Wundt lived to the age of 88, but biographical accounts did not begin to appear until some sketches honored him on his eightieth birthday in 1912. The centennial celebration of Wundt's Institute for Experimental Psychology occasioned several studies of the personality of Wundt, in particular the amassing of family and biographical data by Wolfgang Bringmann and Gustav Ungerer. This chapter uses published biographical and autobiographical writings to explore the background and personality of Wundt, how he came to his particular convictions about the possibility and the nature of psychological science within the general intellectual environment outlined in the opening chapter.

Wundt finished his autobiography, Erlebtes und Erkanntes, shortly before his death in 1920. A rambling account by an octogenarian, it contains details that are nevertheless vivid and significant. Wundt's early recollections include family, a difficult primary education plagued by daydreams and inattention to studies, and an awareness of political and social developments in pre-Bismarckian Germany.

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was born on August 16, 1832, the fourth and youngest child of the Protestant pastor Maximilian Wundt (1787 1846) and Marie Friederike née Arnold (1797 1868). His place of birth was Neckerau, a village near the Rhine port of Mannheim in the Grand Duchy of Baden. Only Wilhelm and a brother Ludwig (1824 1902) survived infancy.

Wundt was descended from Austrian and French Calvinist refugees who settled in the Rhineland and the Palatinate. On the paternal side the family tree displays Calvinist clergymen and theologians at Heidelberg University; his mother's side includes natural scientists, physicians and government administrators. Wundt remembered his father as a man of tender character who, with only one notable exception, was always affectionate toward him. Wundt's mother was more practical and ambitious, and she was the one who disciplined and, for all practical purposes, raised him.

Wundt's father was a pastor of the United Evangelical Church of Baden, which was more Calvinist than Lutheran. The official evaluation by his superiors characterized Maximilian Wundt as mild and peace loving. He was apparently relatively liberal in outlook, more interested in the everyday needs of his congregation than in strict interpretation of Biblical texts.

When Wundt was less than a year old, the family left Neckarau and moved to a small farming town, Leutershausen, in the uplands near Heidelberg. One reason for the move to the lower paying post was the health of baby Wilhelm he had contracted malaria, which was endemic to the marshy Mannheim area. Soon his brother Ludwig went to Heidelberg to live with his mother's sister and attend school. Wilhelm thus lived the life of an only child.

From age four to twelve, Wundt lived in Heidelsheim, a large village near the town of Bruchsal, south of Heidelberg. Here his father had a parish of about 2000 souls the largest charge of his career, and his last one. Heidelsheim was a religiously integrated community, with a sizeable minority of Catholics and even a few hundred Jews with their own synagogue and school. Wundt and his mother often visited a nearby Jewish family, and Wundt occasionally observed religious rituals in the neighbors' home and synagogue. Wundt's memory of his first literary project reflects the liberal and scholarly interests of the young boy: having just learned to print he wrote what seemed to him at the time to be a "great tome" on the history of world religions; the purpose was to show the features common to them all. Wundt's later anthropological writings produced a more sophisticated version of the same theme.

Heidelsheim also had its share of political strife. Church officials described the community as unruly and demoralized, and Wundt's father found there both a higher salary and more work. Relations with the Catholics, who shared the small church building, were strained, and the preceding pastor had antagonized his own parishioners by being overly strict.

During Wundt's first year at grammar school, a violent "village revolution" broke out. The sitting mayor lost an election decisively, but the district commissioner from Bruchsal disqualified the newly elected mayor and reinstated the unpopular official. The interference precipitated a violent protest: the mayor's house was burned; mounted militia from Bruchsal rode in, dispersed the rioters, and arrested dozens of them. Some of them received heavy prison sentences and fines, in spite of the efforts of Wundt's father to win clemency for them. The rebellious majority styled themselves as the "Poles" and called the mayor's supporters the "Russians." The romance of the Polish rebellion of 1830 was alive in Baden in 1838, and it would rise up again a decade later.

As a child Wundt was apparently most content just to be left alone. He hated having to take part in play and activities with other children in the village. His only companion his own age was a retarded child who could barely speak but was "very good natured." Wundt remembered that he enjoyed being with adults who would indulge his imagination with story telling and play acting.

In grammar school this imagination turned to uncontrolled daydreaming. One day his father attended the school in his pastoral role as school inspector, and Wundt's daydream was rudely interrupted by a slap in the face. A stern gaze from his father's face greeted his return to reality. Wundt's earliest memory of his educational experience was all the more vivid because it was the only occasion he could recall that his father punished him.

In his biography of Wundt, Solomon Diamond has made much of the fact that both this incident and Wundt's very earliest memory were painful episodes involving his father. As a toddler, Wundt followed his father to a dark staircase and fell. The darkness and Wundt's feeling of helplessness as his head hit the steps stayed in Wundt's mind's eye until the end of his life. Diamond finds psychoanalytic relevance in these two early episodes: "we are struck by the ambivalence that turns a loving father, in each instance, into a source of pain. Clinically we know that a boy's identification with such a father can lead to distrust of himself." Starting with these earliest memories volunteered by Wundt, Diamond constructs a personality problem in Wundt that, he argues, continued throughout his life and inhibited his ability to lead the new scientific psychology.

Perhaps more significant is the fact that Wundt apparently had little contact with his father's family (the more religious side), whereas his mother's family (the university and scientific side) strongly influenced his childhood and early career.

As a small boy, Wundt made memorable visits to Zacharias Arnold (1767 1840), his mother's father. The retired administrator of Heidelberg University domains was a cultured man, full of energy, varied interests and love of order. He took the boy on educational walks and taught him about the city. Together they watched construction of the first railway between Heidelberg and Mannheim. Wundt remembered feeling sympathetic toward the angry peasant women who were forced to tear out their vineyards and give way to the new railway station. When the first locomotive rolled out, his grandfather pointed out the Englishman at the controls, instructing a German how to run the engine. Visits to grandfather in Heidelberg entailed discipline that was stricter than at home. Wundt recalled once being punished by confinement in a dark closet, "a punishment which even aroused my mother's deepest sympathy." Apparently Mrs. Wundt could be strict, too.

In 1840 grandfather Arnold died and Wundt's father suffered a stroke. The next male influence in the eight year old boy's life was a young vicar, Friedrich Müller (1814 1871), who carried out most of the pastoral duties as the health of Wundt's father declined. Wundt was withdrawn from grammar school and tutored at home by Müller, who was as kind hearted as Wundt's father. Wundt and the young vicar shared a room, but since Müller was often busy seeing to the needs of the parish, Wundt was alone much of the time.

The psychologist whose work would emphasize the role of attention and the focusing of mental activity remembered his inattention as a young pupil, or rather, his attention to inappropriate things. He recalled staring blankly at his books and daydreaming, so vividly that he could interrupt an imaginary adventure when the vicar returned and then continue it from the same place later. Wundt remembered his impatience for his tutor to leave so that he could return to his dream world. Unfortunately, Wundt does not specify the nature of these daydreams.

Friedrich Müller's four years in the Wundt household defined an important phase of the boy's life. Wundt loved his teacher and companion and felt closer to him than to his dying father or his busy mother. He could not recall the young vicar ever punishing him. Müller apparently did an adequate job teaching Wundt Latin but prepared him poorly in mathematics. And Müller did nothing to help the boy control his daydreaming. Then Müller left Heidelsheim to take his own parish in a nearby town in 1844, Wundt convinced his parents to let him live with his tutor until the next fall. Then he went to Bruchsal to enter the Gymnasium, one of the special German high schools which prepared boys for the university.

Wundt recalled 1844 45, his first year of high school, as utterly miserable and full of failure. He was separated from his tutor, living with a Protestant family and attending a predominately Catholic school. To make matters worse, his father suffered another stroke that Christmas holiday. His kind tutor had prepared him for neither the intellectual nor the disciplinary rigors of school. The Gymnasium teachers would not tolerate his inattention and his daydreaming. They slapped him and ridiculed him. A teacher once tried to cheer him with the thought that, even though he was a pastor's son, he had alternatives to university studies he might become a mail carrier! Wundt ran away once from Bruchsal, but his determined mother brought him back to finish the year.

The Heidelberg relatives rescued Wundt from his misery in Bruchsal. Since that arrangement was clearly not working, they moved him in with his brother Ludwig and enrolled him in the Heidelberg Lyceum, as the Gymnasium there was called. Ludwig entered Heidelberg University that same autumn. Wundt's brother and a cousin set good examples of behavior, and Wundt managed to control his daydreaming and execute his assignments. In fact, Wundt bloomed. He made friends at school and loved living in Heidelberg.

Wundt's family situation also began to change. Wundt's mother negotiated her husband's retirement and pension, and the parents and two boys all moved in together in Heidelberg in 1846, shortly before Pastor Wundt died. Except for two years of study outside Heidelberg, Wundt continued to live with his mother until her death in 1868. Late in life, Wundt made his summer home in the same neighborhood where he had lived all those years with his mother.

As a student in the Lyceum in Heidelberg, Wundt fancied himself to be a writer. His passion for daydreaming was transformed into a passion for reading, and one teacher took special interest in Wundt and encouraged him to write. Even though he appreciated this particular teacher, Wundt continued to hold a low opinion of the teaching profession, no doubt partly due to his disastrous year at Bruchsal.

Although Wundt styled himself a mediocre student in school, his grades were outstanding in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and history, and quite good in most other subjects. Mathematics, drawing and singing were his weakest subjects; his inconsistent grades in religion may betray some rebelliousness on the part of this pastor's son, who dropped Hebrew explicitly because he did not want to study theology. Wundt's early strength with the written word and relative weakness in mathematics, art, and music give a foretaste of the type of psychologist he became.

In Heidelberg, the teenaged Wundt had a good vantage point for observing the course of the revolution of 1848. In March of that year, he was present in the Heidelberg Museum when some fifty German and Austrian liberals, inspired by the popular revolts in Berlin and Vienna, met there and issued invitations to an all German National Parliament in Frankfurt am Main. Later that year he was part of the tearful crowd that waved black, gold, and red flags during Robert Blum's inspiring speech in the courtyard of the Heidelberg castle. He followed the accounts of street-fighting in Berlin and Vienna, and he witnessed the farmers, armed with their scythes, streaming into Heidelberg from the outlying areas, only to be turned back by the rifles of the city militia.

The liberal National Parliament met in St. Paul's Church [Paulskirche] in Frankfurt amid great hopes and inspiring rhetoric, but the net result was political failure. As the absolute monarchs reasserted their power, the summer of 1849 found the stubborn Republic of Baden holding out against Prussian troops commanded by their crown prince, the future Emperor Wilhelm I. From a nearby mountaintop Wundt watched the Battle of Waghäusel, which decided the end of the Republic of Baden, and of the revolution in Germany. Some of the rebels were captured; others fled to Switzerland for America.

Heidelberg's citizens braced for the occupation. Happily, as Wundt recalled, their fears soon subsided, as the Prussian troops stayed on their best behavior. A friendly Pomeranian soldier even gave Wundt clarinet lessons. But the Grand Duke was restored to power in Baden before the the Prussian soldiers left, and the years 1849 to 1871 were difficult ones for liberals in Baden. Wundt was himself a liberal, and those difficult years were just the years during which Wundt was educated and launched his career--both scientific and political in Heidelberg.

In 1851 Wundt got his Abitur, the certificate of successful completion of qualifying examinations for attendance at university. Wundt and his family assumed that he would study for a profession, but the precise plan was not at all clear. Neither his late father nor his mother had urged him in the direction of theology. Wundt's talent for classical languages gave him some interest in scholarship, but he certainly did not want to become a schoolteacher. His cousin had been making anatomical drawings long before beginning medical studies in the university, but Wundt had no such enthusiasm for any particular profession.

Wundt decided to study medicine, he tells us, because that choice afforded him the opportunity to leave his mother's home and go to Tübingen, where her brother, Friedrich Arnold (1803 1890), was professor of anatomy and physiology. Wundt even counted himself lucky that his grades had not been good enough to win a scholarship availble to sons of Baden pastors, for in that case he would have started university at Heidelberg. The move to the "foreign" university in nearby Württemberg expanded Wundt's horizons, and he remembered an inclination already in that first year at Tübingen, not to become a physician, but rather a scientist like his uncle.

Friedrich Arnold was able to help and to influence his independent minded nephew. Wundt was stimulated by the social scene at Tübingen and became enthusiastic about his studies of brain anatomy. Presumably his uncle encouraged him in both of these interests. When Arnold became professor of anatomy and physiology at Heidelberg the next year, Wundt went with him: the Arnold family was concerned that he was spending too much money in Tübingen, and so it was decided that he should return home to live with his mother.

Wundt promised his family that he would finish his medical studies in three years at Heidelberg. While rushing through the required courses in theoretical and practical medicine, Wundt managed some time to study mathematics with a private tutor to remedy his deficiencies in that subject, so important to the chemistry and physics used in the new physiology.

Wundt also took advantage of Heidelberg's excellent opportunities to learn natural science. He enjoyed the lecture demonstrations of Philip von Jolly (1809 1884), who had opened one of Germany's early physical institutes in Heidelberg in 1846, and he was particularly impressed by a newcomer to Heidelberg, Robert Bunsen (1811 1899). Bunsen's lectures on general chemistry included results of his recent research and were richly illustrated by demonstration experiments. The combination of theory and experiment would later characterize Wundt's own lecture style in psychology. When he found out that laboratory exercises in Bunsen's chemical institute were supervised, not by the great chemist himself, but by an inexperienced assistant, Wundt withdrew from the institute and attached himself to the private laboratory of a Privatdozent in chemistry who could give him more personal attention. Still generally inspired by Bunsen, Wundt produced his first scientific paper, a study of his own urine while foregoing table salt. He had the satisfaction of seeing the paper published and later even cited in Carl Ludwig's important textbook on human physiology.

In spite of the attraction of chemistry, physiology was Wundt's main interest. Medical students, as well as some receptive anatomists like Wundt's uncle Friedrich, were aware that the Revolution of 1848 had coincided with a revolution in life science:

One can describe the years 1848 to 1851 as the time of the foundation of the new direction of physiology, and German science as the unique site of its origin; it was at first an essentially physical direction.

[Demnach kann man die Jahre 1848 bis 1851 als die Zeit der Begründung der neueren Richtung der Physiologie und die deutsche Wissenschaft als die ausschliessliche Stätte ihres Ursprungs bezeichnen, bei dem sie zunächst eine wesentlich physikalische Richtung einschlug.]

As Wundt described in his autobiography, his uncle Friedrich Arnold (1803 1890), Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795 1878), Eduard Weber (1806 1871), and Johannes Müller (1801 1858) were primarily anatomists who began the development of physiology in Germany. Friedrich Arnold, for example, was an excellent vivisectionist but had little command of fundamentals of physics. Johannes Müller was more than a combination of anatomist and physiologist: his chair at Berlin also represented pathology and comparative anatomy, and he made important contributions to all of those areas. In German universities in the 1840s and 1850s, physiology was at most represented by an assistant professor [Extraordinarius], such as Emil du Bois Reymond (1818 1896) next to Müller, or Karl Vierordt (1818 1884) with Arnold in Tübingen. In the 1850s, Hermann Helmholtz (1821 1894), Carl Ludwig (1816 1895), and Ernst Brücke (1819 1892) reversed the emphasis of their teachers: though they occupied chairs of anatomy physiology, their important work was in physiology. By the next decade, these younger men all held chairs of physiology. Wundt's generation he names Ewald Pflüger (1829 1910), Martin Heidenhain (1834 1897) and Julius Rosenthal (1836 1915) was thus able to choose physiology as a profession, since the late 1850s saw the establishment of chairs of physiology in most German universities.

Young Wundt seemed headed in this direction. His second foray into physiological research won him the prize in experimental medicine at Heidelberg in 1854. At home, with the assistance of his occasionally queasy mother, Wundt studied the effects on respiration of sectioning the vagus and recurrens nerves in rabbits. He worked in secret, perhaps so he could surprise his uncle, the professor who set the problem. To his great satisfaction he shared first prize with a student "who had been helped by his professor." Wundt's long article, which his mother helped him prepare, was accepted by Johannes Müller for his important journal. His secretive behavior suggests that Wundt was eager to prove himself independent of his uncle. Wundt's interest in physiology was probably typical of scientifically oriented medical students in those days, but the migration of his interest from brain anatomy in Tübingen to the physical and chemical approaches of experimental physiology may also reflect his desire to find an area outside his uncle's expertise.

In the summer of 1855 Wundt took the two week state medical examinations in Karlsruhe, the capital city of Baden. Among about a dozen successful candidates, he placed first in all three fields of the exam: internal medicine, surgery, and obstetrics. Wundt recalled that the examiners were practicing physicians rather than university professors, so skill in expression and some knowledge of history of medicine were more useful in the exam than up to date medical knowledge. His exam results plus two publications, all by the age of twenty three, brought him high marks and recognition. He had come a long way since the disastrous first year at the Bruchsal Gymnasium.

Wundt's relatives were anxious for him to begin practicing medicine. He rejected the idea of general practice, but considered two other choices: military physician or doctor at a local health spa. The first option was attractive; Vierordt had told him that it was a convenient way to begin a career in research. (Helmholtz also had served several years as a military physician.) It turned out, however, that there were no openings in the Army. Wundt then decided against the spa because he was uncomfortable with the idea of having to entertain, as well as treat, the "anemic daughters of Baden's bureaucrats."

An attractive temporary job opened: assistant in the women's ward of the university hospital for a half year. This position allowed him to work for one of his favorite professors, Ewald Hasse (1810 1902), pathologist and a director of the hospital. Solomon Diamond has insinuated that Wundt's lack of self confidence made him prefer the military post because "he could do little harm to healthy young soldiers." If this were so, Wundt should have also chosen the spa over the hospital. With all his psychoanalytic insight, Diamond overlooks interesting aspects of Wundt's decision. Wundt chose to treat serious diseases in women of the lower classes and to stay in the university community (and with his mother). He rejected the opportunity to have a less demanding practice in the health spa, because of his embarrassment at having to treat young women of his own social class.

As it happened, Wundt chose the fire instead of the frying pan: his patients at the hospital gave him plenty of trouble. Of the three hospital wards--the surgical, the men's, and the women's--Wundt was sure that his assistantship in the last one was the most unpleasant job. The patients were those unable to pay for medical care, and included factory workers, servant girls, and not a few prostitutes. These latter, whom Wundt referred to as "servants of Venus vulgivana," were kept apart from the rest, but they still managed to make life difficult for the young doctor. In the men's ward, it seemed to him, the patients were quieter, came only if they were very sick, and did not suffer from hysteria. The women, Wundt complained, talked and carried on at all hours. They teased him and were particularly demanding of their resident physician at nighttime.

The events of one evening profoundly influenced Wundt's thinking about the workings of the mind, and perhaps about his own career. After little sleep for several days, he was summoned to the bedside of a typhus patient whose noisy delirium was disturbing the others. To quell the racket, Wundt took a bottle from the shelf. It was not the preparation of opium usually used in such circumstances, but tincture of iodine, which was of course only for topical use. Even though the liquids looked similar, they were clearly labelled and Wundt recalled knowing at the time that it was iodine. Still he was convinced, in his sleepy state, that it was the appropriate medication. Fortunately, the patient disagreed and spat the poisonous liquid without ingesting much. Wundt immediately told another assistant what had happened and the next morning confessed it to Professor Hasse, who told him not to worry about it.

But Wundt did worry about it. For weeks he wondered whether someone who could make such a mistake should practice medicine. He also recalled the incident in a later essay opposing the use of hypnotism as a method for experimental psychology. He considered his experience an example of auto suggestion and its effects during a somnambulistic state. To Wundt, the normal mind could not be studied by means of such strange and uncontrolled phenomena.

How could his episode in auto suggestion to "quiet" the woman possibly one of those teasing prostitutes contribute to an investigation of the function of the mind? Such a question would certainly have interested Sigmund Freud, but Wudnt did not see it as relevant to his own theories of conscious and unconscious mind.

In the Heidelberg environment, that of his energetic and orderly grandfather, Wundt became a scientist and scholar. When his father died and his mother was able to devote her attention to him, Wundt's work habits improved and he began to excel. He became self reliant and fiercely independent of his equals or superiors, i.e., other men. Yet Wundt always relied on a devoted female companion: first his mother, then his wife, finally his unmarried daughter. These three offered both personal and intellectual support to the busy and productive scholar.

Before leaving the clinic in 1856, Wundt did two things that prepared him for an academic career. He carried out experiments on localization of touch sensations on patients with paralyzing nervous diseases, such as encephalitis and meningitis. Combined with experiments on healthy subjects, these observations and experiments formed the basis for his first article on a psychological topic two years later. In Wundt's succinct account: "The clinic was thus the station along the path of my own experimental work which first led me to psychology, before I ever applied myself thoroughly to philosophical studies." [So war die Klinik die erste Station, die mich auf dem Wege eigener experimenteller Arbeiten zuerst zur Psychologie führte, ehe ich noch mich gründlich mit philosophischen Studien beschäftigt hatte.] In the course of this research Wundt noted that the experimenter had to be aware that patients may try to play tricks, and that female subjects were particularly inclined to such deception. Fortunately, as Wundt observed, an alert experimenter could usually guard against these difficulties.

While working in the clinic Wundt also published his dissertation [Promotionsschrift] for the doctoral degree from Heidelberg University. He had already passed the state exams in Karlsruhe, and most people in his position simply paid a fee to the library in lieu of the written work. Wundt, however, chose to write a dissertation on nerve pathology and to dedicate it to Hasse. Wundt admitted that the work reported no major discoveries: it was just a careful anatomical and pathological survey combined with some experiments in the sectioning, grafting and transplanting of tissues. It earned the Dr. med. degree "mit grösstem Lob" and brought an honorable end to his pathological-anatomical studies. Thereafter he began to devote himself fully to physiology.