Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [87]
Although immediate experience has its rules of causality—particular stimuli cause particular elemental experiences—mental life has its own kind of causality: The mind develops, and ideas follow each other, according to specific laws. Wundt had special names for these laws, but essentially they were his reformulations of association, judgment, creativity, and memory.27
Another major theme in his psychology, especially in his later writings, is that “volitional activities” are central to all conscious actions and mental processes; those processes are products of an apperceiving agent that actively chooses to think, speak, and act in certain ways. Even simple, unthinking acts are volitional, in his view, although he calls them impulsive. Acts resulting from more complex mental processes are volitional and voluntary. 28 Although this theory did not survive in psychology, it was an effort on Wundt’s part to move beyond the automatism of mechanist psychology and toward a more holistic model.
In sum, Wundt had a broader and more inclusive view of psychology than he is often given credit for. Nonetheless, on balance he was restrictive and confining, leaving out or proscribing many areas that today are commonly accepted as essential parts of the field:29
—He was unalterably opposed to practical applications of psychology; when one of his gifted students, Ernst Meumann, turned to educational psychology, Wundt looked at it as desertion to the enemy.
—He was equally opposed to the use of introspection in any way but his own. He scathingly criticized the work of certain researchers— members of the Würzburg School, of whom we will hear more in a moment—who asked their subjects about everything that had gone on in their minds during an experiment. Such procedures, Wundt said, were “mock” experiments, neither experimental nor introspective.
—He rejected out of hand the beginnings of child psychology on the grounds that the conditions of study could not be adequately controlled, so the results were not real psychology.
—He considered animal psychology a fit subject for ruminations, philosophizing, and informal experiments (such as those with his poodle) but allowed no work with animals to be performed in his laboratory because no data based on introspection could be obtained. —He dismissed contemporaneous French work in psychology that relied largely on hypnotism and suggestion. Since this research lacked exact introspection, he said it was not true psychological experimentation.
—Finally, he was particularly scornful of the psychology of William James, which was far more holistic, insightful, and personally relevant than his own. After reading James’s The Principles of Psychology— which was greeted enthusiastically by psychologists throughout the world—Wundt sourly commented, “It is literature, it is beautiful, but it is not psychology.”30
Sic Transit
Nothing about Wilhelm Wundt is as curious as his influence on psychology—paradoxically vast and yet very minor.
Vast:
—He was the encyclopedist and systematist of the field; he drew the intellectual map of the territory and defined it as a new domain of science.
—He personally trained many of the people who became the leading psychologists in Germany and the United States during the first decades of the new science.
—He assembled from the scattered beginnings of physiological psychology a distinct methodology for experimental psychology. His laboratory and its methods were the model for many of those established during the next half century.
—Through his immensely authoritative textbooks, he influenced most of the first two generations