Wilhelm Wundt was the first person to call himself a psychologist
In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt started running experiments of his own in a Leipzig room first given to him just to store equipment. That modest space became the first laboratory devoted solely to psychology, and a 1991 survey of historians ranked him first of all time, well ahead of William James and Freud.
Wundt was born on 16 August 1832 at Neckarau, now part of Mannheim, the fourth child of a Lutheran pastor; two siblings died young. He qualified in medicine at Heidelberg in 1856 and in 1858 became assistant to Hermann von Helmholtz, teaching the physiology lab course. His lectures, though, kept drifting from medicine toward the mind. In 1872 he married Sophie Mau, and their daughter Eleanor later assisted him in his work.
After a brief post in Zurich he took a philosophy chair at Leipzig in 1875, a university where Ernst Weber and Gustav Fechner had pioneered the measurement of sensation; Wundt said Weber deserved to be called the father of experimental psychology. The university gave him a room in 1876 for apparatus brought from Zurich. By 1879 he was conducting independent experiments there with tachistoscopes, chronoscopes, pendulums and timers, handing instruments to graduate students to find research uses. Official recognition came in 1883, and the institute eventually filled eleven rooms before moving into a building he designed.
He also launched the first journal for psychological research, Philosophische Studien, in 1883. Between 1875 and 1919 he supervised 185 doctoral students, 70 of them from abroad and 18 from America, including James McKeen Cattell, the first American professor of psychology, and G. Stanley Hall. As a result most early American psychologists can trace their academic lineage back to him; Durkheim, Husserl and Franz Boas also studied or visited.
In the mid-20th century American psychologists often dismissed him, partly because of poor translations, distorted accounts by some students, and behaviourism's quarrel with his approach. He retired in 1917 to write, received three Nobel nominations in medicine and physiology, and died in August 1920, shortly after turning 88. He lies in Leipzig's South Cemetery.
Source: Wilhelm Wundt
