Forgotten Streams in the History of 19th-Century German Psychology

The 19th century is a decisive time for the development of contemporary psychology. The assumption of a mechanical worldview, the secularization of society, the emergence of the modern urban metropolis, and the rise of Darwinian teleology of nature are tendencies that, though characteristic of the 20th century, have their origins in the 19th century. During this century, natural sciences expanded outside their traditional limits, colonized the human and moral sciences, and shaped the modern social sciences. During this long transformation, deep and intense debates arose on free will, the moral dimension of human action, and the possibility of a science of the soul. Unlike the standard reading about the history of psychology, according to which the discipline emerged univocally from physiology in the second half of the 19th century, the attentive consideration of this century shows a multifarious landscape.

This book aims to identify the hidden romantic, idealist, vitalist, and hermeneutical roots of psychology, showing that Wundt’s experimental psychology was only the best promoted final phase of a long debate, many aspects of which remain still today open and undecided. To achieve this goal, we gather key figures of the 19th century whose contributions to the development of modern psychology have been broadly forgotten and are nowadays altogether ignored. Each chapter approaches one forgotten psychologist’s life and work and is written by a prominent scholar specialized in the respective author. By recovering the germinal and dynamic insights of key authors at the dawn of modern psychology and situating them in cultural history, we discover a colorful view of the discipline and a better understanding of the varieties and limitations of contemporary psychology.