WUNDT, Wilhelm. - Born on 16 Aug. 1832 at Neckarau near Mannheim; died on 31 Aug. 1920 at Leipzig. He is regarded as the founder of modern experimental psychology.
After extensive preparation in medicine, physiology, physics and chemistry, he obtained his habilitation in physiology in 1857. In his early period he was especially influenced by the work of the great physiologist J. Müller; from 1858 he worked at Heidelberg alongside Helmholtz until 1871. In 1874 he accepted the chair of inductive philosophy at Zurich, and the following year became full professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin. Wundt’s academic career also marks the main stages of his thought, which moved from strictly scientific and positivist studies to his own philosophical conception of the principal manifestations of the human spirit. In 1879 he moved to Leipzig, where he founded the first laboratory or “Psychologisches Institut” of experimental psychology, conducted according to rigorously scientific criteria, and in 1881 began the series Philosophische Studien, which from 1905 became Psychologische Studien, devoted for the most part to problems of psychology.
Around Wundt there gathered the leading constellation of modern psychology, not only in Germany with Kraepelin, Lehmann, Külpe and Neumann, but also in the Anglo-American world, which would become the strongest bastion of experimental psychology, with Stanley Hall, Cattell, Scripture, Titchener, Witmer, Warren Stratton and Judd. Among his assistants from 1881 to 1909 were scholars of psychological orientations that would later acquire their own profile but retained the unmistakable character of their common master, such as McK. Cattell (his first voluntary assistant), L. Lange, O. Külpe (founder, with Marbe and Messer, of the Würzburg school of Denkpsychologie), W. Möbius, W. Wirth (founder of the Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie), E. Dürr, F. Krüger (founder of Ganzheitspsychologie) and O. Klemm (historian of psychology).