Wilhelm Wundt Contribution To Psychology

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) officially opened an institution and laboratory for Psychology, in Leipzig, Germany. Many students were also taught here on experimental psychology. Wundt was touted as a great lecturer, and some of those taught, emulated Wundt's work and made a significant contribution to psychology; for example Edward Titchner (1867-1927), who introduced 'Structuralism' to the United States of America. This facility was renowned through out the world as the premise on which psychology became a science, because, it was there Wundt carried out extensive research on several hypotheses.

Claiming the title of 'Psychologist' Wundt showed that psychology had its own right to be labelled as a scientific discipline separate from those of physiology and philosophy. This was done via 'Voluntarism' the school of thought associated with Wundt and also through 'Introspection'.

Others highly disapproved of Wundt's work, and many others also came under scrutiny by Wundt especially, if their theories were not of his school of thought. Due to this strong contemptuous approach, many of the existing ideas that bore great significance to psychology as we know it today were dismissed by Wundt.

Despite the great criticism, Wundt's founded the first journal on psychology, became the author of several books and contributed a plethora of papers pertaining to psychological research.

Prior to the founding of Wundt's school and his theories, psychology existed. It was not seen as a science, however, they were other pioneers in the field.

Founding of the 'Institute for Experimental Psychology'

Wilhelm Wundt officially opened a school for psychology in 1879. Although Wundt's institute was not publicized in the book of universities to atte...

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...ation and hard work.

Contributions

Wundt wrote 53, 735 papers on scholarly research. Wundt published the first journal on psychology Philosophical Studies, and he was the author of Theory of Sense Perception, Principles of Physiological Psychology, Outlines of Psychology, Ethics: The Facts of Moral Life, An Introduction to Psychology, Elements of Folk Psychology - Outline of a Psychological History od the Development of Mankind to mention a few.

The existence of psychology before 1879

In 1875 one of Wundt's former students Williams James (1842-1910) form a psychology laboratory in United States of America, at Harvard University. It is alleged that James didn't get the recognition he deserved because his laboratory was strictly for the teaching, rather than experiments and research like his former teacher and colleague- Wundt and G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924).