Log In

Wilhelm Max Wundt Edit Profile

philosopher physician physiologist

Wilhelm Max Wundt was the German psychologist, philosopher, physicianr and linguist responsible for setting up the first psychology laboratory. He is noted for his active work in the late 1800s and early 1900s, at a time when the future of the discipline of psychology was unsure. His laboratory became a focus for those with a serious interest in psychology, first for German philosophers and psychology students, then for American and British.

Background

Wilhelm Wundt was born on 16 August 1832 in Baden, in a suburb of Mannheim called Neckarau. He was the seventeenth child to parents Maximilian Wundt, a Lutheran minister, and his wife Marie Frederike. The family moved when Wilhelm was six to the town of Heidenheim, in central Baden.

Education

By all accounts, he was a precocious, peculiar boy, schooled mainly by his father’s assistant, the vicar, Friedrich Müller; young Wilhelm was so attached to Müller that he moved in with him when the latter got a post in a neighboring village. Wundt attended the gymnasium at Bruschel and at Heidelberg, the University of Tübingen at 19, in 1851 for a year, then Heidelberg for more than 3 years, receiving a medical degree in 1856.

Career

Wilhelm Max Wundt was 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.

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.

Wundt died near Leipzig on 31 August 1920.

Achievements

  • Wilhelm Max Wundt was the founder of experimental psychology. Wilhelm Wundt opened the Institute for Experimental Psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany in 1879. This was the first laboratory dedicated to psychology, and its opening is usually thought of as the beginning of modern psychology.

    Wundt also developed a research technique known as introspection, in which highly trained observers would study and report the content of their own thoughts.

    It was Wundt's work and his establishment of a psychology laboratory that cemented psychology's identity as a legitimate discipline. His revolutionary approach to psychological experimentation moved psychological study from the domain of philosophy and the natural sciences and began to utilize physiological experimental techniques in the laboratory. He is therefore often referred to as the "father of experimental psychology."

    He was credited with the Honorary doctorates from the Universities of Leipzig and Göttingen. 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.

Works

All works

Religion

He grew up in a Lutheran family.

Politics

Wundt was a Liberal during his early Heidelberg time, affiliated with a Workers’ Education Union (Arbeiterbildungsverein), and as a politician in the Baden State Parliament. In old age he appeared to become more conservative, then – also in response to the war, the subsequent social unrest and the severe revolutionary events of the post-war period – adopted an attitude that was patriotic and leant towards nationalism.

Views

To Wundt, the essence of all total adjustments of the organism was a psychophysical process, an organic response mediated by both the physiological and the psychological. He pioneered the concept of stating mental events in relation to objectively knowable and measurable stimuli and reactions. Wundt perceived psychology as part of an elaborate philosophy where mind is seen as an activity, not a substance. The basic mental activity was designated by Wundt as 'apperception'.

Physiological psychology was concerned with the process of excitations from stimulation of the sense organs, through sensory neurons to the lower and higher brain centers, and from these centers to the muscles. Parallel with this process ran the events of mental life, known through introspection. Introspection became, for Wundt, the primary tool of experimental psychology. In Wundt's 1893 edition of Physiological Psychology, he published the 'tridimensional theory of feeling': feelings were classified as pleasant or unpleasant, tense or relaxed, excited or depressed. A given feeling might be at the same time a combination of one of each of the categories.

Wundt's method of introspection did not remain a fundamental tool of psychological experimentation past the early 1920's. His greatest contribution was to show that psychology could be a valid experimental science. His influence in promoting psychology as a science was enormous. Despite poor eyesight, Wundt, it has been estimated, published 53,000 pages, enough to stock a complete library.

As noted above, a primary preoccupation of many early psychologists, such as Wundt and Fechner, was with the measurement of powers of sensory discrimination, resulting in the theory and methodology of psychophysics, the science of quantitative relations between physical magnitudes and sensations. This interest with measurements led Wundt to develop what would be the foundation for Binet's scale of intelligence. Binet had developed a scale where specific tasks were directly correlated to different levels of abilities or a mental age. However, Binet was not suggesting that each task would correspond exactly and reliably to a particular mental level. As the scale developed, Binet found it necessary to use a number of tasks at each level to determine mental age. At this point, the task of determining a person's mental age was reminiscent of one of the psychophysical methods developed by Wundt to determine the level of a person's sensitivity to faint stimuli or to small physical differences in stimuli.

Quotations: "Why does not psychology follow the example of the natural sciences? It is an understanding that, from every side of the history of the natural sciences, informs us that the progress of every science is closely connected with the progress made regarding experimental methods."

Wundt believed that physiological psychology had the following task: "firstly, to investigate those life processes that are centrally located, between external and internal experience, which make it necessary to use both observation methods simultaneously, external and internal, and, secondly, to illuminate and, where possible, determine a total view of human existence from the points of view gained from this investigation." "The attribute ‘physiological’ is not saying that it … [physiological psychology] … wants to reduce the psychology to physiology – which I consider impossible – but that it works with physiological, i.e. experimental, tools and, indeed, more so than is usual in other psychology, takes into account the relationship between mental and physical processes." "If one wants to treat the peculiarities of the method as the most important factor then our science – as experimental psychology – differs from the usual science of the soul purely based on self-observation."

"We therefore generally describe the epitome of the methods as interpretation that is intended to provide us with an understanding of mental processes and intellectual creation." Wundt clearly referred to the tradition of humanistic hermeneutics, but argued that the interpretation process basically also followed psychological principles. Interpretation only became the characteristic process of the humanities through criticism. It is a process that is set against interpretation to dismantle the interaction produced through psychological analysis. It examines external or internal contradictions, it should evaluate the reality of intellectual products, and is also a criticism of values and a criticism of opinions. The typical misconceptions of the intellectualistic, individualistic and unhistorical interpretation of intellectual processes all have "their source in the habitually coarse psychology based on subjective assessment."

Membership

He was honorary member in 12 Scientific Organizations (Societies) and a corresponding member in 13 Academies in Germany and abroad.

Personality

Reserved and shy in public, Wundt aggressively dominated his chosen arenas, the lecture hall and the pages of books, with a witty and sardonic persona.

Quotes from others about the person

  • Wundt was only a rather ordinary man who has worked up certain things uncommonly well.

Connections

In 1867, near Heidelberg, Wundt met Sophie Mau (1844–1912). She was the eldest daughter of the Kiel theology professor Heinrich August Mau and his wife Louise, née von Rumohr, and a sister of the archaeologist August Mau. They married on 14 August 1872 in Kiel. The couple had three children: Eleanor (1876–1957), who became an assistant to her father in many ways, Louise, called Lilli, (1880–1884) and Max Wundt (1879–1963), who became a philosopher.

Wife:
Sophie Mau

1844–1912, she was the eldest daughter of the Kiel theology professor Heinrich August Mau and his wife Louise, née von Rumohr, and a sister of the archaeologist August Mau.

Daughter:
Louise Wundt

1880–1884

Daughter:
Eleanor Wundt

She assisted her father in his work.

Son:
Max Wundt

He became a philosopher.

colleague:
Edward Bradford Titchener

While Wundt is typically associated with structuralism, it was actually his student Edward B. Titchener who influenced the structuralist school in America.