Wundt Psychology Essay

Much of Wundt's work was put down around the mid 20th century in the United States because of a lack of satisfactory translations, misrepresentations by different students, and the behaviourists' problems with the structuralists' program. Titchener was one of Wundt's most voiced advocates in the United States. He is also responsible for various translations and mistranslations of Wundt's work which supported his own views. This approach he called "structuralism" and claimed that it was completely in alignment with Wundt's position. Titchener who focussed on the internal structures of the mind as well, was rejected by behaviorists who would have followed the ideas of B. F. Skinner, which were a part of the latter dominated psychological studies in the mid 1900s. In the later decades, his positions and techniques had seen reconsideration and reassessment by major psychologists. The creation of the psychology lab in 1879 was seen by most modern psychologists to had established psychology as a separate field of study with its own methods and questions. Wilhelm Wundt's support of the method of experimental psychology also set the stage for future behaviourism and many of his experimental methods are still used today in modern psychology. Some psychologists may also disagree that 1879 was not the year that psychology began as an independent discipline. Psychologists may say that psychology began back in the time of the ancient Greeks such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. These philosophers looked at various psychological aspects such as the inner man, and focussed on it as separate from philosophy.

Socrates' (470-399 BC) work was mainly based on his irritation by the Sophists and their ways of teaching logic as a means to achieve sel...

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...ears before Wundt established his psychology lab, William James formed his own psychology lab at Harvard University. James was not credited as the founder of psychology as an independent discipline or as a science because his lab was used for teaching demonstrations to students rather than for the purpose of experimentation and original research.2

In conclusion, psychologists have plenty of reasons to believe that 1879 was the year that psychology was established as an independent discipline. Even though Greek psychologists such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were the first to actually being to study the inner man, Wundt was the psychologists that actually began to undertake actual experiments as a practice. Although both played very crucial roles in the attempt to establish psychology as an independent discipline, it can be said that 1879 was the "official year".