Psychology (just) before James

A few words today about psychology before James, or Freud, or Pavlov.

Before any of them there was Wilhelm Wundt, who may have been the first scholar writing about the human mind to call HIMSELF a "psychologist". 

A few words about the timeline. Herbert Spencer wrote his PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY in two volumes, which appeared a decade apart, in 1870 and 1880. Wundt's most important works in the field were published in 1873-74 and 1881. James published his brilliant two volume Principles in 1890. Freud's breakthrough began with Studies in Hysteria and Three Essays, in the 1890s and after the turn of the century, respectively.  Pavlov published his lectures on the nervous system, which included his famous observations of salivating dogs,  in 1897.  

One gets the impression, then, of Wundt (and perhaps Herbert Spencer in his psychological writings) as constituting the Old Guard in psychology, in the days just before the field was about to explode in a variety of different (and mutually opposed) directions.

One standard label for Wundt in his psychologizing is "structuralist". This allows William James to take up the post of the world's first functionalist in the structure/function dichotomy in psychology. 

Wundt believed that he was experimenting on the human mind (not the brain or nervous system). His experiments seem primitive in retrospect, but that is unsurprising. It has been a long time. 

His experiments were on questions that still have their interest. Consider the measurement of reaction times. Subjects would receive a stimulus such as a flash of light and would be working on an instruction to press a certain button as soon as they saw it. Wundt could record reaction times, the times between flash and press, to thousandths of a second. 

Wundt had certain requirements for laboratory work.  He insisted on the use of trained/practiced observers. Someone just off the street being shown those flashes of light for the first time was considered far less reliable a subject than someone for whom it had become a routine task. Repeatability of results is the hallmark of experimental science, after all, and Wundt's human lab rats gave him this. 

In general, Wundt believed that psychology exists in a real-world terrain between physiology on the one hand and a philosophical concern with a soul on the other. Psychology is the science of direct experience, to which it seeks to give mathematical rigor. Furthermore, psychology is a science of "generally valid forms of direct human experience," a fact that makes it "the foundation of the humanities."

I expect to say something about the ways in which James' psychology was a reaction against Wundt: perhaps as soon as next week if the gods are willing and the creek don't rise.