If you’re trying to find out who “founded” psychology, well, the answer is a little more complicated than you might expect. Still, this article will do its best to give you a satisfying answer. Let us begin with the problems associated with trying to trace any field of research back to any single person.
Progress does not simply occur due to great men
When it comes to fields of thought, we like simplifying things according to the “great man” theory of progress, which was eloquently described by Boring in 1950. This framework was a response to the idea that scientific advancements are caused by geniuses (“great men”) having big ideas. The prevailing style at the time was to attribute scientific developments to the people who appeared to be most responsible for them, which simultaneously implied that they were the sole causes of these developments and discounted the contributions made by other people (such as lab assistants, who were often women or people from underrepresented populations). To this day, many people still think of scientific developments in this way.
However, Boring argued that “culture plays an important role in determining achievement”, and that people’s achievements cannot be viewed in a vacuum but instead must be viewed in the context of the environment they were working in and the people who did foundational work before them. Boring concludes by claiming that “[w]e have, have had, and must have Great men, even though no one of them could have arrived without the benefit of his Zeitgeist”. In other words, even if you do not want to discount an individual’s contribution, you cannot ignore everything surrounding their contribution, and should avoid attributing major scientific advancements to individuals.
Who is the founder/”father” of psychology if you absolutely had to name one?
With all that said, it can sometimes be useful to identify a single person as the founder of something as a starting point. Just make sure that you look deeper into the context surrounding that person to more fully understand the truth. With that understanding, the closest thing to a single founder or “father” of psychology is Wilhelm Wundt.
Wilhelm Wundt is the founder of psychology, if one exists
If you absolutely had to pick one person to point to as the “father” of psychology, your best choice is Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt established the first psychology laboratory in the world at Leipzig University in 1879, and he and his students were the first to”[grant] psychology a disciplinary identity distinct from philosophy” (Kim, 2016). In addition, he also established the first journal dedicated to psychology, Philosophische Studient, and is credited for training several “pioneers of experimental psychology in America who went to Leipzig and derived their inspiration from Wundt” (Farr, 1983).
Wrapping up
At the end of the day, it is important to understand the complex factors involved in scientific advancements rather than solely attributing major contributions to individuals. However, even if we keep the pitfalls of the “great man” theory in mind, it is hard to argue for anyone other than WIlhelm Wundt. Even then, though, his students also made major contributions that cannot be ignored. Try to keep the “great man” theory in mind whenever you think about timelines of scientific developments.
References
Boring, E.G. (1950). Great Men and Scientific Progress. Proceeding of the American Philosophical Society, 94(4).
Farr, R.M. (1983). Wundt, Wilhelm (1832-1920) and the origins of psychology as an experimental and social science. British Journal of Social Psychology, 22(1), 289-301. doi: 10.1111/j.2044-8309.1983.tb00596.x.
Kim, A. Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt. (2016). In E. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2016 Edition. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-wundt/.
