Here is a link to more information about Wundt's Volkerpsychologie, and Wundt in general:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-wundt/#Vol
I wanted to find a link to more information about Volkerpsychologie because so little is known about, but it was hard to find and this link doesn't provide that much more information that what was already in the texts. I find it remarkable that Wundt, the acclaimed founder of psychology, could have such a great influence and so much written about him and be studied so much, when half of his work is negelected. According to this website and our texts, Wundt saw voluntarism and Volkerpsychologie as equally essential parts of his psychology. Volkerpsychologie was an alternative to experimental psychology, a way to gather other forms of evidence that could not be found through experimentation but were equally valid and worth study. He spent the last thirty years of his life writing this ten-volume work, and yet no one seems to think it's worth studying. Wundt did place great emphasis on experimentation, but the popular view that he was interested in no other things, which is supported by the lack of scholarship on Volkerpsychologie, is distorted.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I completely agree with you Amanda. I too found the Volkerpsychologie tidbit interesting, and worth following through with. How could volumes of books be dismissed as basically rubbish, when they haven't even been properly translated? A man as prominent as Wundt surely deserves to have some time devoted to his years of work comparing other fields of interest to psychology.
ReplyDeleteI also found it interesting that almost every article we read about concerning Wundt talked about his work in Volkerpsychologie, yet no one finds it important enough to study it a little further.
Yet the book "The Secret" has sold millions in our society, with no concrete research to back it up. Go figure.
I, too, am confused about the apparent lack of interest in and scholarship on Wundt's Vokerpsychologie. As I was reading our texts, I wondered why this could be. Volkerpsychologie was concerned with such topics as religion, art, and myth. Are these not concepts worth studying in psychology? Most definitions of psychology usually read something like "the scientific study of human behavior/emotion/cognition, etc." Religion, art, and myth all affect the way we behave, feel, and think; it stands to reason that studying these topics would be of use in developing a fuller understanding of psychology.
ReplyDeleteI am reminded of something a psychology professor I knew at the community college I attended before I came to Beloit said: "Religion is wonderful, but it has no place in psychology." I was taken aback by this statement at the time, and after reading about Wundt's Volkerpsychologie, I wonder if there is something we English-speaking psychologists are missing out on because Wundt's extensive works on this subject remain untranslated.
The following is a link to a website that might give us more insight into this lost work. It is in Portugese, but just scroll down to the link that says "Texto disponivel em Word" and it will open a (long) word document entitled "Wundt, Volkerpsychologie and Experimental Social Psychology."
http://www.cliopsyche.uerj.br/agendainterna/historia.html