Chapter 1 in Psychology

Well I really can't decide on what to blog about for this first one, so I'll be unoriginal and talk about someone I recently read about for Psychology. He was known as the "Father of Modern Psychology" and was arguably the most famous psychologist throughout; his name was Wilhelm Wundt. The overall idea of psychology started in Leipzig, Germany in 1879 when Wundt, in his laboratory, attempted to apply the scientific method and other scientific principles to the human mind. In his lab, students from various parts of the world came to study the structure of the mind.  Before psychology, Wundt focused on physiology and was a physiologist, he studied various topics that related to the brain such as reaction times, relfelxes, etc. He wanted to add reasoning to the different structures so he came up with an overall idea that is still talked about today. This idea, which focuses on mind structure and other (more basic) elements is known as structuralism. Structuralism, therefore was said to be created by Wundt. After Wundt, William James expanded his theory of structuralism and other psychologists came up with different theories that argued with what Wundt and James thought. Another important contribution Wundt had for psychology is called objective introspection. This is where someone is trying to understand the reasoning behind their own thoughts or basically asking “Why?” to anything that crosses the mind. An example of this would be placing a pencil or any object in someone’s hand and having them tell you everything and anything that crossed their mind. This experiment was considered the first attempt to “bring objectivity and measurement to the concept of psychology” (White 7).  Although Wundt didn’t provide many of the newer ideas in psychology, he was the first to attempt to think of psychology as a science. Below are some pictures of Wundt himself.