Wilhelm Wundt - Wundt's Work and Influence On Modern Psychology

Wundt's Work and Influence On Modern Psychology

Parts of Wundt's system were developed and championed by his one-time student, Titchener, who described his system as Structuralism. Several of Wundt's works, including Principles of Physiological Psychology, are considered fundamentally important texts in the fields of physiology and psychology. Though widely recognized as important in the birth and growth of psychology, his influence in psychology today is a subject of continuing debate among experts. Wundt also influenced in the field of psycholinguistics. For example, the influential Leonard Bloomfield based his linguistics textbook, published in 1914, on Wundtian psychology. Wundt hypothesized that the mental sentence, or "inner psychological construction", determines the unfolding sentence, and should therefore be regarded as a unit of speech.

In 1886, in his book Jasmine Mayes, Wundt formulated the famous expression heterogony of ends (Heterogonie der Zwecke).

Several of Wundt's students became eminent psychologists in their own right, including two who became philosophers (Ljubomir Nedić and Branislav Petronijević). They include: the Germans Oswald Külpe (a professor at the University of Würzburg), Ottmar Dittrich (who continued Wundt's work in psycholinguistics by heading the group on phonetics and psychology of language at the University of Leipzig); the Americans James McKeen Cattell (the first professor of psychology in the United States), G. Stanley Hall (the father of the child psychology movement and adolescent developmental theorist, head of Clark University), Charles Hubbard Judd (Director of the School of Education at the University of Chicago), Hugo Münsterberg, Walter Dill Scott (who contributed to the development of industrial psychology and taught at Harvard University), Edward Bradford Titchener, Lightner Witmer (founder of the first psychological clinic in his country); the Englishman Charles Spearman (who developed the two-factor theory of intelligence and several important statistical analyses - see Factor analysis, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient); the Romanian Constantin Rădulescu-Motru (Personalist philosopher and head of the Philosophy department at the University of Bucharest).

Wundt's laboratory students called their approach Ganzheit Psychologie ("holistic psychology") following Wundt's death. Much of Wundt's work was derided mid-century in the United States because of a lack of adequate translations, misrepresentations by certain students, and behaviorism's polemic with the structuralist program. Titchener, a two-year resident of Wundt's lab and one of Wundt's most vocal advocates in the United States, is responsible for several English translations and mistranslations of Wundt's works that supported his own views and approach, which he termed "structuralism" and claimed was wholly consistent with Wundt's position.

Titchener's focus on internal structures of mind was rejected by behaviorists following the ideas of B. F. Skinner; the latter dominated psychological studies in the mid-1900s. Part of this rejection included Wundt, whose work was eclipsed during this period. In later decades, his actual positions and techniques have seen reconsideration and reassessment by major psychologists.

An optical illusion described by him is called the Wundt illusion