A German doctor made psychology a science

The human brain has been a source of fascination and admiration throughout history, but psychology only became an independent science in the 19th century.

Until then, the study of the psyche was seen by many as an offshoot of philosophy, while others saw it as part of medicine, focusing on the brain and nervous system.

It was the German physician Wilhelm Wundt – known today as the father of modern psychology – who established psychology as an independent field of research.

Wundt was not the first to research people’s mental states. He was the first to call himself a psychologist and he founded an institute where he only carried out psychological research and experiments according to recognized scientific methods.

Researchers flocked to Leipzig

Wundt’s institute was founded in 1879 at the University of Leipzig, and in doing so, he stepped out of the shadow of other academic scientists for the first time.

In his laboratory, Wundt studied, among other things, the mental structures behind consciousness. His methods were based on experimentation and empiricism, and Wundt developed among others: introspection.

In this method, conscious experiences are broken into smaller pieces, which are then examined. The goal is to use the sum of these elements to understand consciousness.

This Institute of Psychology became so successful that researchers from all over the world came to Leipzig to discover the new science. One of his students was Armand Thiery, a Belgian priest who was doing doctoral research at Wundt.