Wilhem Wundt

Wilhem Wundt

(1832 – 1920)

I. The definition of psychology

Wundt founded and defined the new science of psychology in terms of conscious human experience. For Wundt, experimental psychology is the unmediated study of consciousness, aided by the experimental protocols of the natural sciences. Various definitional statements made in his writings include:

* “For psychology seeks to account for the genesis of ideas, and for their relations both to other ideas and to those psychical processes, such as feelings, volitions,etc.”

* “Psychology investigates the contents of experience in their complete and actual form, both the ideas that are referred as objects, and all the subjective processes that cluster about them.”

* “The forms of interpretation in natural science and psychology are supplementary in the sense that each takes a different point of view in considering the single contents of experience.”

* “Thus, while natural science and psychology are both empirical sciences in the sense that they aim to explain the contents of experience, though from different points of view, still it is obvious that, in consequence of the character of its problem, psychology is more strictly empirical.”

II. The subject matter of psychology

According to Wundt, the subject matter of psychology is the immediate reality of experience.

III. The method of psychology

* Experiment and observation

* Wundt advocated the use of two exact methods:

1) The experimental method – serving for the analysis of simpler psychical processes

2) The observation of general mental products – serving for the investigation of the higher psychical processes and developments

IV. The scope of psychology

Consciousness is a very large topic. The scope is very broad as it includes the individual, culture, animals and others. There are numerous amounts of objects and sensations, feelings and the processes by which these are abstracted and analyzed are many....