Wilhelm Wundt

German psychologist

• Born: August 16, 1832
• Birthplace: Neckerau, Baden
• Died: August 31, 1920
• Place of death: Grossbothen, Germany

Wundt did much to develop psychology as an independent discipline. Beginning in 1879, Wundt established a psychological institute at the University of Leipzig, where he directed many experiments in which subjects studied their sensations and feelings. He was an effective teacher, who trained many of the next generation’s leading psychologists.

Early Life

Wilhelm Wundt (VIHL-hehlm vawnt) was born into a distinguished family that included two university presidents as well as theologians and other scholars. Wundt’s father was a Lutheran pastor. Wundt’s childhood was apparently lonely; indeed, even as an adult with a successful career, Wundt was generally shy and withdrawn. When Wundt was eight, he came under the tutelage of his father’s assistant, a young vicar whose guidance supported Wundt for several years. After failing his first year at the Roman Catholic gymnasium at Neckarau, Wundt transferred to the Heidelberg gymnasium, where he was more comfortable, and was graduated in 1851.

Wundt’s scholastic record was mediocre, but with the help of his maternal uncle he gained admission to the premedical program at the University of Tübingen, where he stayed for only a year before transferring to the University of Heidelberg. His diligence earned for Wundt a summa cum laude in three years and a first place on the state board medical examination.

After a year of study at the University of Berlin, Wundt returned to Heidelberg in 1857 as a lecturer in physiology, but he overworked himself preparing lectures on experimental psychology and contracted a serious illness that forced him to recuperate for a year in the Swiss Alps. In 1858, Wundt took a position as assistant to the distinguished physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, who had been appointed head of the Institute of Physiology at the University of Heidelberg. Wundt wearied of his tenure with Helmholtz and resigned in 1863, but by that time he had published his first book and launched what was to become an astonishingly prolific scholarly career.

Wundt became active in politics in the 1860’s, serving as president of the Heidelberg Workingmen’s Educational Association and completing two terms in the Baden parliament. In 1871, however, he returned to the University of Heidelberg for three more years; during this period, he published one of the most important books in the history of psychology, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (2 vols., 1873-1874; Principles of Physiological Psychology , vol. 1, 1904). Wundt revised this work in six more editions through 1911, and it remained the basis for his work in experimental psychology.

After three final years at Heidelberg, Wundt left there for the University of Zurich. His stay at Zurich was brief; after one year, he moved to the University of Leipzig to accept the chair in philosophy. He remained at Leipzig for the remainder of his life, establishing and lecturing in the Psychological Institute, from which he derived his fame as an educator.

Life’s Work

The Psychological Institute began in 1879 in makeshift quarters, and, before it was given better housing in 1897, Wundt had trained a large number of the best-known experimental psychologists of the next generation. Wundt’s institute was especially influential in its nurturing of the most prominent American psychologists, among them Granville Stanley Hall and the English-born Edward Bradford Titchener. In 1881, Wundt founded a journal, Philosophische Studien, as the voice of the new institute. In the same decade, he published a series of philosophical tomes: Logik , in two volumes (1880-1883), Ethik: Eine Untersuchung der Thatsachen und Gesetze des sittlichen Lebens (1886; Ethics: An Investigation of the Facts and Laws of the Moral Life , 1897-1901), and System der Philosophie (1889). His scholarly output in the 1880’s was prodigious. Besides the three long philosophical works, Wundt published numerous articles in Philosophische Studien as well as the second and third revised editions of the two-volume Principles of Physiological Psychology.

This huge work was an attempt to explain the mind in a series of elements interrelated by the principle of association, a holdover from earlier theorizing about the mind in England. This period in Wundt’s career culminated in his appointment in 1889 as rector of the University of Leipzig.

The 1890’s were no less fruitful, producing a fourth edition of Principles of Physiological Psychology (1893), an important theory of feeling presented in Grundriss der Psychologie (1896; Outlines of Psychology , 1897), several revisions of the earlier philosophical works, and more articles. In Outlines of Psychology, Wundt built on the Principles of Physiological Psychology and tried to demonstrate a three-part structure to explain feelings. Wundt believed that feelings can be measured in terms of their pleasantness or unpleasantness, their degree of strain or relaxation, and their components of excitement or calm. The basis for this analysis was the unverifiable record of personal experience and its effect was to enrich the theoretical understanding of the workings of the mind. Wundt’s efforts to find experimental evidence for this new theory led to strenuous testing by others in Germany and the United States, and although the results were equivocal, the work was important in fostering the studies of the new laboratories.

The century ended with the publication of the first volume of Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie (1900; cultural psychology), an immense undertaking that reached ten volumes by 1920. Völkerpsychologie occupies a problematic position in the huge corpus of Wundt’s work. Two of its volumes treat aspects of language, two are on myth and religion, two are on society, and one each is on art, law, culture, and history.

The special nature of the Völkerpsychologie can be explained by the German differentiation between Naturwissenschaften, or natural science, and Geisteswissenschaften, the less rigorous observation that does not depend on experimental evidence. Historians of experimental psychology have understandably slighted Völkerpsychologie, but Wundt obviously saw the work as an integral part of his complete vision of the study of the mind’s workings and not as a late interest attached as a huge footnote to his experimental work. He had indeed defined the topic as early as 1862, explaining it more fully in 1904 in a reference to “other sources of psychological knowledge, which become accessible at the very point where the experimental method fails us.”

Significance

Wundt’s major contribution was his establishment of the psychological institute that put psychology on a firm experimental basis, dividing it from metaphysics. The use of such instruments as tachistoscopes, pendulums, and sensory mapping apparatus put psychology into the laboratory, and it is now difficult to imagine the intensity of some of Wundt’s opponents. There were those, for example, who predicted that self-conscious examination of one’s mental and emotional responses would lead to insanity. Wundt’s laboratory studies involved the recording by trained subjects of their mental reactions to controlled events, and from these studies Wundt isolated two elements of the mind, sensation and feeling. In Outlines of Psychology, Wundt went beyond the associationist theory that influenced him in Principles of Physiological Psychology to advance a picture of the mind’s creative vitality: The mind was to be seen not as a mechanical manipulator of static elements but as an organic and dynamic synthesis of the mental and the physical.

Wundt was a teacher of great influence and authority who assigned research projects to students and directed dissertations. In the roughly four decades that he ran his laboratory, Wundt directed 186 doctoral theses, 70 in philosophy and the others in psychology. (His most famous student, however, was not a psychologist but Hugo Eckener, commander of the Graf Zeppelin.) The list of Wundt’s students who founded their own psychology laboratories in the United States includes Frank Angell, Edward A. Pace, and Edward Scripture. Lightner Witmer started the first psychological clinic in the United States in 1896, three years after he received his degree under Wundt. Harry Kirke Wolfe founded the Department of Psychology at the University of Nebraska; Charles Judd, who translated Wundt’s Outlines of Psychology into English, founded both the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the psychology laboratory at New York University. Wundt’s influence was so strong that, by 1900, twelve of the forty-three psychological laboratories in the United States had been started by former students of Wundt.

Wundt was not flamboyant, but he drew large gatherings of students to his lectures and taught more than twenty-four thousand students during his long career. He continued to be interested in politics throughout his life and spoke ardently in support of the German cause in World War I, judging France, Russia, and especially England to be coconspirators against Germany.

Bibliography

Blumenthal, Arthur. “A Reappraisal of Wilhelm Wundt.” American Psychologist 30 (1975): 1081-1083. A much-praised fresh look at Wundt that takes Völkerpsychologie seriously and sees Wundt’s work as more of a piece.

Hamner, M. Gail. American Pragmatism: A Religious Genealogy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Hamner looks at the ideas of several European psychologists, including Wundt, to trace their influence on American pragmatic philosophers William James and Charles Sanders Peirce. Chapter 2, “Wilhelm Wundt,” provides an overview of Wundt’s ideas.

Hilgard, Ernest R. Psychology in America: A Historical Survey. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. Chapter 2 gives a succinct account of Wundt as a “systematic psychologist,” treating him with William James.

Hothersall, David. History of Psychology. 4th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004. Chapter 4, “Wilhelm Wundt and the Founding of Psychology” is divided into sections such as “Wundt the Man,” “Wundt as Advisor,” and “Wundt’s Research” that provide an excellent overview of Wundt and his career.

Littman, Richard. “Social and Intellectual Origins of Experimental Psychology.” In The First Century of Experimental Psychology, edited by Eliot Hearst. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1979. A useful look at Wundt’s work from a modern perspective.

Pickren, Wade E., and Donald A. Dewsbury. Evolving Perspectives on the History of Psychology. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2002. “A Reappraisal of Wilhelm Wundt” is one of the essays included in this collection of essays tracing the history of psychology.

Rieber, Robert W., and David K. Robinson, eds. Wilhelm Wundt in History: The Making of a Scientific Psychology. Rev. ed. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2001. A valuable collection of essays on Wundt, extensively revised since their initial publication in 1980. The essays include “Personal History Before Leipzig,” articles about Wundt’s influence, and appreciations by Wundt’s contemporaries.

Robinson, Daniel N. Toward a Science of Human Nature: Essays on the Psychologies of Mill, Hegel, Wundt, and James. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Superb essays in intellectual history, elaborating the approach in Wundt’s time to such issues as the mind-body problem and definitions of the self. Very stimulating but not for beginners.

Wertheimer, Michael. A Brief History of Psychology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. The two chapters “Wilhelm Wundt” and “The Contemporary Scene in the Age of Wundt” offer a convenient introduction to the subject.