WUNDT, WILHELM (1832–1920), German physiologist, philosopher, and psychologist, was best known as the founder of experimental psychology. Born the son of a Lutheran pastor, near Mannheim, Wundt studied at Tübingen, Heidelberg, and Berlin, took his Ph.D. and M.D. degrees at Heidelberg, and taught at the universities of Heidelberg, Zurich, and Leipzig. Early in his teaching career at Heidelberg he wrote Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung (1858–1862), considered to be the first treatment of psychology as an experimental science, and Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Tierseele (1863). Perhaps his most important work for psychology was Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (1874), in which he advocated investigating the immediate experiences of consciousness using a method of introspection. In 1874 he was made professor of inductive philosophy at Zurich. In the following year, he accepted a professorship at Leipzig, where in 1879 he founded what is generally regarded as the world's first psychological laboratory. In 1881 he founded a journal of psychology, Philosophische Studien, which primarily published the results of research conducted at his Leipzig institute and which helped to establish experimental psychology as a separate discipline.
During his long career at Leipzig, Wundt's most important works were Grundriss der Psychologie (1896) and his Völkerpsychologie (10 vols., 1900–1920). These two works represent diverse streams that Wundt held together: his interest in physiological psychology and his more philosophical approach to the analysis of ethnic groups. For him, they were not so disparate; he considered psychology the science that could study the phenomena of human consciousness in both its individual and its group manifestations. In his Völkerpsychologie Wundt considered an immense amount of anthropological data. He viewed religion, myth, morality, art, and language as phenomena of long duration and therefore as constituting a psychic reality distinct from individual consciousness. Wundt discerned a "folk soul," which for him was not a substance but rather a psychic actuality that could be studied. The idea of a collective unconscious was quite foreign to Wundt, who rejected any idea of the unconscious, advising his students that its study by psychology was a mistake. Wundt focused instead on the objective forms of language, morality, and religion. Nevertheless, his earlier association studies anticipated and inspired the work of his student, Emil Kraepelin, in psychopathology, and stimulated the development of the association test used by C. G. Jung and his associates in Zurich.
Although social psychologists (except possibly for those in Germany during the Nazi period) have rejected any notion of a folk soul and have operated from premises different from those established by Wundt, social psychology has continued the study of the objective forms of religion in society. Wundt's interests in the universality of mythological motifs and the nature of the language of religion have been taken up by students in the fields of history of religions (although the evolutionary approach implicit in Wundt's more philosophical works has been rejected) and psychology of religion, especially from Freudian and Jungian perspectives.
Bibliography
The best recent studies of Wundt's work are two publications stemming from the celebration of the founding of his psychological laboratory in 1879: Wundt Studies: A Centennial Collection, edited by Wolfgang G. Bringmann and Ryan D. Tweney, with a foreword by Ernest R. Hilgard (Toronto, 1980), and Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology, edited by R. W. Rieber in collaboration with Arthur L. Blumenthal, Kurt Danziger, and Solomon Diamond (New York, 1980). Both are critical of Edwin G. Boring's evaluation of Wundt in A History of Experimental Psychology, 2d ed. (New York, 1950), which, however, provides considerable biographical data. A good summary of Wundt's legacy is found in Daniel N. Robinson's Toward a Science of Human Nature: Essays on the Psychologies of Mill, Hegel, Wundt, and James (New York, 1982).
New Sources
The most comprehensive recent monograph is Robert W. Rieber and David K. Robinson, Wilhelm Wundt in History. The Making of Scientific Psychology, New York, 2001. In German see Alfred Arnold, Wilhelm Wundt. Sein philosophysches System, Berlin, 1980, and the authoritative biography by Georg Lamberti, Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (1832–1920), Bonn, 1995.
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