The Story of Psychology (25 page)

It is true that no Wundt could have arisen to launch experimental psychology in Tertullian’s time or Aquinas’s or even Descartes’; there were no batteries, telegraph keys, and chronoscopes, much less a view of human behavior as a set of phenomena that could be investigated by experiment. Yet in any field of knowledge, even at the right time and place there spring up not a thousand great men, and not a hundred, but a very few. Or even one: one Galileo, one Newton, one Darwin, inspiring thousands of lesser men (and, later, women) who learn from them and are able to push farther on. And one Wundt, who had the genius and drive to become the guiding light of the new psychology in Europe and the United States.

Yet today he seems a strange and paradoxical figure. Despite the immense reputation and influence he long had, his name is now all but unknown except to psychologists and scholars; most laypersons who can easily identify Freud, Pavlov, and Piaget have no idea who Wundt was. Even people who do know his place in history cannot agree on what his main ideas were; summaries of his system by various scholars seem to summarize different Wundts. And while for some time most psychologists have felt that Wundt’s psychology was narrow in scope, a few historians of the field have recently re-evaluated his work and pronounced him a psychologist of great vision and breadth.
⁸
(It may be indicative
that his
Outlines of Psychology
was still being republished as late as 1998.) To some degree, what makes him an enigma is that he was the epitome of the nineteenth-century German scholar: encyclopedic, dogged, authoritarian, and, in his own eyes, all but infallible—an ideal and a personality hard to comprehend today.

As puzzling as anything about Wundt is how the child could have become the man. In his boyhood and youth he seemed utterly lacking in the drive or intellectual capacity to become even modestly successful, let alone an outstanding figure in science and the world of higher education. He appeared, in fact, to be a dolt.

Born in 1832 in Neckarau, near Mannheim, in southwestern Germany, Wundt came from a family of intellectual achievers. His father was a village Lutheran pastor, but among his forebears were university presidents, physicians, and scholars.
⁹
For many years Wundt showed no trace of intellectual gifts and had no interest in learning; when he was a child, his only close friend was a retarded boy, and in school he was a habitual daydreamer. One day when Wundt was in first grade, his father visited the school as an observer and was so infuriated by his son’s wool-gathering that he slapped his face in front of his classmates. Wundt never forgot the incident, but it did nothing to change him; even at thirteen, attending a Catholic gymnasium at Bruchsal, he was still such a dreamer that his homeroom teacher would publicly slap him, and another teacher would mock him in front of the other students—mostly ignorant farm boys who were themselves no models of scholarship. The teachers’ punishments did no good; he failed the year and disgraced himself.

Wundt’s parents then sent him to the Lyceum in Heidelberg. There, among students whom he found more congenial, he gained control over his daydreaming and progressed through the school years, though he never became more than an average student. When he graduated, he had no idea what he wanted to do, but since his father had died and his mother had only a meager pension, he had to prepare for a profession in which he could earn a decent living. He chose medicine and enrolled at the University of Tübingen; out of his mother’s sight, he played and idled a year away, learning almost nothing.

But when he came home at the end of the year and realized that there
was barely enough money to get him through the next three years, he underwent an astonishing change. He started medical training over again in the fall at the University of Heidelberg, threw himself into his studies with such dedication and zeal that he completed his training in three years, and ranked first in the medical state board examinations in 1855.

Along the way, however, he had discovered that clinical practice did not appeal to him but that he was fascinated by the science courses in the curriculum. After receiving his M.D.
summa cum laude
in 1855, he spent a semester at the University of Berlin under Johannes Müller and Emil Du Bois-Reymond, and in 1857 was appointed lecturer in physiology at Heidelberg. The following year, when the illustrious Hermann Helmholtz went there to establish a physiology institute, Wundt applied for the job of his laboratory assistant and got it. His work for Helmholtz further focused his interest on physiological psychology.

Still in his mid-twenties and still single, Wundt had become a thorough workaholic. In addition to his laboratory duties, he lectured, wrote textbooks to augment his income, carried on his own research on sense perception, and began drafting a major book on that subject, the
Contributions
, published in 1862. In it, Wundt, at only thirty, threw down the gauntlet to senior philosophers and mechanist physiologists by asserting that psychology could be a science only if it was based on experimental findings, and that the mind could indeed be experimentally investigated.

In 1864, Wundt was promoted to associate professor and resigned as Helmholtz’s assistant to concentrate on his own interests. No longer having access to Helmholtz’s laboratory, he created one at home, where he collected and fabricated the necessary apparatus and conducted his own psychological experiments. He continued to teach experimental physiology, but his courses came to contain more and more psychological material. Not until his late thirties did he stray from his work long enough to court a young woman and become engaged to her, although for financial reasons they had to postpone their marriage.

Helmholtz left Heidelberg in 1871. Wundt seemed the logical successor to his chair, but while the university assigned him to many of Helmholtz’s duties, it appointed him only Professor Extraordinarius at a quarter of Helmholtz’s pay. The promotion enabled Wundt and his fiancée to marry, but he now worked longer and harder than ever on his book,
Principles of Physiological Psychology
, hoping that it would enable him to escape from Heidelberg.

It did. In Part One—it appeared in two parts, in 1873 and 1874— Wundt immodestly wrote, “The work I here present to the public is an attempt to mark out a new domain of science.” It brought him the acclaim he sought, the offer of a chair of philosophy at the University of Zürich, and a year later the offer of a much better chair at the University of Leipzig.

Wundt went to Leipzig in 1875, wangled the use of the room in Konvikt for storage and demonstrations, and four years later began using it as his private institute. His lectures became so popular, and his reputation and that of his laboratory drew so many acolytes to Leipzig that in 1883 the university increased his salary, granted his institute official status, and gave him additional space to turn the laboratory into a seven-room suite.
¹⁰

He himself spent relatively little of his time in the laboratory and most of it in lecturing, running the institute, and writing and revising weighty books on psychological subjects and, later, on logic, ethics, and philosophy. His day was as rigidly structured as Immanuel Kant’s. He wrote during much of the morning and then had a consultation hour, visited the laboratory in the afternoon, went for a walk during which he thought over his next lecture, delivered it, and then briefly dropped in again at the laboratory. His evenings were quiet; he avoided public functions except for concerts and almost never traveled, but he and his wife often entertained his senior students, and on most Sundays they had his assistants in to dinner.

At home he was genial, if formal, but at the university dogmatic and pedantic; he acted like, and saw himself as, an eminence. At his lectures—the most popular in the university—he waited until everyone was seated and his assistants had filed in and taken front seats. Then the door swung open and in he strode, impressive in his black academic robe, looking neither to right nor left as he marched down the aisle and up the steps of the platform, where he took his time arranging his chalk and papers, and at last faced his expectant audience, leaned on the lectern, and began talking.

He spoke fluently and fervently, without looking at his notes, and although on paper he was often turgid, ponderous, and obscure, when lecturing he could be entertaining in a heavy-footed academic way, as in his lecture on the mental powers of dogs:

That is as far as Wundt ever unbent; even the admiring Edward Titchener, one of Wundt’s most devoted disciples, found him usually “humorless, indefatigable, and aggressive.”
¹²
Being possessed of encyclopedic erudition, he saw himself as the Authority. As William James caustically wrote to a friend,

With his graduate students, Wundt was helpful, concerned, kindly— and authoritarian. At the beginning of the academic year, he would order the students in his graduate research seminar to assemble at the institute; they would stand before him in a row and he would read a list of the research projects he wanted to see carried out that year, assigning the first topic to the first student in the row, the second to the second, and so on. According to Raymond Fancher,

It is only fair to add that in his later years Wundt became relatively mellow and grandfatherly. He enjoyed playing host, in his study, to younger people after his lectures and reminiscing about his early experiences. He taught, wrote, and supervised psychological research until his retirement at eighty-five in 1917, and thereafter was busy at his writing until eight days before his death, at eighty-eight, in 1920.

If we visit Wundt’s laboratory in imagination, either in its one-room or later embodiments, and watch experiments being conducted, we will think them curiously trivial, or at least limited to what look like trivial mental phenomena; they explore none of what we usually consider the more intriguing areas of human psychology—learning, thinking, language skills, the emotions, and interpersonal relations.

We see Wundt’s students and occasionally Wundt himself spending hours listening to a metronome; they run it at speeds ranging from the very slow to the very fast, sometimes stopping it after only a few beats, sometimes letting it run for many minutes. Each time, the listeners examine their sensations closely and then report their conscious reactions. They find that some conditions are pleasant and some unpleasant, that rapid beats create a touch of excitement and slow beats a mood of relaxation, and that they experience a faint sense of tension before each click and a faint sense of relief afterward.
¹⁵

This seemingly insignificant exercise is serious business; it is training in what Wundt calls introspection. He means by it something very different from the introspection practiced by philosophers from Socrates to Hume, which consisted of thinking about their thoughts and feelings. Wundtian introspection is precise, circumscribed, and controlled; it is confined to what Wundt calls the “elements” of psychic life—the immediate, simple perceptions and feelings aroused by sounds, lights, colors,
and other stimuli. The experimenter provides these stimuli and observes the subject’s visible reactions, while the subject focuses his attention on the perceptions and feelings the stimuli generate in him.
*

Such introspection is a crucial part of many experiments in Wundt’s laboratory, the most common being reaction-time research. Like Donders, Wundt and his students often measure the time needed to respond to different kinds of stimuli, in the effort to discern the components of psychic processes and the connections among them.

Many of the experiments we see taking place are somewhat like the very first one in that laboratory, Max Friedrich’s. Hour after hour, day after day, an observer causes the ball to drop to the platform, making a sharp noise and closing a contact that starts the chronoscope. As soon as the subject hears the noise, he presses the telegrapher’s key, stopping the chronoscope. Such experiments usually come in at least two forms. In one, the subject is told to press the key as soon as he is clearly aware of his perception of the sound; in a second form, he is told to press the key as soon as possible when the sound occurs. In the first case, the instructions focus his attention on his own perception; in the second case, on the sound itself.