Wilhelm Wundt

Wilhelm Wundt (1832 to 1920) was a German physiologist, philosopher and professor, and one of the fathers of modern psychology, the first person to call himself a psychologist. Born at Neckarau in Baden, he took a medical degree at Heidelberg in 1856, worked there as assistant to Hermann von Helmholtz and in 1864 became associate professor for anthropology and medical psychology. After a chair of inductive philosophy at Zurich he became professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, where in 1879 he founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research, and he started the first academic journal of the field, Philosophische Studien. He wrote Principles of Physiological Psychology in 1874 and, in ten volumes between 1900 and 1920, the Völkerpsychologie, an investigation of the developmental laws of language, myth and custom, which made him a pioneer of cultural psychology. He retired in 1917 and died in 1920. The atlas keeps him as a social theorist because of that study of collective mental life, which shaped later sociology and anthropology, for example the early work of Alfred Vierkandt.