Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (; German: [vʊnt]; 16 August 1832 – 31 August 1920) was a German physiologist, philosopher, professor, and one of the fathers of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person to call himself a psychologist.
He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology". In 1879, at the University of Leipzig, Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research. This marked psychology as an independent field of study.
He also established the first academic journal for psychological research, Philosophische Studien (from 1883 to 1903), followed by Psychologische Studien (from 1905 to 1917), to publish the institute's research.
A survey published in American Psychologist in 1991 ranked Wundt's reputation as first for "all-time eminence", based on ratings provided by 29 American historians of psychology. William James and Sigmund Freud were ranked a distant second and third.
Wundt was born at Neckarau, Baden (now part of Mannheim) on 16 August 1832, the fourth child to parents Maximilian Wundt (1787–1846), a Lutheran minister, and Marie Frederike, née Arnold (1797–1868). Two of Wundt's siblings died in childhood; his brother, Ludwig, survived. Wundt's paternal grandfather was Friedrich Peter Wundt (1742–1805), professor of geography and pastor in Wieblingen. When Wundt was about six years of age, his family moved to Heidelsheim, then a small medieval town in Baden-Württemberg.
Born in the German Confederation at a time that was considered very economically stable, Wundt grew up during a period in which the reinvestment of wealth into educational, medical and technological development was commonplace. An economic striving for the advancement of knowledge catalyzed the development of a new psychological study method, and facilitated his development into the prominent psychological figure he is today.
Education and Heidelberg career
Wundt studied from 1851 to 1856 at the University of Tübingen, at the University of Heidelberg, and at the University of Berlin. After graduating as a doctor of medicine from Heidelberg (1856), with doctoral advisor Karl Ewald Hasse, Wundt studied briefly with Johannes Peter Müller and Emil du Bois-Reymond before joining the staff of Heidelberg University, becoming an assistant to the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz in 1858 with responsibility for teaching the laboratory course in physiology. There he wrote Contributions to the Theory of Sense Perception (1858–1862). In 1864, he became associate professor for anthropology and medical psychology and published a textbook about human physiology. However, his main interest, according to his lectures and classes, was not in the medical field – he was more attracted by psychology and related subjects. His lectures on psychology were published as Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology in 1863–1864. Wundt applied himself to writing a work that came to be one of the most important in the history of psychology, Principles of Physiological Psychology, in 1874. This was the first textbook that was written pertaining to the field of experimental psychology.
In 1867, near Heidelberg, Wundt met Sophie Mau (1844–1912). She was the eldest daughter of the Kiel theology professor Heinrich August Mau and his wife Louise, née von Rumohr, and a sister of the archaeologist August Mau. They married on 14 August 1872 in Kiel. The couple had three children: Eleanor (1876–1957), who became an assistant to her father in many ways, Louise, called Lilli, (1880–1884) and Max Wundt (1879–1963), who became a philosophy professor.
In 1875, Wundt was promoted to professor of "Inductive Philosophy" in Zurich, and in 1875, Wundt was made professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig where Ernst Heinrich Weber and Gustav Theodor Fechner had initiated research on sensory psychology and psychophysics – and where two centuries earlier Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had developed his philosophy and theoretical psychology, which strongly influenced Wundt's intellectual path. Wundt's admiration for Ernst Heinrich Weber was clear from his memoirs, where he proclaimed that Weber should be regarded as the father of experimental psychology: "I would rather call Weber the father of experimental psychology…It was Weber's great contribution to think of measuring psychic quantities and of showing the exact relationships between them, to be the first to understand this and carry it out."
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology
In 1879, at the University of Leipzig, Wundt opened the first laboratory ever to be exclusively devoted to psychological studies, and this event marked the official birth of psychology as an independent field of study. The new lab was full of graduate students carrying out research on topics assigned by Wundt, and it soon attracted young scholars from all over the world who were eager to learn about the new science that Wundt had developed.
The University of Leipzig assigned Wundt a lab in 1876 to store equipment he had brought from Zurich. Located in the Konvikt building, many of Wundt's demonstrations took place in this laboratory due to the inconvenience of transporting his equipment between the lab and his classroom. Wundt arranged for the construction of suitable instruments and collected many pieces of equipment such as tachistoscopes, chronoscopes, pendulums, electrical devices, timers, and sensory mapping devices, and was known to assign an instrument to various graduate students with the task of developing uses for future research in experimentation. Between 1885 and 1909, there were 15 assistants.
In 1879, Wundt began conducting experiments that were not part of his course work, and he claimed that these independent experiments solidified his lab's legitimacy as a formal laboratory of psychology, though the university did not officially recognize the building as part of the campus until 1883. The laboratory grew and encompassed a total of eleven rooms. The Psychological Institute, as it became known, eventually moved to a new building that Wundt had designed specifically for psychological research.
Wundt's teaching in the Institute for Experimental Psychology
The list of Wundt's lectures during the winter terms of 1875–1879 shows a wide-ranging programme, 6 days a week, on average 2 hours daily, e.g. in the winter term of 1875: Psychology of language, Anthropology, Logic and Epistemology; and during the subsequent summer term: Psychology, Brain and Nerves, as well as Physiology. Cosmology, Historical and General Philosophy were included in the following terms.
Wundt was responsible for an extraordinary number of doctoral dissertations between 1875 and 1919: 185 students including 70 foreigners (of whom 23 were from Russia, Poland, and other east-European countries and 18 were from America). Several of Wundt's students became eminent psychologists in their own right. They include the Germans Oswald Külpe (a professor at the University of Würzburg), Ernst Meumann (a professor in Leipzig and in Hamburg and a pioneer in pedagogical psychology), Hugo Münsterberg (a professor in Freiburg and at Harvard University, a pioneer in applied psychology), and cultural psychologist Willy Hellpach, and the Armenian Gourgen Edilyan.
The Americans listed include James McKeen Cattell (the first professor of psychology in the United States), Granville Stanley Hall (the father of the child psychology movement and adolescent developmental theorist, head of Clark University), Charles Hubbard Judd (Director of the School of Education at the University of Chicago), Walter Dill Scott (who contributed to the development of industrial psychology and taught at Harvard University), Edward Bradford Titchener, Lightner Witmer (founder of the first psychological clinic in his country), Frank Angell, Edward Wheeler Scripture, James Mark Baldwin (one of the founders of Princeton's Department of Psychology and who made important contributions to early psychology, psychiatry, and to the theory of evolution).