Wilhelm Wundt

Wilhelm Wundt (1832—1920; Figure 6.1) was the pivotal figure of the era in which experimental psychology emerged as a separate discipline on the intellectual scene. Reported to have been humorless, aggressive, and an untiring worker, Herr Professor Dr. Wundt in his experimental work personified the spirit of post-Fechnerian systematic German psychology. But Wundt was actually less interested in experimental psychology (which he considered basic) than in what is now called cognitive psychology, sociocultural psychology, and psycholinguistics, not to mention philosophy. Recent scholarship has established that the view ofWundt that has pervaded English-language history of psychology, as primarily a systematic experimental psychologist, is a distortion that perhaps was fostered by Wundt’s student Titchener, and Titchener’s student Boring, possibly as an inadvertent consequence of their effort to add legitimacy to Titchener’s structuralism. Be that as it may,Wundt remains a major figure in psychology's history.

The Man and His Works

Wundt’s was a long, productive life, spanning a period of rapid change. In 1832, the year of his birth, the first railroad tracks were laid in Germany between Nürnberg and Fürth; this was also the year of Goethe’s death. People used horses for travel and candles to light their homes. Wundt lived until 1920, two years after the end ofWorld War I, by which time electricity, the radio, and the airplane had become commonplace.

Wilhelm Wundt had a quiet childhood; like Fechner and Friedrich Nietzsche, he spent his early years in a village pastor’s house. Several of his siblings died, and one brother left home early; much of the time he was the only child in the home, but his parents apparently did not pay much attention to him. He was taught by a tutor, a vicar who was his father’s assistant.The vicar left after a few years; what home must have meant to Wundt is shown by the fact that Wundt left with him.

When Wundt entered school, he did not do well, mostly, it seems, because of problems with social adjustment. His mind wandered; his work was so poor that he had to repeat one year, although later he did do well enough to keep up. When he was 19, he began attending Tübingen University in southern Germany and thereafter went to Heidelberg, where he studied medicine and became interested in physiology. His reason for going into medicine and earning an MD degree was

Figure 6.1 Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920).

strictly practical and economic—he chose it because he wanted to make a decent living.

After a year’s internship at Heidelberg, he realized he did not enjoy working with patients and went for a year to the University of Berlin to study with Johannes Müller. He received his medical degree at age 24 and started teaching at Heidelberg. Later Hermann von Helmholtz gave him an assistantship in his laboratory, and Wundt directed the exercises in Helmholtzs laboratory course in physiology. He started publishing while at Heidelberg and continued to be astonishingly prolific throughout the remainder of his career.

Wundt obtained his first regular teaching position in 1874 at Zürich, in Switzerland, as professor of philosophy in inductive logic. In 1875, to Wundts surprise, he received a call from the University of Leipzig to become professor of philosophy there; this was a major chair at the time. According to his autobiography, Wundt never knew why the offer came; it might have been because of the 1874 publication of his Physiological Psychology, or largely through Fechner’s influence, or perhaps because the physicist J. K. F. Zöllner (who has a well-known perceptual illusion named after him) was impressed with him.

At any rate, Wundt became professor of philosophy at Leipzig and stayed there until the end of his life (even though an attempt was made later to get him to go to Berlin, a university with even greater prestige). In 1875 he requested space for demonstrations, and by 1879 he had a functioning psychological research laboratory, the Psychologische Institut, which began as a single room.

At Leipzig he led the dedicated life of a scholar; he did not appear to be excited about anything other than his work. Even his wife and family received no more than one paragraph in his published autobiography. His dedication went so far that he analyzed his psychological experiences when he was very seriously ill and near death; at one point in his life he expressed interest in the idea of experiencing the process of dying.

During the first few years he had no assistant at the Institut; then, according to Wundt’s autobiography, Janies McKeen Cattell, his student, came to him and said, “in typical American fashion,’’“Herr Professor, you need an assistant, and I shall be he.” Cattell served for a time without pay; later the university provided funds for an assistant for Wundt and the Institut grew rapidly.

Many of the books Wundt wrote turned out to be important. In his late twenties, he published two books: one on the theory of muscular movement, and one titled Contributions to the Theory of Sense Perception. In his early thirties, because he needed it for his medical students while teaching for Helmholtz, he published his Textbook of Human Physiology; for the same reason, he published another, the Handbook of Medical Physics. In 1863 appeared what might be considered the first comparative psychology: Lectures on the Minds of Men and Animals. In 1874 he published his influential, lengthy Fundamentals of Physiological Psychology; the title was intended to imply, in part, that psychology should employ the same scientific methods as those used in physiology. This usage was to affect later practice as well as the book published by psychologist George Trumbull Ladd in the United States in 1887. In 1881, largely to serve as a publication outlet for research conducted in his laboratory, Wundt started a new psychological journal, Philosophische Studien, whose title was later changed to Psychologische Studien. During a period of about 12 years he published a series of books on philosophy, each a huge, compendious volume: a logic, an ethics, and a major systematic philosophy. His Outline of Psychology, which underwent many revisions before he died, first appeared in 1896.

Between 1900 (when he was 68) and 1920 (when he died at the age of 88) he published a series of 10 weighty volumes titled Völkerpsychologie, a kind of cultural psychology based on artifacts and institutional products. Concern with cultural psychology had been a major focus of influential German psychologists such as Hajim Steinthal and Moritz Lazarus for several decades by the time Wundt began publishing in this field. Many of these, as well as most of his other books, underwent several revisions before Wundt’s death. In recent years, his work on language and cognition, which had previously not been translated into English, was “rediscovered”; it contains many seminal ideas similar to ones current in the psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Indeed, to repeat what was said at the opening of this chapter, though Wundt is still widely seen as the founder of experimental psychology, it is now clear that he was much more interested in the problems discussed in his Völkerpsychologie (and rediscovered in the fields of psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology in the 1970s) than he was in experimental psychology as such.

As several historians have remarked, it is fitting to Wundts systematic nature that his autobiography appeared in 1920, the year of his death. It has also been proposed that Wundt’s enormous productivity was in part due to a gift from his assistant Cattell, who gave him a typewriter from the United States—the same typewriter that Cattell had used for his PhD thesis in 1886.