Wilhelm Wundt
1832-1920 · German · Experimental Psychology
Every psychical compound shows attributes which may indeed be understood from the attributes of its elements after these elements have once been presented, but which are by no means to be looked upon as the mere sum of the attributes of these elements.
Wilhelm Wundt founded psychology as an independent experimental science. In 1879, at Leipzig, he opened the first laboratory devoted to the experimental study of the mind, and from it came the first generation of psychologists — his students carried the new discipline to America, England, and across Europe. His Principles of Physiological Psychology was the field's founding textbook; he trained more psychologists than any man of his century and wrote, across a vast lifetime output, on sensation, apperception, feeling, the will, logic, ethics, language, and the mental life of peoples.
Topics Wilhelm Wundt addresses
- experimental psychology
- the Leipzig laboratory
- immediate experience
- experimental introspection
- apperception
- creative synthesis
- voluntarism
- the will as the paradigm mental act
- psychophysical parallelism
- the actuality of mind
- Völkerpsychologie
- the tridimensional theory of feeling
- sensation and simple feeling
- the higher mental processes
- psychical causality
- the heterogony of ends
- the mental elements
- reaction-time experiments
- the two-method program
- language, myth, and custom
- the founding of scientific psychology
- the critique of associationism
- structuralism (the misreading)
Questions to put to Wilhelm Wundt
The Leipzig Laboratory and Experimental Method
- How did you turn psychology into an experimental science?
- What makes experimental introspection different from just thinking about your own thoughts?
- Why did you think trained observers could report their immediate experience objectively?
- What kinds of mental processes can actually be studied in the laboratory?
- How do reaction-time experiments reveal anything about the mind?
Apperception and the Active Mind
- What do you mean by apperception?
- Why do you make the will, rather than sensation, the paradigm mental act?
- How is your voluntarism different from the associationist view of the mind?
- What's the difference between having a sensation and actively attending to it?
- How does the mind actively synthesize its contents rather than just receiving them?
Creative Synthesis and Psychical Causality
- What do you mean by creative synthesis?
- How can a whole have properties none of its parts possessed?
- What makes the laws of the mind different from the laws of physics?
- Can you give me an example of creative synthesis in everyday mental life?
- What is the heterogony of ends?
Feeling and the Elements of Consciousness
- Why do you analyze feeling along three dimensions instead of just pleasure and pain?
- What's the difference between a sensation and a simple feeling?
- What are the mental elements, and how do they combine?
- How do you study immediate experience as distinct from what the physicist studies?
- What makes a mental process elementary rather than higher?
Völkerpsychologie and the Higher Mental Life
- Why can't the higher mental processes be studied experimentally?
- What is Völkerpsychologie and why did you devote decades to it?
- How do language, myth, and custom reveal the collective mind?
- What's the relationship between your experimental psychology and your folk psychology?
- Why do the products of collective life require a different method than laboratory observation?
Psychophysical Parallelism and the Actuality of Mind
- What do you mean by psychophysical parallelism?
- How can mind and body be parallel without one causing the other?
- Why do you say the mind is an activity rather than a thing?
- How does your view avoid both materialism and spiritualism?
- What makes psychology autonomous from physiology if every mental process has a physiological concomitant?
Converse with Wilhelm Wundt on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Wilhelm Wundt's own writing, cited to the page.