The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  —Finally, he was particularly scornful of the psychology of William James, which was far more holistic, insightful, and personally relevant than his own. After reading James’s The Principles of Psychology— which was greeted enthusiastically by psychologists throughout the world—Wundt sourly commented, “It is literature, it is beautiful, but it is not psychology.”30

  Sic Transit

  Nothing about Wilhelm Wundt is as curious as his influence on psychology—paradoxically vast and yet very minor.

  Vast:

  —He was the encyclopedist and systematist of the field; he drew the intellectual map of the territory and defined it as a new domain of science.

  —He personally trained many of the people who became the leading psychologists in Germany and the United States during the first decades of the new science.

  —He assembled from the scattered beginnings of physiological psychology a distinct methodology for experimental psychology. His laboratory and its methods were the model for many of those established during the next half century.

  —Through his immensely authoritative textbooks, he influenced most of the first two generations of American psychologists and their students. During the early part of the twentieth century, the majority of American students of psychology could trace their historical lineage back to Wundt.31

  And yet very minor:

  Wundt’s ideas play little part in contemporary psychological theory. The principal reasons:

  —Wundt wrote on every imaginable branch of psychology, including many not amenable to his own experimental methods, such as psychic causality, hypnosis, and mediumship. As a result, certain young psychologists saw him as something of a dualist and meta-physician, and thereupon adopted even more rigorously positivist criteria for those psychological phenomena which could be investigated scientifically.32 Their views would be embodied in behaviorism, which would regard introspection, even of the Wundtian kind, as unscientific and valueless.

  —Many other psychologists, however, reacted against what they saw as the excessive narrowness and rigidity of Wundtian psychology. They were drawn to areas of research with practical applications, among them child psychology, educational psychology, psychological testing, and clinical psychology. All these fields, though beyond the Wundtian pale, grew and prospered.

  —Certain new schools of research psychology emerged during Wundt’s later years as protests against characteristics of his system. These schools had in common the view that experimental psychology should not be limited to the elemental components of immediate experience but should explore higher mental processes.

  Such as memory. At the University of Berlin, Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) invented a method of investigating memory processes that eliminated subjectivity and the effects of the individual’s previous experiences. He created twenty-three hundred nonsense syllables—meaningless combinations of two consonants separated by a vowel, such as bap, tox, muk, and rif— and used them in a series of memory experiments.

  He would read a list of the syllables, for instance, then recall as many as he could. By varying the conditions—the length of the list, the speed at which he read it, the number of times he read it—he rigorously explored such issues as how the number of items is related to the speed with which they can be memorized (the difficulty of memorizing the list increases far faster than its length), how forgetting is related to the time lapse between learning and recall, the effect on learning and forgetting of repetition and review.33

  So dedicated was Ebbinghaus to his research that he subjected himself to almost incredible labors. In an effort to determine how the number of repetitions affects retention, for instance, he rehearsed 420 lists of 16 syllables 34 times each, a total of 14,280 trials—an Edmond Dantès of psychology, scratching his way through the walls of a Château d’If of research. His method, dreadful as it sounds, was so successful that it has been a staple of the armamentarium of experimental psychology ever since. (In recent decades, to be sure, the predictions he derived from his work have dwindled in importance; the emphasis on memory research in recent decades has been on meaningful rather than meaningless learning.)34

  George Elias Müller (1850–1934), at the University of Göttingen, added introspection to Ebbinghaus’s method in order to examine the mental processes behind the statistical findings. Müller found that the recall of nonsense syllables, far from being related solely to the length of the list, the number of repetitions, and similar factors, was in considerable part contingent on his subjects’ active use of stratagems of their own, such as the groupings, rhythms, and even consciously contrived meanings they had imposed on the nonsense syllables. Learning, in short, is not a passive process but an active and creative one.35 These findings, too, helped free psychology from the limits imposed on it at Leipzig.

  Certain other psychologists, including some of Wundt’s students, developed even more radical methods of experimental research. Oswald Külpe (1862–1915), though he took his degree under Wundt and was his assistant for eight years, came to think that not only memory but many other thought processes could be studied in the laboratory. In 1896, he founded a psychological laboratory at the University of Würzburg that soon was second in prestige only to Wundt’s, and he and his students became known as the Würzburg School. Their distinctive contribution was the use of “systematic experimental introspection,” in which the subject reports not just sensations and feelings but all the thoughts he had while performing a mental task.

  Külpe used this method to test Donders’s hypothesis that complex mental processes consist of simple ones linked together; it revealed that the addition of mental steps to a reaction-time experiment often changed the nature of the thought process altogether, yielding a reaction time different from the simple addition of all the steps involved.36

  The work of others in the Würzburg School—Karl Marbe, Narziss Ach, and Karl Bühler—made its name synonymous with the experimental study of human thought.37 In a typical Würzburg experiment, a subject might have been given a stimulus word and asked to produce an associated word that was more comprehensive, or else an associated word that was more specific. If the stimulus was, say, “bird,” a “superordinate” (more comprehensive) association might be “animal,” a “subordinate” (more specific) one “canary.” Afterward the subject recounted everything that had gone on in his mind during the few seconds it had taken him to perform the task—his recognition of the stimulus word, his reaction to the task, the appearance of mental images aroused by the stimulus word, the search for the appropriate response, and the appearance of the appropriate word.38 These recollections, written down, were analyzed for clues as to how memory works.

  (In recent years this very method has been used by artificial intelligence specialists to create “expert systems”—computer programs that simulate human problem-solving activities such as medical diagnosis by replicating, in computer language, the steps of reasoning used by human experts.)

  A curious discovery made by members of the Würzburg School was that subjects sometimes found no trace of mental imagery in their introspection. Adding or subtracting numbers, for instance, or making a judgment as to whether a statement was true or false, might involve no images. The researchers called this phenomenon “imageless thought”; it showed that, contrary to Wundtian theory, some thought processes are not composed of elemental sensations and perceptions.39

  A researcher named Henry Watt made another of the Würzburg School’s valuable discoveries. He found that if he told a subject what the task was—perhaps “Find a superordinate word”—before giving him the stimulus word, introspection would show that the subject had not searched for the superordinate word but that it simply appeared of itself. Watt had discovered the effect of a “determining tendency” or, as it came to be more generally known, “mental set”—the mind’s preparedness to perform a task by unconscious means.40

  In these and other ways the Würzburg School expanded experimental psycho
logy far beyond Wundtian boundaries and led the move toward a more holistic psychology.

  By the 1920s Wundtian psychology was fading from the scene. Professor Ludy T. Benjamin, a leading historian of the field, sums up what became of it:

  In the end, Wundt’s psychology, and that of his contemporaries, was replaced by newer psychological approaches. Although parts of this psychological system exist in modern psychology…we continue to remember him principally for his vision in seeing the promise of a science of psychology and then taking the giant steps required in the nineteenth century to establish the discipline.41

  But, he adds, recent scholarship has shown that Wundt had “a depth of understanding and breadth of interest (e.g., his writings on culture, law, art, language, history, and religion)” that have long been overlooked.

  For all that, Boring’s evaluation of Wundt, first made over seventy-five years ago and repeated in 1950, seems unassailable:

  Ebbinghaus and not Wundt… had the flash of genius about how to investigate learning. So too with the other great problems of emotion, thought, will, intelligence, and personality, which were to be successfully attacked sometime and for which the Wundtian laboratory was not yet ready. We need not, however, despise our heritage because, with its help, we have in time advanced far beyond it.42

  * I use “his” and “him” here because for many years Wundt had no female graduate students. —M.H.

  SIX

  The Psychologist Malgré Lui:

  William James

  “This Is No Science”

  What is one to make of a distinguished professor of the new science of psychology who denies that it is a science? Who praises the findings of experimental psychologists but loathes performing experiments and does as few as possible? Who is said to be the greatest American psychologist of his time (the late nineteenth century) but never took a course in psychology and sometimes even disavows the label of psychologist?

  Listen to this maverick, William James:

  To a poet friend he writes, in sarcastic allusion to the New Psychology of the German mechanists, “The only Psyche now recognized by science is a decapitated frog whose writhings express deeper truths than your weak-minded poets ever dreamed.”1 In a letter to his brother, the novelist Henry James, he refers to psychology as a “nasty little subject” that excludes everything one would want to know.2 Only two years after completing his huge and magisterial Principles of Psychology he writes:

  It is indeed strange to hear people talk triumphantly of “the New Psychology,” and write “Histories of Psychology,” when into the real elements and forces which the word covers not the first glimpse of clear insight exists. A string of raw facts; a little gossip and wrangle about opinions; a little classification and generalization on the mere descriptive level; a strong prejudice that we have states of mind, and that our brain conditions them: but not a single law in the sense in which physics shows us laws, not a single proposition from which any consequence can causally be deduced. This is no science, it is only the hope of a science.3

  Yet this outspoken recusant is not scornful of psychology but has great expectations of it. He sees its goal as the discovery of the connection between each physiological “brain state” and the corresponding state of mind; a genuine understanding of that connection would be “the scientific achievement, before which all past achievements would pale.”4 But he says psychology is not ready for that; its state is like that of physics before Galileo enunciated the laws of motion, chemistry before Lavoisier stated the law of the preservation of mass. The best it can do until its Galileo and Lavoisier come is to explain the laws of conscious mental life, but “come they some day surely will.”

  Adorable Genius

  The informality and unpretentiousness of James’s remarks tell us that we are in the presence of a man very unlike Wundt; no wonder they did not appreciate each other’s work. James, a short, slender man, lightly bearded and blue-eyed, with fine features and a noble forehead, chose to dress in what was, for that time, informal garb for a professor—Norfolk jacket, bright shirt, flowing tie. Friendly, charming, and outgoing, he often walked across Harvard Yard with students, animatedly talking to them, a spectacle to make a Herr Professor’s flesh creep. As a lecturer, he was so vivacious and humorous that one day a student interrupted and asked him to be serious for a moment.

  Despite his ready smile and boyish, even impish, manner, he was a complex personality: strong yet intermittently frail, hardworking yet sociable, joyous but given to spells of melancholy, frivolous but profoundly serious, kind to students and loving to his family but easily bored and exasperated, especially by nitpicking chores like proofreading (about which he once wrote, “Send me no proofs! I will return them unopened and never speak to you again”5). Although he had the manners of a gentleman and was thoroughly civil in his behavior, he could be wickedly derogatory, as in the remarks about Wundt quoted earlier, but usually he made such comments only in personal letters, and in his published work was gentle and courteous even when critical.

  He wrote with a fluency, informality, and intimacy that no other psychologist of his time, certainly no German, would have dreamed of using. Of the differing codes governing the several social selves of a man he said, “You must not lie in general, but you may lie as much as you please if asked about your relations with a lady; you must accept a challenge from an equal, but if challenged by an inferior you may laugh him to scorn.”6 To illustrate the difficulty of paying attention to a subject one dislikes he offered this case (probably himself):

  One snatches at any and every passing pretext, no matter how trivial or external, to escape from the odiousness of the matter at hand. I know a person, for example, who will poke the fire, pick dust-specks from the floor, arrange his table, snatch up the newspaper, take down any book which catches his eye, trim his nails, waste the morning anyhow, in short, and all without premeditation,—simply because the only thing he ought to attend to is the preparation of a noonday lesson in formal logic which he detests. Anything but that! 7

  He sometimes salted his serious writing with humorous stories and jokes. Describing how Helmholtz and Wundt felt about a psychologist who had recently misapplied their principle of unconscious inference, he wrote, “It would be natural [for them] to feel towards him as the sailor in the story felt towards the horse who got his foot into the stirrup,—‘If you’re going to get on, I must get off.’ ”8

  And he could be wonderfully sensitive and empathetic. He visited Helen Keller when she was a young girl and brought her a gift he thought she could particularly appreciate, and which in fact she never forgot—an ostrich feather.

  No wonder the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead summed him up as “that adorable genius, William James.”

  Born in New York City in 1842, William James was a child of privilege and by all odds should have become a playboy or, at best, a dilettante.9

  His Scotch-Irish grandfather, who had come from Ireland, was a shrewd, hardworking businessman and a promoter of the Erie Canal who amassed several million dollars. In consequence, his son Henry (William’s father) had no need to work. Henry went to divinity school for two years, but found its stern Presbyterian doctrines repugnant and quit; he continued, however, to be concerned with religious and philosophic questions all his life. At thirty-three, he had an acute emotional crisis. After dinner, while idly staring at the fire, he was suddenly overwhelmed by a nameless fear—“a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause,”10 he later said—that lasted for only ten seconds but left him badly shaken and prey to recurring anxiety for two years. Physicians, trips, and other distractions were no help, but at last he found relief in the philosophy of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who himself had suffered just such anxiety attacks.

  After regaining his health, Henry devoted himself in part to writing works of theology and social reform (he styled himself “a philosopher and seeker of truth”), and in part to the education of his children. D
issatisfied with American schools, he alternately took his family— William James was the eldest of five children—to Europe to broaden their education and experience, and brought them back to their house on Washington Square in New York to keep in touch with their own culture.

  As a result, William James attended schools in the United States, England, France, Switzerland, and Germany, and was also privately tutored; became familiar with the major museums and galleries in every city the family visited; acquired fluency in five languages; met, listened to, and talked to such frequenters of the James household as Thoreau, Emerson, Greeley, Hawthorne, Carlyle, Tennyson, and J. S. Mill; and through his father’s influence became widely read and well versed in philosophy. Not that Henry James, Sr., was a taskmaster or disciplinarian; for his time, he was an unusually permissive and loving father, who encouraged dinner table arguments by the children about every kind of issue and, to his friends’ horror, allowed his children to attend theater.

  But a loving and permissive father can wield distressing influence over a child. At seventeen William James wanted to become a painter, but Henry James, Sr., who wanted him to seek a career in the sciences or philosophy, disapproved and took the family to Europe for a year as a distraction. Only because William persisted was he reluctantly allowed to study with an artist in Newport. After half a year William decided he was not gifted, perhaps more because of guilt feelings than a lack of talent, and, obeying his father’s wishes, entered Harvard and began the study of chemistry.