wundt was more preoccupied with daydreaming than with his studies, and it seemed as if he was not to attain the scholarship that was prevalent in his family line. He eventually earned admittance to university studies. After having some training to become a physician he changed his mind and focused on physiology. He studied under Johannes Müller, and later was a laboratory assistant to Helmholtz.

He began to see psychology as its own discipline and published this idea in his book Contributions to the Theory of Sensory Perception (published across1858-1862) in which he used the phrase “experimental psychology” for the first time. He taught “a course at Heidelberg on physiological psychology” which is really synonymous with experimental psychology and lectures from this course were published in 1873-1874 in an important book called Principles of Physiological Psychology, which is published in “six editions over 37 years.”

In 1875 Wundt became a professor at the University of Leipzig where he stayed for 45 years. There, he began a laboratory and in 1881 established the first psychology journal Philosophical Studies.

His reputation and work drew students from all around the world (for examples, the U.S., Italy, Russia, Japan), many of whom, on returning to their own countries, became pioneers in their own right. “Wundt was a popular lecturer. At one time the enrollment in his Leipzig courses exceeded 600 students.”

His work “days were carefully regimented.” Between 1900 and 1920 his multi-volume work Cultural Psychology was published, in which he explored the roles of such things as language, arts, customs, etc in society. For Wundt, this was the way to study higher mental processes. Over his working life (from 1853 to 1920, the year he died) he is estimated to have written about 2.2 pages of material per day.

For Wundt, psychology meant the study of consciousness. He named his system of psychology voluntarism which reflected his belief in the mind willing itself to organize into higher cognitive processes. Unlike the British empiricists, Wundt was not interested in the elements of consciousness per se, but instead on “the process of actively organizing…those elements.”

Because governmental officials did not see any practical value in Wundt’s psychology, and because Wundt himself was uninterested in applying psychology, the field remained small in Germany and tended to be grouped with other disciplines (such as philosophy).

Meanwhile in the U.S. psychology grew quickly, but as an applied discipline.

There were substantial criticisms of Wundt and his work. First, there were differences in the reports of introspective observers. Second, his nationalistic defense of Germany in World War I caused many U.S. psychologists to turn from his system. Third, other schools of thought rose in Germany, Austria, and the U.S. to oppose his system. Last, because of the economic ruin of Germany after World War I, many universities suffered from a lack of funding.

Despite the fact that his scientific findings have for the most part not survived, Wundt’s legacy is that he purposefully founded a new science, created a laboratory which was designed to add new knowledge to psychology, created the first psychology journal, and taught hundreds of students (many of whom founded their own labs).

Franz Brentano’s work rose in opposition to Wundt’s system. He is a precursor to two schools of psychology: Gestalt and humanism. Brentano argued that psychology should not “study the content of conscious experience” as Wundt proposed, but rather should study the actions of consciousness (his system is called Act psychology to reflect this stance).

Act psychology makes introspection useless because acts “are not accessible through introspection.” Such acts could only be studied through recalling mental processes and/or imagining them. One of his students was Sigmund Freud.

James is counted as one of the most influential psychologists in history, but at the same time he eschewed psychology as a science.

James was born into a very wealthy family and received his schooling in the U.S. and abroad yet was sickly as a child and adult. Eventually he entered Harvard, but changed his studies from chemistry to medicine, dabbling in zoology/biology, then back to medicine. He suffered from “neurasthenia”, which appeared to be neurotic in origin.

Through readings, James began to develop his own philosophy, and came to believe in free will. He also became interested in “mind-altering chemicals.” The idea that body states would affect conscious experience was fascinating to him

He accepted a teaching position at Harvard in 1872 and three years later taught a course in Psychology, the first such course ever taught in the United States. He published The Principles of Psychology in 1890, which became one of the most influential books in psychology.

“In The Principles of Psychology, James presents what eventually became the central tenet of American functionalism—that the goal of psychology is…the study of living people as they adapt to their environment.”