ABSTRACT
Wilhelm Wundt was the pivotal figure of the era in which experimental psychology emerged as a separate discipline on the intellectual scene. Recent scholarship has established that the view of Wundt that has pervaded English-language history of psychology, as primarily a systematic experimental psychologist, is a distortion that perhaps was fostered by Wundt’s student E. B. Titchener. Sociocultural psychology was for Wundt a far more promising route to the understanding of emotion and volition than experimental psychology. And much of his sociocultural psychology, as was typical of philosophers and psychologists of his time, was devoted to the psychology of language, or what is now called psycholinguistics. Wundt considered the older definitions of psychology, such as the science of the mind or of the soul, too metaphysical. He recommended that psychology should be defined as the science of consciousness. The methods of psychology are experimentation and observation without experimentation—still the two major methods.
