Wilhelm Wundt

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was born on August 16, 1832, in Neckarau near Mannheim, the fourth child of a Lutheran minister. He found his footing in medicine at Tübingen and Heidelberg, earning his doctorate in 1856. From 1858 he spent five formative years as assistant to Hermann von Helmholtz, learning the exacting experimental physiology that would underpin his later science.

By 1862 Wundt was lecturing on "psychology from the standpoint of natural science." His Principles of Physiological Psychology (1874) became the first textbook of experimental psychology. After a brief Zurich professorship he was called to Leipzig in 1875, and in 1879 opened the first laboratory devoted exclusively to psychological research. Most histories date psychology's birth as an independent science to that event.

The lab soon drew students from across Europe and the Americas. Between 1875 and 1919 Wundt supervised 185 doctoral dissertations, 70 of them by foreigners. Through James McKeen Cattell (the first U.S. professor of psychology), G. Stanley Hall, Hugo Münsterberg, Edward Titchener and Charles Spearman, he became the academic grandfather of most first- and second-generation American psychologists. His method was introspection: trained observers analyzed conscious experience into components reunited by apperception. He was no simple elementist; he developed a three-dimensional theory of feeling and devoted his last two decades to a ten-volume Völkerpsychologie (1900-1920) on language, myth and custom as the psychology of communities.

Gestalt psychologists charged that wholes exceed the sum of their parts. Behaviorists attacked introspection as hopelessly subjective. Mid-century American psychology inherited a distorted Wundt through poor translations. He gave wartime patriotic lectures in 1914, and his nationalism remains controversial. He retired in 1917 and died in Leipzig on August 31, 1920, at 88. His deepest legacy is institutional: psychology became a field of its own.