Wilhelm Wundt

Wilhelm Wundt: Interesting Facts

Wilhelm Wundt was born in 1832 near Mannheim, Germany, and he lived to be 88 years old. He married a lady named Sophie in 1867 and had three kids. After finishing his education, Wundt became a professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig. Psychology wasn't a field of study yet! It didn't become its field until Wundt, and a team of researchers opened a psychology laboratory in 1879. They packed this lab with scientific instruments available at the time and began conducting experiments.

Wilhelm Wundt, wikimedia.commons.org

Before opening this laboratory, though, Wundt started teaching courses on psychology in 1875. Since Wundt was also a doctoral mentor for many students, he helped influence nearly all the big names in psychology in the following years. Wundt also wrote a lot! He wrote so much that historians have difficulty counting all his publications and writings.

What are some other interesting facts about Wilhelm Wundt?

Wilhelm Wundt: Structuralism

Wundt was one of the founders of the school of thought in psychology known as structuralism. One of Wundt's students, Edward Bradford Titchener, was another major founder.

Even though he was a professor of philosophy, Wundt's training was in medicine. When his interest turned toward psychology, he wanted to learn more about our inner human experiences connected to culture, sensations, thoughts, and feelings. He focused on sense experiences: how we react to what we touch, taste, see, hear, and smell.

Remember know how there is a table of periodical elements in chemistry? Nothing like that existed for psychology since it was so new. Structuralists like Wundt wanted to organize and categorize the different structures of the mind. The primary technique that structuralists used in their research were introspection.

Wundt's Research Group, wikimedia.commons.org

Wilhelm Wundt: Examples of Structuralism

Many of Wundt's contributions to structuralism were the theories he developed about different psychological topics. He wrote about consciousness, perception, mental associations, and human will. Titchener took these ideas and used them to help build the school of structuralism.

Wundt and Titchener did not agree on everything, though. Titchener used many of Wundt's ideas but also included some of his own. Remember, Wundt was a doctor and philosopher before he became a psychologist, but Titchener was a psychologist from the beginning. Wundt's ideas about the mind and introspection as a scientific tool started structuralism, and Titchener took over from there.

Wilhelm Wundt: Experiments

Wundt was more a writer, teacher, and theorist than an experimenter. This is interesting considering that he is called the father of experimental psychology! He developed a field of psychology called völkerpsychologie: Folk or Cultural Psychology. He viewed psychology as a fusion of philosophy and the natural sciences.

Wilhelm Wundt Publication, wikimedia.commons.org

He recognized that you need different methods to study the many different topics within psychology. For some things, you can use the same methods used in the natural sciences, but they won't work for studying things like thoughts and feelings. So, in his psychology laboratory, Wundt organized experiments using scientific instruments and more subjective methods like introspection. He led the students, created the budget, and kept everything organized.

Wilhelm Wundt: Contribution to Psychology

It is hard not to see how important Wundt was to psychology! Before him, psychology wasn't a field of study, and no scientific psychology laboratories existed. His writings started, and he also created the first academic journal for psychology so that others could write and contribute. This is similar to how other fields of science got their start.

Wundt wrote textbooks on psychology and put together the first set of information on psychology as a field of study. As a teacher and writer, he influenced the first generation of psychologists, including Sigmund Freud. If you put Wundt’s work and writings together with all the work of the psychologists he influenced, there’s no end to the impact he had on psychology!