Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [76]
In the end, Helmholtz did not completely vanquish his opponents; nativism survived in one guise or another, including Gestalt psychology and, more recently, genetic psychology, studies of temperament, and, still more recently, evolutionary psychology. But the mainstream of psychology from Helmholtz’s time on has been largely empiricist and experimental. He, who did not consider himself a psychologist, would have been surprised to learn that he had a more profound and lasting influence on psychology than on physics or physiology.
Psychophysics: Fechner
While sensible, normal young Helmholtz was beginning to amass evidence for his mechanistic view of neural and psychic events, a visionary, neurotic middle-aged professor at the University of Leipzig was seeking to demonstrate that every person, animal, and plant in the universe is composed of both matter and soul. Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887) failed in that aim, but in gathering data to show the mathematical relationship between stimuli (the world of matter) and the resulting sensations (the world of mind or soul)—which, he thought, confirmed his panpsychic philosophy—he developed research methods that have been used ever since by experimental psychologists to advance the materialist psychology he meant to invalidate.34
Fechner, born in a village in southeastern Germany, was the son of the local pastor. The father combined religious faith with a hard-headed belief in science, as would his son. He preached the word of the Lord but shocked the villagers by installing a lightning rod on the church, a precaution that in those days was seen as a lack of faith in God’s care of His own.
Fechner studied medicine at the University of Leipzig, but in 1822, after receiving his degree, switched his attention to physics and mathematics. For several years he supported himself by translating into German a number of French manuals on physics and chemistry—nine thousand pages’ worth of them in a few years—and from 1824 lectured on physics at the university, conducted a heavy research program on electrical currents, and wrote numerous technical articles. The hectic pace made his reputation in physics, but at a cost: he began suffering from headaches and spells of inability to control his thoughts, which would obsessively go around and around on matters of no importance.
Although only in his early thirties and prospering—he was able to marry by 1833 and was made a full professor in 1834—his condition continued to deteriorate. “I could not sleep and suffered from attacks of total exhaustion which robbed me of the ability to think and caused me to lose all interest in life,” he later said of this period.35 He sought relief in spas, but to no avail. He then distracted himself by studying afterimages—his first foray into experimental psychology—in the course of which he stared at the sun through tinted glasses for long periods. His research on afterimages was well received—Helmholtz, as we know, made use of the data—but as a result of it Fechner suffered severe photophobia and total emotional collapse.
Virtually blind, he immured himself in a darkened room, where he was tormented by pain, emotional distress, intolerable boredom, and severe digestive problems. (He resigned from the university but was granted a pension, although he had been teaching only half a dozen years.) At the nadir of three years of invalidism, he had his room painted black, remained in it day and night, and saw no one. Not laxatives, steam treatments, mesmerism, nor two kinds of shock treatments did any good. He continued to be troubled by repetitive thinking about minor matters; in addition he was torn between an exalted sense that he was close to discovering the secret of the world and a troubling