Introspection wilhelm wundt biography

Leibniz developed a new concept of the soul through his discussion on substance and actuality , on dynamic spiritual change, and on the correspondence between body and soul parallelism. Wundt secularised such guiding principles and reformulated important philosophical positions of Leibniz away from belief in God as the creator and belief in an immortal soul.

Wundt gained important ideas and exploited them in an original way in his principles and methodology of empirical psychology: the principle of actuality, psychophysical parallelism, combination of causal and teleological analysis, apperception theory, the psychology of striving , i. Wundt's differentiation between the "natural causality" of neurophysiology and the "mental causality" of psychology the intellect , is a direct rendering from Leibniz's epistemology.

Wundt devised the term psychophysical parallelism and meant thereby two fundamentally different ways of considering the postulated psychophysical unit, not just two views in the sense of Fechner's theory of identity. Wundt derived the co-ordinated consideration of natural causality and mental causality from Leibniz's differentiation between causality and teleology principle of sufficient reason.

The psychological and physiological statements exist in two categorically different reference systems ; the main categories are to be emphasised in order to prevent category mistakes. With his epistemology of mental causality, he differed from contemporary authors who also advocated the position of parallelism. Wundt had developed the first genuine epistemology and methodology of empirical psychology.

Wundt shaped the term apperception, introduced by Leibniz, into an experimental psychologically based apperception psychology that included neuropsychological modelling. When Leibniz differentiates between two fundamental functions, perception and striving, this approach can be recognised in Wundt's motivation theory. The central theme of "unity in the manifold" unitas in multitudine also originates from Leibniz, who has influenced the current understanding of perspectivism and viewpoint dependency.

Unlike the great majority of contemporary and current authors in psychology, Wundt laid out the philosophical and methodological positions of his work clearly. Wundt was against the founding empirical psychology on a metaphysical or structural principle of soul as in Christian belief in an immortal soul or in a philosophy that argues "substance"- ontologically.

Wundt's guiding principle was the development theory of the mind. Wundt's ethics also led to polemical critiques due to his renunciation of an ultimate transcendental basis of ethics God, the Absolute. Wundt's evolutionism was also criticised for its claim that ethical norms had been culturally changed in the course of human intellectual development.

Wundt's autobiography [ 87 ] and his inaugural lectures in Zurich and Leipzig [ 88 ] as well as his commemorative speeches for Fechner [ 89 ] and his Essay on Leibniz [ 90 ] provide an insight into the history of Wundt's education and the contemporary flows and intellectual controversies in the second half of the 19th century. Wundt distanced himself from the metaphysical term soul and from theories about its structure and properties, as posited by Herbart, Lotze, and Fechner.

Wundt followed Kant and warned against a primarily metaphysically founded, philosophically deduced psychology: "where one notices the author's metaphysical point-of-view in the treatment of every problem then an unconditional empirical science is no longer involved — but a metaphysical theory intended to serve as an exemplification of experience.

Psychology and the other sciences always rely on the help of philosophy here, and particularly on logic and epistemology, otherwise only an immanent philosophy, i. He is concerned about psychologists bringing their own personal metaphysical convictions into psychology and that these presumptions would no longer be exposed to epistemological criticism.

Wundt claimed that philosophy as a general science has the task of "uniting to become a consistent system through the general knowledge acquired via the individual sciences. Starting from the active and creative-synthetic apperception processes of consciousness, Wundt considered that the unifying function was to be found in volitional processes and the conscious setting of objectives and subsequent activities.

Wundt extrapolated this empirically founded volitional psychology to a metaphysical voluntarism. He demands, however, that the empirical-psychological and derived metaphysical voluntarism are kept apart from one another and firmly maintained that his empirical psychology was created independently of the various teachings of metaphysics.

Wundt interpreted intellectual-cultural progress and biological evolution as a general process of development whereby, however, he did not want to follow the abstract ideas of entelechy , vitalism , animism , and by no means Schopenhauer's volitional metaphysics. He believed that the source of dynamic development was to be found in the most elementary expressions of life, in reflexive and instinctive behaviour, and constructed a continuum of attentive and apperceptive processes, volitional or selective acts, up to social activities and ethical decisions.

At the end of this rational idea he recognised a practical ideal: the idea of humanity as the highest yardstick of our actions and that the overall course of human history can be understood with regard to the ideal of humanity. Parallel to Wundt's work on cultural psychology he wrote his much-read Ethik , 3rd ed. Wundt considered the questions of ethics to be closely linked with the empirical psychology of motivated acts [ ] "Psychology has been such an important introduction for me, and such an indispensable aid for the investigation of ethics, that I do not understand how one could do without it.

The derived principles are to be examined in a variety of areas: the family, society, the state, education, etc. In his discussion on free will as an attempt to mediate between determinism and indeterminism he categorically distinguishes between two perspectives: there is indeed a natural causality of brain processes, though conscious processes are not determined by an intelligible, but by the empirical character of humans — volitional acts are subject to the principles of mental causality.

On the one hand, Ethics is a normative discipline while, on the other hand, these 'rules' change, as can be seen from the empirical examination of culture-related morality. Wundt's ethics can, put simply, be interpreted as an attempt to mediate between Kant's apriorism and empiricism. Moral rules are the legislative results of a universal intellectual development, but are neither rigidly defined nor do they simply follow changing life conditions.

Individualism and utilitarianism are strictly rejected. In his view, only the universal intellectual life can be considered to be an end in itself. Wundt also spoke on the idea of humanity in ethics, on human rights and human duties in his speech as Rector of Leipzig University in on the centenary of the French Revolution. Wundt divided up his three-volume Logik into General logic and epistemology, Logic of the exact sciences, and Logic of the humanities.

While logic, the doctrine of categories, and other principles were discussed by Wundt in a traditional manner, they were also considered from the point of view of development theory of the human intellect, i. The subsequent equitable description of the special principles of the natural sciences and the humanities enabled Wundt to create a new epistemology.

The ideas that remain current include epistemology and the methodology of psychology: the tasks and directions of psychology, the methods of interpretation and comparison, as well as psychological experimentation. The American psychologist Edwin Boring counted publications by Wundt excluding pure reprints but with revised editions that are, on average, pages long and amount to a total of 53, pages.

Thus Wundt published an average of seven works per year over a period of 68 years and wrote or revised an average of 2. Apart from his library and his correspondence, Wundt's extraordinarily extensive written inheritance also includes many extracts, manuscripts, lecture notes and other materials [ ] Wundt's written inheritance in Leipzig consists of 5, documents, mainly letters, and was digitalised by the Leipzig University Library.

The catalogue is available at the Kalliope online portal. The university's stock consists of 6, volumes in western languages including bound periodicals as well as 9, special print runs and brochures from the original Wundt Library. The last Wundt biography which tried to represent both Wundt's psychology and his philosophy was by Eisler One can also get an idea of Wundt's thoughts from his autobiography Erlebtes und Erkanntes Later biographies by Nef and Petersen up to Arnold in restrict themselves primarily to the psychology or the philosophy.

Eleonore Wundt's knowledgeable but short biography of her father exceeds many others' efforts. At the start of the First World War, Wundt, like Edmund Husserl and Max Planck , signed the patriotic call to arms as did about 4, professors and lecturers in Germany, and during the following years he wrote several political speeches and essays that were also characterized by the feeling of a superiority of German science and culture.

During Wundt's early Heidelberg time he espoused liberal views. He co-founded the Association of German Workers' Associations. He was a member of the liberal Progressive Party of Baden. From to he represented Heidelberg in the Baden States Assembly. In old age Wundt appeared to become more conservative see Wundt, ; Wundt's correspondence , then — also in response to World War I, the subsequent social unrest and the severe revolutionary events of the post-war period — adopted an attitude that was patriotic and lent towards nationalism.

Wilhelm Wundt's son, philosopher Max Wundt, had an even more clearly intense, somewhat nationalist, stance. The psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin described the pioneering spirit at the new Leipzig Institute in this fashion: "We felt that we were trailblazers entering virgin territory, like creators of a science with undreamt-of prospects. Wundt spent several afternoons every week in his adjacent modest Professorial office, came to see us, advised us and often got involved in the experiments; he was also available to us at any time.

The philosopher Rudolf Eisler considered Wundt's approach as follows: "A major advantage of Wundt's philosophy is that it neither consciously nor unconsciously takes metaphysics back to its beginnings, but strictly distinguishes between empirical-scientific and epistemological-metaphysical approaches, and considers each point-of-view in isolation in its relative legitimacy before finally producing a uniform world view.

Wundt always differentiates between the physical-physiological and the purely psychological, and then again from the philosophical point-of-view. As a result, apparent 'contradictions' are created for those who do not observe more precisely and who constantly forget that the differences in results are only due to the approach and not the laws of reality This knowledgeable representation examines Wundt's main topics, views and scientific activities and exceeds the generally much briefer Wundt reception within the field of psychology, in which many of the important prerequisites and references are ignored right from the start.

The internal consistency of Wundt's work from to , between the main works and within the reworked editions, has repeatedly been discussed and been subject to differing assessments in parts. One could consider Wundt's gradual concurrence with Kant's position, that conscious processes are not measurable on the basis of self-observation and cannot be mathematically formulated, to be a major divergence.

Wundt, however, never claimed that psychology could be advanced through experiment and measurement alone, but had already stressed in that the development history of the mind and comparative psychology should provide some assistance. Wundt attempted to redefine and restructure the fields of psychology and philosophy. None of his Leipzig assistants and hardly any textbook authors in the subsequent two generations have adopted Wundt's broad theoretical horizon, his demanding scientific theory or the multi-method approach.

While the Principles of physiological Psychology met with worldwide resonance, Wundt's cultural psychology ethno-psychology appeared to have had a less widespread impact. But there are indications that George Herbert Mead and Franz Boas , among others, were influenced by it. In its time, Wundt's Ethik received more reviews than almost any of his other main works.

Most of the objections were ranged against his renouncing any ultimate transcendental ethical basis God, the Absolute , as well as against his ideas regarding evolution, i. As Wundt did not describe any concrete ethical conflicts on the basis of examples and did not describe any social ethics in particular, his teachings with the general idea of humanism appear rather too abstract.

Leipzig was a world-famous centre for the new psychology after There are various interpretations regarding why Wundt's influence after the turn of the century, i. A survey was conducted on the basis of more than contemporary and later sources: reviews and critiques of his publications since , references to Wundt's work in textbooks on psychology and the history of psychology from to , biographies, congress reports, praise on his decadal birthdays, obituaries and other texts.

A range of scientific controversies were presented in detail. Wundt's terminology also created difficulties because he had — from today's point-of-view — given some of his most important ideas unfortunate names so that there were constant misunderstandings. Examples include:. A representation of Wundt's psychology as 'natural science', 'element psychology' or 'dualistic' conceptions is evidence of enduring misunderstandings.

It is therefore necessary to remember Wundt's expressly stated desire for uniformity and lack of contradiction, for the mutual supplementation of psychological perspectives. Wundt's more demanding, sometimes more complicated and relativizing, then again very precise style can also be difficult — even for today's German readers; a high level of linguistic competence is required.

There are only English translations for very few of Wundt's work. Such shortcomings may explain many of the fundamental deficits and lasting misunderstandings in the Anglo-American reception of Wundt's work. 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.

As Wundt's three-volume Logik und Wissenschaftslehre, i. A highly contradictory picture emerges from any systematic research on his reception. On the one hand, the pioneer of experimental psychology and founder of modern psychology as a discipline is praised, on the other hand, his work is insufficiently tapped and appears to have had little influence.

Misunderstandings and stereotypical evaluations continue into the present, even in some representations of the history of psychology and in textbooks. Like other important psychologists and philosophers, Wundt was subject to ideological criticism, for example by authors of a more Christianity-based psychology, by authors with materialistic and positivistic scientific opinions, or from the point-of-view of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and social theory, as in Leipzig, German Democratic Republic , up to Wundt was involved in a number of scientific controversies or was responsible for triggering them:.

There are many forms of criticism of Wundt's psychology, of his apperception psychology, of his motivation theory, of his version of psychophysical parallelism with its concept of "mental causality", his refutation of psychoanalytic speculation about the unconscious, or of his critical realism. A recurring criticism is that Wundt largely ignored the areas of psychology that he found less interesting, such as differential psychology, child psychology and educational psychology.

In his cultural psychology there is no empirical social psychology because there were still no methods for investigating it at the time. Wundt further influenced many American psychologists to create psychology graduate programs. Wundt developed the first comprehensive and uniform theory of the science of psychology. The special epistemological and methodological status of psychology is postulated in this wide-ranging conceptualization, characterized by his neurophysiological, psychological and philosophical work.

The human as a thinking and motivated subject is not to be captured in the terms of the natural sciences. Psychology requires special categories and autonomous epistemological principles. It is, on the one hand, an empirical humanity but should not, on the other hand, ignore its physiological basis and philosophical assumptions. Thus a varied, multi-method approach is necessary: self-observation, experimentation, generic comparison and interpretation.

Wundt demanded the ability and readiness to distinguish between perspectives and reference systems, and to understand the necessary supplementation of these reference systems in changes of perspective. He defined the field of psychology very widely and as interdisciplinary, and also explained just how indispensable is the epistemological-philosophical criticism of psychological theories and their philosophical prerequisites.

Psychology should remain connected with philosophy in order to promote this critique of knowledge of the metaphysical presuppositions so widespread among psychologists. The conceptual relationships within the complete works created over decades and continuously reworked have hardly been systematically investigated. The most important theoretical basis is the empirical-psychological theory of apperception, based on Leibniz's philosophical position, that Wundt, on the one hand, based on experimental psychology and his neuropsychological modelling and, on the other hand, extrapolated into a development theory for culture.

The fundamental reconstruction of Wundt's main ideas is a task that cannot be achieved by any one person today due to the complexity of the complete works. He tried to connect the fundamental controversies of the research directions epistemologically and methodologically by means of a co-ordinated concept — in a confident handling of the categorically basically different ways of considering the interrelations.

Here, during the founding phase of university psychology, he already argued for a highly demanding meta-science meta-scientific reflection — and this potential to stimulate interdisciplinarity und perspectivism complementary approaches has by no means been exhausted. August in Neckarau bei Mannheim gestorben Januar in Kiel gestorben Contents move to sidebar hide.

The German universities were formerly very tolerant of foreigners. Many an American, in preparation for professoring at Harvard, spent a couple of years roaming from one to the other of them without picking up enough German to read the Berliner Tageblatt. Such frauds swarm in all our lesser universities, and many of them, during the war, became eminent authorities upon the crimes of [philosopher Friedrich] Nietzsche and the errors of [historian Heinrich von] Treitschke.

Also at the time of Wundt's first major publication of the Physiological Psychology, a review in the Literarisches Centralblatt in said that the book, "corresponds exactly to the need created by recent developments in physiology and psychology and the [consequent] lively demand for a specialized scientific treatment of the actual relations between body and consciousness.

One observer agreed with the perspective that provided an important clue in how to approach Wundt's critics, both contemporary and modern. He noted in that the world was beginning to notice Wundt again, and his work was beginning a new surge in popularity. Boeree reflected:. Over years after his work, we have finally caught up with him.

Actually, he was massively misrepresented by poorly educated American students in Germany, and especially a rather ego-driven Englishman named Titchener. Wundt recognized that Titchener was misrepresenting him, and tried to make people aware of the problem. But Boring—the premier American historian of psychology for many decades—only knew Wundt through Titchener.

Much of the problem lay in the mistranslation, or the lack of translation of his works, especially for the English-speaking audience. The title itself of his Principles of Physiological Psychology, gave first witness to the issue. Especially upon the advent of the behaviorists in the twentieth century, the confusion over the essence of Wundt's psychological theories would only increase before the real message of his work would be made clear.

This problem continued with various biographical profiles that inevitably list his greatest achievement as the establishment of experimental methods rather than his theories themselves. For instance, Zusne wrote in that Wundt's "systematic views are of lesser importance and constitute largely a descriptive system. Zusne was mistaken when he noted in his biographical profile of Wundt that "Wundt's elementism and the method of introspection did not survive the death of his truest disciple, E.

In establishing branches of applied psychology, others would use his theories to grow into branches from the seed Wundt planted, even though he did not believe in applied psychology himself. Wundt's theory of emotions and creative synthesis would provide a cornerstone for the Gestalt school of psychology. His student Emil Kraepelin would use the basic tenets of Wundt's actuality principle and its descriptions of processes of central selective attention to form his own theory of schizophrenia in Another biographer offered a different analysis of Wundt and the interpretations of his work.

But the difficulties of Wundt scholarship are not entirely a matter of translation. Some of them are intrinsic to the original texts. Wundt was virtually encyclopedic in his writings with the result that he would often discuss topics in different contexts and therefore arrive at somewhat different formulations. That can make it difficult to extract the definitive Wundt position on specific issues.

Wundt's long life and career complicated matters as well. Throughout the course of his work, some of his opinions changed due to the evolution of his own theories and experimentation methods. He was known to be sometimes reluctant to admit he had changed his mind, and the result was ongoing confusion about what he believed. As a group, the hundreds of young Americans who studied with Wundt were only part of the consideration of the impact he made in America.

Certain Americans, professors and scholars such as William James and G. Stanley Hall, merited a closer study. These people were the movers of thought in the United States, and far more significant in the debate about Wundt. In his own review of Wundt's first work, James was very favorable. He welcomed it as a book "indispensable for study and reference," even if it did have many shortcomings, in his opinion.

Only later would James come to criticize Wundt for those shortcomings, as well as the different courses their philosophies took them see accompanying sidebar. Because James and Wundt were contemporaries who had studied with some of the same giants in the early years of physiological and psychological research, contrasting their views is essential to studying the arguments of Wundt.

Stanley Hall's perspectives on Wundt are also useful, since not only had Hall studied with Wundt, but he also had taken what he knew back to America to begin a similar research path. Often the focus of the debate between Wundt and James centers on the structuralist approach of Wundt compared to the functionalism of James. A writer noted that the two schools of thought were actually more similar to each other than to the rest of mainstream psychology.

Both, he pointed out, were engaged in the principle of free will and opposed to the materialistic philosophy. Even their ideas of what made psychology worth studying, as well as the nature of its essence, did not differ much. In comparing their ideas, it is helpful to consider the following points made by that writer. For Wundt:. The fact that the naive consciousness always and everywhere points to internal experience as a special source of knowledge may, therefore, be accepted for the moment as sufficient testimony to the right of psychology as a science.

The subject itself is determined wholly and exclusively by its predicates. What James offered to make a similar point was that, "There is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and we call that stuff, 'pure experience. Neither Wundt nor James were proponents of the Hegelian system of rationale, however, or other such philosophical ideas.

They were similar, too, in the way they viewed materialism and reductionism. Wundt wrote:. If we could see every wheel in the physical mechanism whose working the mental processes are accompanying, we should still find no more than a chain of movements showing no trace whatsoever of their significance for mind. All that is valuable in our mental life still falls to the psychical side.

The doctrine of materialism was equally distasteful to James, a follower of pragmatism, and a student of Charles Sanders Peirce , who had founded that philosophy. But James did not give credence to Wundt's introspection of consciousness. His own thoughts led him to focus on behavior in outer environments, though James would scarcely have believed that behaviorist psychology evolved from his own philosophy.

Wundt has had for decades the prestige of a most advantageous academic chair. He founded the first laboratory for experimental psychology, which attracted many of the most gifted and mature students from all lands. By his development of the doctrine of apperception he took psychology forever beyond the old associationism which had ceased to be fruitful.

He also established the independence of psychology from physiology, and by his encyclopaedic and always thronged lectures, to say nothing of his more or less esoteric seminary, he materially advanced every branch of natural sciences and extended its influence over the whole wide domain of folklore, mores, language, and primitive religion. His best texts will long constitute a thesaurus which every psychologist must know.

In the next paragraph, however, he went on to offer harsh criticism, saying that Wundt had suffered from a. As a contemporary of Wilhelm Wundt who studied physiology with many of the same people, including Helmholtz at the University of Heidelberg, William James — was considered the founder of American psychology. Even into the twenty-first century, he has retained his reputation as America's foremost psychologist.

James was also known as a member of the pragmatist movement, which was founded by philosopher Charles Peirce. James held little respect for Wundt, however, and he challenged the claim that Wundt's experimental laboratory was the first of its kind. James established his lab at Harvard in , although his research did not generate the intense interest that Wundt's did.

Introspection wilhelm wundt biography

Historical records have placed the opening of Wundt's famous Leipzig lab in ; he joined the Leipzig faculty in , however, and began conducting his first experiments there. Walsh James. His grandfather, also named William James, had been a successful land speculator; he amassed a significant fortune, estimated at approximately 3 million dollars when he died in Henry, Sr.

His brother Henry would eventually become famous in his own right as a novelist who chronicled the lives of wealthy Americans at home and abroad. James and his siblings enjoyed traveling to Europe, spoke both German and French, and were well-versed in artistic pursuits. James enrolled at Harvard at the age of 19 as a chemistry student. He changed his major to medicine within a very short time, even though his real interest was science.

When he was 21, in , James had the opportunity to study along the Amazon River, traveling with the famous biologist Louis Agassiz , who was collecting samples of new species. In he traveled to Germany to study physiology. During his studies in Germany, he showed his first signs of serious depression, even harboring thoughts of suicide, as well as suffering from other health problems.

He returned to the United States in to complete his medical degree. Reading a French philosopher named Renouvier helped James become a believer in the power of free will. As he adopted this belief to address his own problems, he thought his life and health might be improving. James received his M. His professional career was based at Harvard, where he began working in as an instructor in physiology.

He taught physiology, psychology, and philosophy at Harvard—eventually becoming a professor—until He was a professor emeritus at Harvard from until his death in His major work was, Principles of Psychology, a book that James wrote over a year period. A key theory he espoused therein would eventually become known as functionalism—his opposition to the structuralism of such psychologists as Wundt.

Among his many other writings are The Will to Believe, published in ; Varieties of Religious Experience, ; Pragmatisim, , which popularized the theory as a practical way to lead a useful life; and The Meaning of Truth, That same year he published, Pluralistic Universe, which contained some additional ideas of pragmatism. While recognized more for being a teacher and celebrity, rather than for the substance of his beliefs, James solidified his prominent reputation in American psychology.

James married Alice Gibbens in , and the couple had five children. He died on August 26, , at the family home in Chocorua, New Hampshire , after several years of suffering from heart problems. In his discussion of what was on the horizon with Freud as compared to Wundt, Hall added that, "We cannot forebear to express the hope that Freud will not repeat Wundt's error in making too abrupt a break with his more advanced pupils like Adler or the Zurich group.

The real breakdown between Wundt and his structuralism, and the Americans and their functionalism, was mostly due to the way Wundt's and others' theories were melded into the American culture. A book described the controversy by noting that:. Functionalism did make its appearance as a psychology of protest. Its leaders did oppose the school that was then the establishment in American psychology: the classical experimentalists, essentially Wundtian in outlook, who saw as their basic and immediate scientific task the introspective analysis of conscious experiences under experimentally controlled conditions.

These were its psychologists, who, during the ensuing controversy, came to be called structuralists. And the functionalists did place more emphasis on the study of behavior than the classical experimentation has accorded it. Without denying introspection a legitimate and useful role, the functionalists in their own researches drew heavily on behavioral data.

Influenced as they were by Darwinian theory, they undertook investigations that required that most, and in some cases all of the empirical data be obtained from the study of behavior—researched in developmental psychology, in educational and other forms of applied psychology, and in animal psychology, to mention a few examples. Another observer's view of the debate and antagonism between the Americans and Wundt was that it was "no confrontation at all in one aspect and a misfired polemic [argument] in another.

Titchener lost the totality the one in the constitutive total of basal elements the many , and yet this self-organizing principle of mental life is most characteristic of the human experience. Rather than a full airing of the introspective-versus-extraspective theoretical slant implied, what developed was a temporary quibble over the rules of methodological procedure.

Other Americans who had once praised Wundt would eventually criticize him. These included James Mark Baldwin , who constantly referred to Wundt in his Handbook of Psychology, but barely mentioned him in his History of Psychology, except to criticize his "tendency to abstract classification and schematicism," in Volkerpsychologie. Wundt's American loyalists One former student of Wundt, an American named Edward Wheeler Scripture, would eventually Americanize some of Wundt's methods enough to use them for application with time-and-motion studies in industrial psychology and clinical applications for work with communication disorders.

The two men were in continual conflict due to their philosophical conflicts. Scripture was to a great extent loyal to Wundt's teachings; Ladd apparently was not. Charles Herbert Judd, one of the German psychology professor's American students, was named by one author as "by far the most loyal American student of Wundt. But, again, with the Americanization process occurring in the form that application was taking in the United States, especially in the educational psychology—a field that with Hall's help was beginning to boom by the early years of the twentieth century—even a loyalist like Judd would eventually fall in line with the application theorists.

In , Hall wrote about Wundt, again showing the conflicts that his former students had felt about the changes that experimental psychology had effected. Hall pondered:. Perhaps what is now needed is another Wundt with another life. It would seem as if laboratory psychology in this country was now sufficiently developed so that it should be less dependent upon the new departures made in Germany.

The present impasse is the most challenging opportunity ever presented to psychologists. In this crisis our need is a new method, point of view, assortment of topics and problems. These, I believe, geneticism is very soon to supply. Meanwhile, we may have at least for a time to follow Wirth's call to go back to Wundt. Wundt influenced many European contemporaries such as Belgian phenomenologist Albert Michotte — In much the same roles Wundt and James had played in their respective countries, Michotte was considered the founder of Belgian experimental psychology.

He had studied with Wundt in Leipzig during the —06 academic terms, inspired to pursue the issue of voluntary choice. Eventually he would become known especially for his research into the "perception of causality," and the direction he would provide to the later Gestalt psychologists. Michotte's work would also be an important stepping stone to the birth of the field of social psychology.

Another Belgian, George Dwelshauvers — was a strong advocate of experimental psychology. He worked at Wundt's Institute in Leipzig after he received his doctorate in Brussels. He returned there in , intending to open a psychological institute. He wrote to Wundt, explaining that in doing so he would "let the true way of experimental psychology rescue his 'extremely unphilosophical country' from the 'ridiculous masquerades' of the 'spiritualists, positivists, and materialists'.

Wilhelm Wirth — took a position as an assistant to Wundt at Leipzig in He would eventually become known for his work in psychophysics. But after his arrival, he became one of Wundt's foremost defenders through his experimental work. The results he obtained supported Wundt when his critics were mounting the case against his methods and theories.

That was also the time when his reaction-time studies had begun a resurgence. Following Wundt's retirement in , however, Wirth left to pursue his own work in psychophysics. He would no longer carry much influence at Leipzig, especially in psychology, in the way his director once had. Interest in Wundt experienced a serious revival in the s, after his large contribution in psycholinguistics was rediscovered.

A profile of Wundt for the American Psychological Association 's Contemporary Psychology, series was entitled the "The founding father we never knew. Scholars have continued to examine Wundt's work a century after his death. The intricacies of understanding he brought to the study of human consciousness might not ever be totally decipherable.

But it is clear that his significance continued, as advancements in technology brought an entirely new direction in the study of the human brain and how it works. The significance of Wundt's work and his place as a pioneer cannot be overstated. One observer wrote that, "The reaction-time studies conducted during the first few years of Wundt's laboratory constituted the first historical example of a coherent research program, explicitly directed toward psychological issues and involving a number of interlocking studies.

One very important endeavor in Wundt's scientific work was to study the facts pertaining to the nature of the human organism, to isolate these facts by observation, and to measure them in terms of intensity and duration, that is to say, to study the psychic compounds formed by and revealed to us by our "introspective experience. Wundt was an experimental psychologist.

That meant that he was not sitting in a room listening to a client's problems, for instance, or helping direct a changed path in a client's life following some childhood trauma. It was Wundt's business to try to take apart the human psyche in the same way a mechanic might dismantle an automobile's engine and operating system. An explanation of Wundt's research and experiments serves as a necessary component to the observation of the theories that might have evolved from those experiments.

Psychology historian Edwin G. Boring offered readers a description of what went on in Wundt's laboratory. Boring was able to classify experimental articles from Wundt's journal, Philosophische Studien, into four categories. In the first category, the study of vision predominated the studies of sensation and perception, followed by auditory perception.

Tactile sensation, although a crucial study area in the history of psychophysics, was the topic of only a few of the research studies. No articles were published on the sense of smell, and only a few on the sense of taste. Three researchers studied what Boring referred to as the "sixth sense" or the "time sense," in their experiments on the perception, or estimation of time intervals.

Another historian explained that:. As a specialist in sensory perception, Boring strongly identified with the Wundtian experimental tradition. Although he suggested that reaction—time experiments were part of the core of the work of the early Institute, he concluded that this line of research ultimately failed when it proved impossible to measure separately the times required by discrete mental functions.

The failure was by no means total, as Metge has argued [Anneros Metge, "The experimental psychological research conducted at Wundt's Institute and its significance in the history of psychology," in the book, Advances in historiography of psychology. In this case, the importance of Wundt's work was born of unexpected consequences, and it was not even his original intention.

As the historian continued:. When Wundt came to Leipzig, studies of sensation and perception were primarily identified with physiology, and Wundt would change that identification only partially. Research on sensation and perception in the Leipzig Institute, in the large picture, was preliminary or ancillary to investigations of complex central-nervous processes.

Reaction-time experiments sought to measure those processes directly. Leipzig researchers worked in hot pursuit of the parameters and laws of mental chronometry, and Wundt's theory of mental processes implied that reaction-time experiments could serve as the model for investigating many mental phenomena, including attention, will, association, feeling, and emotion.

But the so-called failure, however, led to an entirely new way of psychological experimentation, an outgrowth from the problems of these early experiments. Wundt was not the first researcher to study reaction times. Early nineteenth-century astronomers, for instance, had continually encountered the phenomenon of the human factor in their quest to gain increasingly accurate simultaneous measurements of position and time for certain celestial events.

This human factor would often cause variations of as much as a half-second. Wundt was curious about that difference—enough so that he wanted to explain why such differences existed and provide some standard measurement of reaction times. Thirteen years before he opened his laboratory at Leipzig in , Wundt was credited for his discovery that the "observed time of a reaction was significantly greater than the time required for a nervous impulse to travel from sense organ to the brain plus that required to travel back to the reacting muscle," one biographer observed.

That meant the central nervous processes were consuming a lot of the reaction time. Wundt still had to prove it with experimentation, however. A Swiss precision mechanic named Mathias Hipp — developed a measuring instrument for Swiss astronomer Adolph Hirsch —93 who wanted to measure, as one writer reported it, "the speed of thought.

The instrument remained a laboratory standard for 50 years. In addition to Hirsch, a Dutch psychologist named Franciscus Cornelis Donders —89 had devised the "subtraction method," which utilized the instrument to determine the difference in reaction times from a simple task to a more difficult task. Donders' experiments would help lead Wundt to measuring the focus of his own research—conscious mental actions.

The foundation of his work would begin in the reaction-time experiments. American psychologist James McKeen Cattell , who worked in Leipzig on these experiments, helped to clarify the crucial distinction between psychometry and psychophysics in regard to these experiments. In , he wrote that,. We are naturally glad to find it possible to apply methods of measurement directly to consciousness; there is no doubt but that the mental processes take up time, and that this time can be determined.

The measurements thus obtained are not psychophysical, as those which we have been recently considering, but purely psychological. Throughout his research and experimentation, Wundt used a variety of instruments. Edward J. Haupt has copyrighted the captions that accompany their illustration; his basic descriptions are made available on the Web site PsiCafe, published by the University of Portland Oregon psychology department.

Those particular 10 instruments that are designated as Wundtian, and described in Haupt's words, are:. As mentioned above, Wundt did use Donders' experiment with the subtraction method, but preferred to do it by means of the Hipp chronoscope rather than the chronograph when he set about his reaction-time studies at Leipzig. Not only did he employ a technical change, Wundt acted on a different concept as well.

He believed that a stricter definition between choice and discrimination was vital. Donders' experiment According to one historian, Donders' experiments relied on "the assumption that each part of the reaction sensation, perception, discrimination, choice, reaction movement took a specific amount of time. In this method the differences of the time measurements would be small.

The first, or "a" reaction was the simple response to the stimulus; the "b" reaction was that involved with discrimination of the sensory functions, followed by motor selection in telling the researcher what choice had been made; and the "c" reaction held to the discriminatory function but not the motor. Only five syllables—possible examples would be "ka, ke, ki, ko, ku,"—with particular choices of one of those syllables would comprise a particular reaction.

In the case of the simple reaction, both the stimulus and response was "ki;" for the "b" reaction, the stimulus was any of the five syllables with the respondent giving back that same syllable used in the stimulus; in the "c" reaction, the stimulus was any of the five syllables but the respondent was told only to react if hearing the sound of "ki.

Wundt liked such quantitative results when examining mental processes. Buthe decided that the Donders experiment needed an adjustment. He added a "d" reaction—discrimination without choice. What he was actually proposing here was a true psychological experiment. It was a thought experiment with no external measure as to when such a recognition would occur.

Wundt would define a whole new way of experimental psychology with this. His techniques were those of self-observation, inner observation, and inner experience. Wundt held to a model for mental reaction that had five parts. Steps one and five, Wundt suggested, were purely psychological. The three middle steps were psychosocial because they had both a physiological and a psychic side.

On the basis of his work, and the influence it had on psychologists who were to follow him, Wundt can be regarded as the founder of experimental psychology, so securing his place in the history of psychology. At the same time, Wundt himself believed that the experimental approach was limited in scope, and that other methods would be necessary if all aspects of human psychology were to be investigated.

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc. Associate Editor for Simply Psychology. Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors. Saul McLeod, PhD. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology. We can describe this as having low external validity.

A low external validity means the method is not universally applicable. Introspection is criticised as observing our thoughts, usually resulting in our opinions about them, which leads to a new thought separate from the train of thought we had at first—making it challenging to study what it sets out to, lowering the validity of the research.

We will start by exploring the origins of psychology: Wundt and Introspection. Then we will move on to understand the link between Wundt, Structuralism and Introspection. To ensure your understanding of introspection, we will look at an introspection example and how Wundt used it to understand consciousness. And finally, we will look at Wundt and introspection evaluation points, including the strength and weakness of Wundt and introspection.

Origins of Psychology: Wundt and Introspection Wundt began his career as a medical doctor and neurophysiologist. Introspection Wundt As discussed, the term introspection is a research technique developed by psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt's Method of Introspection Although introspection relies on reflecting on subjective experiences, Wundt argued the research technique is an objective analytic process as the individuals are trained and must adhere to a standardised protocol.

Wundt, Structuralism and Introspection Titchener, a student of Wundt's, used his teachings to develop one of the first approaches to psychology, structuralism. Introspection Example In his lab, Wundt aimed to make the process of introspection as systematic, replicable, structured and controlled as possible to present psychology as legitimate science.

The participants were given the same instructions and were tested in the same conditions. The study found that participants generally felt: Pleasure and pain. Strain and relaxation Excitation and no reaction. Wundt argued that these emotions predominantly constitute our affective state. Wundt and Introspection Evaluation: Strengths of Wundt and Introspection Wundt's and introspection's strength is that it paved the way and caused a wave of later researchers to develop it into the scientific processes that we use today.

Wundt and Introspection Evaluation: Weakness of Wundt and Introspection One main criticism of introspection is that it is a subjective method of experimentation, whereas scientific methods usually aim to be objective. Wundt and introspection - key takeaways Wilhelm Wundt is considered the founding father of psychology and was the first to open a psychology lab in Wundt founded the first experimental method in psychology, called introspection.

Introspection is considered a scientific method because it utilises standardised instructions in a controlled environment. One of Wundt's students, Titchener, developed his idea to form the approach of structuralism. By modern standards, introspection is not considered scientific but can be advantageous when applied in a therapeutic setting.