| Wilhelm Wundt | |
|---|---|
| Born | 16 August 1832 Neckarau near Mannheim, Grand Duchy of Baden, German Confederation |
| Died | 31 August 1920 (aged 88) Großbothen near Leipzig, Germany[1] |
| Residence | Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Fields | Psychology, Physiology |
| Institutions | University of Leipzig |
| Alma mater | University of Heidelberg |
| Doctoral students | Edward B. Titchener, G. Stanley Hall, Oswald Külpe, Hugo Münsterberg, Vladimir Bekhterev, James McKeen Cattell, Lightner Witmer[2] |
| Known for | Psychology, Voluntarism |
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (16 August 1832 - 31 August 1920 in Germany) was a German physician, psychologist, physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founding figures of modern psychology. He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology".[3][4][5] In 1879, Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research at the University of Leipzig.
By creating this laboratory he was able to explore the nature of religious beliefs, identify mental disorders and abnormal behavior, and find damaged parts of the brain. In doing so, he was able to establish psychology as a separate science from other topics. He also formed the first journal for psychological research in 1881.
Asteroid 635 Vundtia is named in his honour.
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Wundt was born at Neckarau, Baden on August 16th,[6] 1832 (now part of Mannheim), the fourth child to parents Maximilian Wundt (a Lutheran minister), and his wife Marie Frederike. When about four years of age, Wundt's family moved to Heidelsheim which was known to be a small town. He studied from 1851 to 1856 at the University of Tübingen, University of Heidelberg, and the University of Berlin. After graduating in medicine from Heidelberg (1856), Wundt studied briefly with Johannes Peter Müller, before joining the University's staff, becoming an assistant to the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz in 1858. There he wrote Contributions to the Theory of Sense Perception (1858–62).[7] In 1865, he wrote a textbook about human physiology. In 1867 he became a professor in acquainting medical students with the exact physical needs for medical investigation. In 1874, he became a professor of "Inductive Philosophy" in Zurich. In 1875, he moved back to Leipzig.
He married Sophie Mau while at Heidelberg. It was during this period that Wundt offered the first course ever taught in scientific psychology, all the while stressing the use of experimental methods drawn from the natural sciences, emphasizing the physiological relationship of the human brain and the mind. His background in physiology would have a great effect on his approach to the new science of psychology. His lectures on psychology were published as Lectures on the Mind of Humans and Animals in 1863-1864. He was promoted to Assistant Professor of Physiology at Heidelberg in 1864.[7] Weber (1795–1878) and Fechner (1801–1887), who worked at Leipzig, inspired Wundt's interest in neuropsychology.
Wundt applied himself to writing a work that came to be one of the most important in the history of psychology, Principles of Physiological Psychology in 1874. This was the first textbook that was written pertaining to the field of psychology.[8]The Principles utilized a system of psychology that sought to investigate the immediate experiences of consciousness, including feelings, emotions, volitions and ideas, mainly explored through Wundt's system of "internal perception", or the self-examination of conscious experience by objective observation of one's consciousness.
Wundt proclaimed that a human's soul – if indeed they had one – was irrelevant, as humans could only be understood in terms of physically observable phenomena. A search for the spiritual nature of humans, he reasoned, was a waste of time as there was no psyche. Thus psychology became the study of the spirit which denied the spirit. The subject of psychology thereafter became prevalent in universities.
Parts of Wundt's system were developed and championed by his one-time student, Titchener, who described his system as Structuralism. Several of Wundt's works, including Principles of Physiological Psychology, are considered fundamentally important texts in the field of psychology. Though widely recognized as important in the birth and growth of psychology, his influence in psychology today is a subject of continuing debate among experts. Wundt was also notable in the field of psycholinguistics. For example, the influential Leonard Bloomfield based his linguistics textbook, published in 1914, on Wundtian psychology. Wundt hypothesized that the mental sentence, or "inner psychological construction", determines the unfolding sentence, and should therefore be regarded as a unit of speech.[9]
In 1886, in his book Ethics, Wundt formulated the famous expression heterogony of ends (Heterogonie der Zwecke).[10][11]
Though Wundt wrote extensively on a variety of subjects including philosophy, physics, physiology, psycholinguistics, and of course psychology, the immensity of his collected writings and the 65 year-long duration of his career makes it difficult to identify a single, coherent mode of thought.[3] Wundt is argued by some writers to have been a devout foundationalist, working tirelessly to understand the intricacies of the areas of knowledge he studied to form a coherent, atomistic understanding of the universe.[12] In recognition of Wundt's work, the American Psychological Association established the "Wilhelm Wundt-William James Award for Exceptional Contributions to Trans-Atlantic Psychology", which recognizes "a significant record of trans-Atlantic research collaboration." [13]
Several of Wundt's students became eminent psychologists in their own right. They include: the Germans Oswald Külpe (a professor at the University of Würzburg), Ottmar Dittrich (who continued Wundt's work in psycholinguistics by heading the group on phonetics and psychology of language at the University of Leipzig); the Americans James McKeen Cattell (the first professor of psychology in the United States), G. Stanley Hall (the father of the child psychology movement and adolescent developmental theorist, head of Clark University), Charles Hubbard Judd (Director of the School of Education at the University of Chicago), Hugo Münsterberg, Walter Dill Scott (who contributed to the development of industrial psychology and taught at Harvard University), Edward Bradford Titchener (who founded the first psychology laboratory in the United States at Cornell University), Lightner Witmer (founder of the first psychological clinic in his country); the Englishman Charles Spearman (who developed the two-factor theory of intelligence and several important statistical analyses - see Factor analysis, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient); the Romanian Constantin Rădulescu-Motru (Personalist philosopher and head of the Philosophy department at the University of Bucharest).
Wundt's laboratory students called their approach Ganzheit Psychologie ("holistic psychology") following Wundt's death. Much of Wundt's work was derided mid-century in the United States because of a lack of adequate translations, misrepresentations by certain students, and behaviorism's polemic with the structuralist program. Titchener, a two-year resident of Wundt's lab and one of Wundt's most vocal advocates in the United States, is responsible for several English translations and mistranslations of Wundt's works that supported his own views and approach, which he termed "structuralism" and claimed was wholly consistent with Wundt's position.
Titchener's focus on internal structures of mind was rejected by behaviorists following the ideas of B. F. Skinner; the latter dominated psychological studies in the mid-1900s. Part of this rejection included Wundt, whose work was eclipsed during this period. In later decades, his actual positions and techniques have seen reconsideration and reassessment by major psychologists.
An optical illusion described by him is called the Wundt illusion
To name all of Wundt's publications would exceed the scope of an encyclopœdia article. The American psychologist Edwin Boring (1960) numbered the volume of Wundt's Bibliography at over 490 works, which are on average 110 pages long. Wundt published in 68 years an average of seven works a year, making him probably the most prolific scientist of all time.[14][15]
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