 |
| Wilhelm Wundt |
Wilhelm Wundt is the founder of the
new science of psychology. Associating experimentation with psychology, he
established psychology as an independent academic discipline, separating it
from philosophy and physiology. According to Wundt, psychology should be
studied by defining psychological events in terms of variables and analysing
them by the experimental method.
Wundt defined psychology as the analytic
study of the generalized adult human mind through the method of introspection. For
Wundt, the subject matter of psychology is the study of consciousness. Wundt
believed that consciousness has many different parts, which can be studied by
breaking it down into smaller components. Wundt’s approach was a major
precursor to the first school of psychology called structuralism.
Psychology in today’s time is very
different from Wundt’s approach. Over the years, psychology went through many
changes due to the emergence of other schools of thought. These schools
broadened the scope of psychology beyond the laboratory, studied a wide range
of topics, apart from just conscious experiences, and also emphasized on the
practical applications of psychology. Gradually, with the passing of time,
Wundtian psychology faded away.
Despite Wundtian psychology having
little relevance in today’s time, some aspects of it can be found in
psychological perspectives that emerged much later. Certain ideas proposed by
Wundt are found in a rather different form and context in other approaches to
psychology that came into existence many years after Wundtian psychology, and
are still very popular.
Unlike the British empiricists, Wundt
did not believe that the mind works passively. Wundt focused on the
self-organizing capacity of the mind. Due to this he referred to his system as voluntarism – a term derived from the
word volition, which means the act or power of willing. Voluntarism is the
power of the will to organize the content of the mind into higher mental
processes. He emphasized on the process of actively organizing and synthesizing
the elements of the mind.
The concept of the will was highly
significant for Wundt. He suggested that the idea of will should be the central concept on the basis of which
psychological issues should be understood.
According to Wundt, human beings can
decide what is attended and thus what is perceived, that is, humans can exert
their will in attending to and perceiving of objects. He further suggested that
much of this will has a purpose; it is motivated. On the whole, through his approach
of voluntarism, Wundt was emphasizing that humans have will, choice, and
purpose.
 |
| Abraham Maslow |
Decades later, another psychological
perspective developed and gained popularity by emphasizing similar ideas. One
of the basic themes of humanistic psychology, founded by Abraham Maslow, that
emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, many years after Wundt, is choice and free will.
Humanistic
psychologists believe that behavior is not constrained by either current
circumstances or past experience. The way individuals act is not simply a
response to an immediate stimulus, nor determined solely by previous events. Human
beings, instead, choose and decide how to behave based on their subjective
assessment of a situation. They are also guided by purpose rather than being
passive to external factors. This means that, according to humanistic
psychologists, human beings have free will.
This
emphasis on free will emphasized by humanistic psychologists is very similar to
Wundt’s voluntarism. Wundt opposed the associationists view of the mind being
passive and suggested that humans can exert choice and will while attending to
and perceiving. In the same way, humanistic psychology opposed the
deterministic viewpoint of psychoanalysis and behaviorism.
Humanistic
psychologists suggested that instead of being determined by the unconscious or
environmental factors, human beings, based on their subjective perceptions of the
situation, have choice and free will, and are not passive.
Wundt’s
voluntarism, however, was specifically with respect to perception, whereas
humanistic psychology, emphasizing on free will, is more in terms of behavior
in general. Nevertheless, there can be a striking similarity found between
Wundtian psychology and humanistic psychology with respect to choice, will, and
purpose.
Wundt used his approach of voluntarism
to explain the organization of mental elements referred to as apperception. He suggested that perceptions
have a unity or wholeness; the visual experience of individuals in the real
world comprehends a whole, complete object and not as the elementary sensations
and feelings that constitute it.
It is this organization of mental elements that Wundt called apperception. Wundt
believed that apperception is active and voluntary; it is under the individual’s
control. He emphasized on the active role of attention.
According
to Wundt, when elements are attended to, they are arranged and rearranged as
per the individual’s will. Wundt called this phenomenon creative synthesis. He believed that creative synthesis is involved
in all acts of perception.
Wundt
suggested that the process of organizing mental elements into a whole is a
creative synthesis, which creates new properties from the building up or
combining of the elements. Apperception, thus, according to Wundt, is an active
process. The mind acts on the elements or smaller components in a creative way
to make up the whole.
This
combining of elements into a whole by the individual’s will in a creative
manner was also suggested years later, in the 1930s, by the psychoanalyst
Alfred Adler – one of the pioneers of social psychoanalysis.
 |
| Alfred Adler |
One
of the most significant concepts of Adler is the creative self. By the concept of creative self, Adler suggested
that each individual has the ability, the creative power to develop his/her own
personality, in the way he/she wants to. The creative power of the self is
something that intervenes between the stimuli acting upon and the person and
the responses the person makes to these stimuli.
Adler suggested that individuals use the raw material of
heredity and experience to construct their own personality. The individual uses
the heredity and environment, together with the manner in which he/she
experiences them as the bricks and mortar to build and develop overall
personality. The architectural design reflects that person’s own
style. How individual’s put those materials together to use is of major
importance.
The concept of the creative self was developed by Adler to
oppose the mechanistic viewpoint of construction of life. Adler opposed the
idea that individuals acquire unique behavior patterns through a
stimulus-response kind of learning, because it implies that people are passive
recipients who cannot interpret or act upon their experiences.
The creative self, in contrast, implies that people,
by actively constructing them out of their experiences and heredities, create their
own personalities, resulting in uniqueness, completeness, and wholeness. The creative self enables the
individual to act upon the facts of the world and transform these facts into a
personality that is dynamic, unified, and uniquely stylized.
In the same manner, Wundt opposed
idea of the mind being passive and suggested that apperception takes place by
creative synthesis, which organizes the mental elements into something new,
unique, and whole; the mind acts upon sensations and experiences creatively to
make the whole.
Wundt and Adler, in a way, were
suggesting a similar idea in a different context. Wundt was talking about
organization of sensations and experiences and its interpretation leading to
the comprehension of a whole object. Adler was talking about using heredity,
environment, and experiences taken together in the construction of personality.
Both emphasized the individual actively being involved in the transformation
from raw materials towards wholeness and completeness.
Wundt, therefore, suggested
ideas and concepts that years later were represented in aspects of psychoanalytic
and humanistic perspectives. Wundtian psychology, which involved the study of consciousness
by breaking it down into smaller sensory experiences in a laboratory setting,
proposed certain ideas and concepts similar to perspectives that emerged much
later, at a time when psychology had moved beyond only experimentation and just
the study of consciousness.
No comments:
Post a Comment