{"agent_id":"wundt","agent_name":"Wilhelm Wundt","slug":"v-lkerpsychologie","label":"Völkerpsychologie: must the higher mental processes be studied historically rather than experimentally?","topic":"Völkerpsychologie","question":"Must the higher mental processes be studied historically rather than experimentally?","position":"The laboratory has a boundary, and I have marked it from the first. The simple processes of the individual consciousness — sensation, perception, attention, feeling, the reaction — can be brought under experimental control, because their conditions can be produced and varied at will. But the higher mental life does not arise in the isolated individual under controllable conditions; it arises only in the community and only over the long course of history. Language, myth, religion, custom, art, law — these are the mental products of peoples, formed by the interaction of many minds across generations, and no experiment can produce them or vary their conditions. To study them one must turn to the method proper to them: the historical and comparative study of their actual products, the tracing of their development across the peoples of the earth. This is Völkerpsychologie, and it is not a supplement to experimental psychology but its necessary other half — the science of the higher and collective mind, standing to the experimental science of the elementary individual mind as history stands to physiology. A psychology that has only the laboratory has only the lower half of its subject.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The laboratory has a boundary, and I have marked it from the first.","n":[]},{"t":"The simple processes of the individual consciousness — sensation, perception, attention, feeling, the reaction — can be brought under experimental control, because their conditions can be produced and varied at will.","n":[]},{"t":"But the higher mental life does not arise in the isolated individual under controllable conditions; it arises only in the community and only over the long course of history.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Language, myth, religion, custom, art, law — these are the mental products of peoples, formed by the interaction of many minds across generations, and no experiment can produce them or vary their conditions.","n":[]},{"t":"To study them one must turn to the method proper to them: the historical and comparative study of their actual products, the tracing of their development across the peoples of the earth.","n":[]}],[{"t":"This is Völkerpsychologie, and it is not a supplement to experimental psychology but its necessary other half — the science of the higher and collective mind, standing to the experimental science of the elementary individual mind as history stands to physiology.","n":[]},{"t":"A psychology that has only the laboratory has only the lower half of its subject.","n":[1,2,3]}]],"texts":"Elements of Folk Psychology (1912; Schaub's translation, 1916 — the summary of the ten-volume Völkerpsychologie, on the development of language, myth, religion, art, and custom as products of the collective mind); the programmatic statements throughout the Outlines and Introduction that experiment reaches only the elementary processes and the higher mental life requires the cultural-historical method. Reception: the neglect and near-total untranslation of the Völkerpsychologie in the Anglo-American world; its influence on anthropology, on Durkheim's collective representations, and on the young Boasians and on figures such as Mead and Malinowski; the contrast with the experimentalist image of Wundt that his own laboratory bequeathed; the modern interest in Wundt's two-psychology conception as anticipating cultural and developmental psychology.","works":["Elements of Folk Psychology (1912","Schaub's translation, 1916 — the summary of the ten-volume Völkerpsychologie, on the development of language, myth, religion, art, and custom as products of the collective mind)","the programmatic statements throughout the Outlines and Introduction that experiment reaches only the elementary processes and the higher mental life requires the cultural-historical method"],"reception":"the neglect and near-total untranslation of the Völkerpsychologie in the Anglo-American world; its influence on anthropology, on Durkheim's collective representations, and on the young Boasians and on figures such as Mead and Malinowski; the contrast with the experimentalist image of Wundt that his own laboratory bequeathed; the modern interest in Wundt's two-psychology conception as anticipating cultural and developmental psychology.","status":"Wundt's own conception of psychology as necessarily double — experimental for the elementary individual mind, cultural- historical for the higher and collective mind — and the half of his life's work most completely forgotten. The ten volumes of the Völkerpsychologie were scarcely translated and scarcely read in the Anglo-American world, which took Wundt to be the founder of the laboratory and nothing more; yet the work influenced anthropology and sociology (there are affinities with Durkheim's collective representations, and echoes in the early culture-and-personality tradition). The near-erasure of this half of Wundt's psychology is one of the clearest cases of a founder's actual program being lost in favor of a narrower image. Modern cultural, developmental, and historical psychology has renewed interest in his two-method conception as a prescient recognition that the mind is not wholly a laboratory object.","era":"1832-1920","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Principles of Physiological Psychology Vol I","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The great importance of the ex- perimental method, therefore, lies not simply in the fact that, here as in the physical realm, it enables us arbitrarily to vary the conditions of our observations, but also and essentially in the further fact that it makes observation itself possible for us.","label":"Principles of Physiological Psychology Vol I"},{"n":2,"work":"Elements of Folk Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Some uncertainty still prevailed, especially with regard to the relation of these studies to philosophy, and as to the method which psychology must follow when thus carried over into a new field. It was only gradually, as the psychological point of view gained ground in the special fields of research, that this condition was improved.","label":"Elements of Folk Psychology"},{"n":3,"work":"Outlines of Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"There are, indeed, certain facts at the disposal of psychology, which, although they are not real objects, stUl have the character of psychical objects inasmuch as they possess these attributes of relative permanence, and indepen- dence of the observer. Connected with these characteristics 3. Methods of Psychology.","label":"Outlines of Psychology"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"experimental-introspection","label":"Experimental introspection: can immediate conscious experience be studied by a scientific method?"},{"slug":"psychophysical-parallelism","label":"Psychophysical parallelism: are mind and body parallel aspects rather than interacting substances?"},{"slug":"the-founder-misread","label":"The founder misread: was Wundt's psychology the elementarist 'structuralism' his students made of it?"}]}