What was William James critic against the theory of Structuralism by Wundt?

-- madelene p. siega (madie_siega@hotmail.com), May 09, 2001

Answers

James was occasionally critical of Wundt, but not because of his presumed "structuralism", per se (see below). Writing to Stumpf (who thought Wundt would ultimately have little intellecutal legacy), James said that this "Napoleon of the intellectual world [Wundt]... will never have a Waterloo, for he is a Napoleon without genius and with no central idea which, if defeated, brings down the whole faric in ruin.... Cut him up like a worm and each fragment crawls,... you can't kill him all at once." In a letter to his friend, the philospoher Santayana, James said "Wundt seems to me like a survival of the alchemist." In 1893 he said that Wundt was "fast turning into a humbug" and called him "mentally dishonest" (all quotations take from p. 29 of John M. O'Donnell's _The Origins of Behaviorism: American Psychology, 1870-1920_ (NYU, 1985). Still, all this must be taken in the context of James having been decidedly ambivalent about the value of laboratory psychology, which he criticized regularly for having produced some data, but few new ideas of any merit. Wundt himself had stopped doing much lab work in the 1880s (according to Cattell's retrospective of his days in the Wundt lab), but he had trained almost all the founders of the early U.S. psychology labs.

To return to the issue of structuralism, however, if you look at more recent historical scholarship, I think you'll find that Wundt was not a "structuralist." This term was invoked by Wundt's student, E.B. Titchener, to distinguish his own approach from the Chicago school's (Angell, Dewey, Carr) "functionalism." The misapprehension that Wundt was a "structuralist" seems to derive the classic history of psychology text by E.G. Boring (1929), who had been Titchener's student, and Titchener had claimed to be the primary inheritor of the "true" Wundtian tradition in the U.S. Wundt's work was, in fact, far more wide-ranging than "structuralism" suggests -- including everything from physiological psychology, to anthropology (the "folk psychology"), to philosophical ethics. Much has been written about this. See, e.g.,

A reappraisal of Wilhelm Wundt. By Blumenthal, Arthur L. American Psychologist. 1975 Nov Vol 30(11) 1081-1088.

On "discovering" Wundt. By Diamond, Solomon. American Psychologist. 1980 Aug Vol 35(8) 763-765.

The Wundt myths. By O'Neil, W. M. Australian Journal of Psychology. 1984 Aug Vol 36(2) 285-289.

Origins and basic principles of Wundt's Voelkerpsychologie. By Danziger, Kurt. British Journal of Social Psychology. 1983 Nov Vol 22(4) 303-313.

A reappraisal of Wundt's influence on social psychology. By Kroger, Rolf O.; Scheibe, Karl E. Canadian Psychology. 1990 Jul Vol 31(3) 220-228.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), May 09, 2001.

And one more that I was unable to find on PsychInfo:

Leahey, T. H. (1981) The mistaken mirror: On Wundt's and Titchener's psychologies. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 17: 273-282.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yokru.ca), May 09, 2001.