Wilhelm Wundt

German psychologist and physiologist (1832–1920), founder of the world's first laboratory of experimental psychology, opened at Leipzig in 1879, and the teacher from whom much of the next generation of psychologists came. He had trained in medicine and worked as Hermann von Helmholtz's assistant at Heidelberg, and from that school he took the conviction that mental processes could be measured with the same instruments used to measure perception: reaction times, thresholds, tachistoscopes. The *Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie* (1874) is the book that declares psychology an experimental science with an object of its own.

What tends to be forgotten is the second half of his work, and it was the half he thought more important. Wundt distinguished two territories: the experiment served immediate experience — sensation, perception, feeling, attention — but the higher mental processes would not be confined to it. Those required *Völkerpsychologie*, ten volumes devoted to studying thought through its collective products: language, myth and custom. It was not an appendix but half the programme.

His introspection was also not what later went by that name. Wundt demanded controlled conditions and trained observers reporting simple, repeatable facts, and he distrusted precisely the free self-observation of complex contents that Titchener's structuralism came to practise in America. Titchener, Stanley Hall, Külpe and Münsterberg all passed through his lecture rooms, and partly for that reason criticism of "Wundtianism" often aims at things he had not said.