Wundt and Völkerpsychologie

Abstract

Wilhelm Wundt is generally recognized as the pioneer and institutional founder of the academic study of scientific psychology in Europe. He effectively created the first laboratory, textbook, journal, and Ph. D. program in experimental psychology. What he introduced in Leipzig in the 1880s was a discipline concerned with the experimental analysis of immediate experience, in supposed contrast to the natural sciences, which he held to be concerned with mediate experience: “with the objects of experience, thought of as independent of the subject” (1897/1902, p. 3). Wundt's experimental work, conducted in the Leipzig laboratory and reported in Philosophische Studien (later Psychologische Studien ), largely consisted of studies of psychophysics, reaction time, perception, and attention. This form of “individual” or “general” experimental psychology Wundt called physiologische Psychologie (physiological psychology), not because it was grounded in or directed toward physiological objects but because it appropriated the experimental methods of the newly and successfully developed science of physiology. As is well known, Wundt also thought that this form of experimental individual psychology should be supplemented by a Völkerpsychologie : a “social” or “group” or “folk” or “cultural” psychology (depending on the favored translation) concerned with the complex “mental products” of “social communities,” such as language, myth, and custom. The idea of a form of psychology grounded in social community had been suggested by Johann Friedrich Herbart (1816), who characterized it as a form of “political ethology,” and was developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1836), who explicitly related differences in forms of cognition, emotion, and behavior to different social communities and associated linguistic modes of expression.

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