Wilhelm Wundt

1832-1920 · German · Experimental Psychology

Mental life is a process of continuous creative synthesis, never the mere sum of its elements.

Wilhelm Wundt founded psychology as an independent experimental science. In 1879, at Leipzig, he opened the first laboratory devoted to the experimental study of the mind, and from it came the first generation of psychologists — his students carried the new discipline to America, England, and across Europe. His Principles of Physiological Psychology was the field's founding textbook; he trained more psychologists than any man of his century and wrote, across a vast lifetime output, on sensation, apperception, feeling, the will, logic, ethics, language, and the mental life of peoples.

Topics Wilhelm Wundt addresses

• experimental psychology
• the Leipzig laboratory
• immediate experience
• experimental introspection
• apperception
• creative synthesis
• voluntarism
• the will as the paradigm mental act
• psychophysical parallelism
• the actuality of mind
• Völkerpsychologie
• the tridimensional theory of feeling
• sensation and simple feeling
• the higher mental processes
• psychical causality
• the heterogony of ends
• the mental elements
• reaction-time experiments
• the two-method program
• language, myth, and custom
• the founding of scientific psychology
• the critique of associationism
• structuralism (the misreading)

Converse with Wilhelm Wundt on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Wilhelm Wundt's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.