The Germans Gave Us Psychology

The Wonder of The Mind

The year 1879 is generally put forward as the birth date of modern scientific psychology. It was in that year that Wilhelm Wundt (pronounced "Voont") established the first real psychology research laboratory at the University of Leipzig, in Germany. Wundt's intention was to employ the methods of laboratory science to study consciousness. He was a physiologist and was concerned with our sensory-percepted systems.

Consciousness, to Wundt, was the mental experience that arises from sensory-perception. To his credit, Wundt changed psychology from the philosophy of mental processes to the science of mental processes. In an effort to describe the basic elements of consciousness he turned to introspection, which means "to look inward." Wundt and his former student, Edward Titchener, engaged in the search for the building blocks of consciousness and their system was later called structuralism.

Very early in the 20th century, around 1912, the argument arose supporting the idea that the whole of conscious experience is not the same as the sum of its parts. This concept of the whole (or Gestalt in German) became the position of the Gestalt psychologists led by Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Kohler. They firmly believed that consciousness should be studied in its entirety, not piece by piece.

Near the end of the 19th century, while Wundt was working in Germany, Sigmund Freud was in Vienna, Austria, exploring the unconcious. He was a physician who began to question the assumption that biological factors alone were behind all behavior and mental processes. Eventually, Freud came to believe that all behavior is motivated by psychological processes.

He declared that psychodynamic conflicts within us occur without our even being aware of them. He took the position that aggressive and sexual instincts were responsible for many of the hidden conflicts and for firty years Freud revised and expanded his ideas into a body of work known as psychoanalysis.

Today there are many approaches to the study of man, his consciousness, personality and behavior. The six most often mentioned are: biological, evolutionary, psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive, and humanistic. Psychology today, that is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes, has come a long way since 1879. Our debt to the great German pioneers in this field is immeasurable.

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