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Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) was born in Neckarau, Germany, the son of a Protestant minister. Despite a withdrawn adolescence, he was able to enter medical school first at Tübingen (1851), and then at Heidelberg (1852 - 56). After a semester's research on neuroscience in Berlin he returned to Heidelberg, where he taught physiology and acted as research assistant for Hermann HELMHOLTZ; here, independently of Helmholtz, he developed the notion that "unconscious inference" can determine perception (Richards 1980). In 1862 he wrote a book on perception that included a plan for a future science of psychology based on experiment, observation of behavior, and self-observation; this future psychology would include child psychology, animal psychology, and the study of linguistic, moral, and religious differences between ethnic groups (Völkerpsychologie). Such a science would be free of metaphysics and speculations based on introspection. Wundt distinguished between acceptable self-observation (e.g., "press a button when the identity of a word just briefly flashed before you comes clearly to mind") and unacceptable INTROSPECTION (e.g., "What do you think went on in your mind just before you pressed the button?"), a distinction stressed by Blumenthal (1980) and Danziger (1980).
From 1864 to 1868 Wundt served as a professor of both anthropology and medical psychology at Heidelberg and also, until 1869, as a representative, in the Baden legislature, of the city of Heidelberg. In 1872 he married Sophie Mau (1844-1912); they had three children. The first edition of his authoritative Grundzügeder physiologischen Psychologie appeared in 1874; the sixth and final edition would appear in 1908 - 11. Following a year at Zürich, in 1875 he moved to Leipzig with the title of professor of philosophy.
Wundt's famous Institute of Experimental Psychology, for which funding was first received in 1879, consisted initially of the use of a classroom on the third floor of a refectory building (destroyed by bombing in World War II), but in 1883 it was expanded to nine rooms (a floor plan is provided by Bringmann, Bringmann, and Ungerer 1980: 151). Further expansions took place in 1888, 1892, and 1897, when the institute moved to the top floor of a newly built building. Wundt (1910) himself chronicled these expansions and gave a floor plan of the 1897 laboratory. In 1881 he also founded a journal, Philosophische Studien, for the dissemination of the research from his Institute.
Students came there not only from Germany but also from North America, the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan, and other countries. For example, the American James McKeen Cattell (1860-1944) carried out research at Leipzig on word associations, introduced Wundt to the newly invented typewriter, and wrote letters home that give a good account of life and work in Wundt's laboratory (Sokal 1981). A full list of Wundt's Ph.D. students was provided by Tinker (1932), with more details on his thirty-three American students in particular being given by Benjamin et al. (1992). Between 1879 and 1920 Wundt published prolifically; a bibliography of his scientific writings was given by Titchener and Geissler (1908, with supplements continuing to 1922). Wundt's books included works on LOGIC and ethics as well as psychology, and his final years were devoted to his multivolume Völkerpsychologie (The Psychology of Peoples). It was in the first volume of this work that Wundt put forward an approach to PSYCHOLINGUISTICS that stressed that a mental representation was psychologically prior to the formation of a sentence in the speaker's mind; variations in the use of grammar permitted the speaker to emphasize one or another aspect of the MENTAL REPRESENTATION (Blumenthal 1970).
Among Wundt's ideas that received extensive discussion at the turn of the century, we may note his hypothesis that all "feelings" have the tridimensional attributes of being pleasant/unpleasant, exciting/depressing, and strained/relaxed; and his belief that the frontal lobes mediated the process known since the eighteenth century as "apperception," namely, the identification and grouping by the brain of sense data so that the perceiver attained coherence in his or her interpretation of reality. In this latter opinion, he belonged to a tradition of German psychology inherited from Leibniz and KANT; and the first Ph.D. thesis awarded at Leipzig for an experiment in psychology, that of Max Friedrich (1883), attempted to measure apperception-time. Wundt also insisted that any system of psychology had to include a purposive element, that is, a component reflecting intentional, voluntary decision making. He argued that the laws of mental science differ from the laws of physical science particularly insofar as the former cannot be described without including variables concerned with "value" or "desirability." And he maintained that thinking can involve a "creative synthesis" such that genuinely new ideas can emerge from the mental fusion of two or more ideas; a combination of ideas is not necessarily a simple And-Sum. In these beliefs, he foreshadowed GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY.
Meischner and Eschler (1979: 110-112) provide a list of thirty honorary degrees and memberships of foreign societies awarded to Wundt between 1874 and 1918, as well as a photograph of his Leipzig home, where he died of natural causes.
Benjamin, L. T. Jr., M. Durkin, M. Link, M. Vestal, and J. Acord. (1992). Wundt's American doctoral students. American Psychologist 47:123-131.
Blumenthal, A. L. (1970). Wilhelm Wundt the master psycholinguist, and his commentators. In A. L. Blumenthal, Ed., Language and Psychology: Historical Aspects of Psycholinguistics. New York: Wiley, pp. 9-78.
Blumenthal, A. L. (1980) Wilhelm Wundt -- problems of interpretation. In W. G. Bringmann and R. D. Tweney, Eds., Wundt Studies. Toronto: C. J. Hogrefe, pp. 435-445.
Bringmann, W. G., M. J. Bringmann, and G. A. Ungerer. (1980). The establishment of Wundt's laboratory: An archival and documentary study. In W. G. Bringmann and R. D. Tweney, Eds., Wundt Studies. Toronto: C. J. Hogrefe, pp. 123-157.
Danziger, K. (1980). The history of introspection reconsidered. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16:242-262.
Friedrich, M. (1883). Über die Apperceptionsdauer bei einfachen and zusammengesetzten Vorstellungen. Philosophische Studien 1:39-77. English summary by P. J. Behrens, The first dissertation in experimental psychology: Max Friedrich's study of apperception (1980). In W. G. Bringmann and R. D. Tweney, Eds., Wundt Studies. Toronto: C. J. Hogrefe, pp. 193 - 209.
Meischner, W., and E. Eschler. (1979). Wilhelm Wundt. Leipzig: Urania.
Richards, R. J. (1980). Wundt's early theories of unconscious inference and cognitive evolution in their relation to Darwinian biopsychology. In W. G. Bringmann and R. D. Tweney, Eds., Wundt Studies. Toronto: C. J. Hogrefe, pp. 42-70.
Sokal, M. M., Ed. (1980). An Education in Psychology: James McKeen Cattell's Journal and Letters from Germany and England, 1880-1888. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tinker, M. A. (1932). Wundt's doctoral students and their theses, 1875-1920. American Journal of Psychology 44: 630 - 637.
Titchener, E. B., and L. R. Geissler. (1908). A bibliography of the scientific writings of Wilhelm Wundt. American Journal of Psychology 19:541-556; (1909) 20: 570; (1910) 21: 603 - 604; (1911) 22: 586 - 587; (1912) 23: 533; (1913) 24: 586; (1914) 25: 599; (1922) 33: 260 - 262.
Wundt, W. (1862). Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung. Leipzig: C. F. Winter. Introduction, "On the methods of psychology," trans. by T. Shipley, Ed., Classics in Psychology. New York: Philosophical Library, 1961, pp. 51-78.
Wundt, W. (1874). Grundzüge der Physiologischen Psychologie. Leipzig: W. Engelmann.
Wundt, W. (1910). Das Institut für experimentelle Psychologie zu Leipzig. Psychologische Studien 5:279-293.
Wundt, W. (1900-1909). Völkerpsychologie. Leipzig: W. Engelmann.
Diamond, S. (1976). Wundt, Wilhelm. In C. C. Gillespie, Ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography. New York: Scribner, pp. 526-529.
Murray, D. J. (1988). 1879 to about 1910: Wundt and his influence. In A History of Western Psychology. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, pp. 199-240.
Psychological Review. (1921). In Memory of Wilhelm Wundt: A symposium of reminiscences by seventeen of Wundt's American students. Psychological Review 28:153-188.
Titchener, E. B. (1921). Wilhelm Wundt. American Journal of Psychology 32:161-178.
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