Würzburg School

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The Würzburg School describes a direction in psychology that emerged from the work of Oswald Külpe and Karl Marbe , August Messer , Narziss Ach , Karl Bühler and Otto Selz on the basis of thought psychology when the first psychological research institutions were founded at the beginning of the 20th century. Her research focused on thinking , judging , willing and attentiveness .

In the teaching of the Würzburg School, one's own experience in the form of systematic self-observation is viewed as a basic source of psychological knowledge. The essential method was the experimental recording of cognitive processes with the help of retrospection (retrospective introspection ). Among other things, associations and thought processes triggered by given stimuli were examined. An important finding was the determined and partly unconscious control of human thinking. Because of the inclusion of higher intellectual processes, the methodological approach of the Würzburg School was criticized by Wilhelm Wundt as unscientific. Nevertheless, the Würzburg School and thought psychology created important foundations for the later cognitive turn . Their methods were rediscovered , among other things, in attribution research .

The Würzburg School has been remembered since 2005 with the award of the Oswald Külpe Prize , which is awarded to outstanding scientists who have experimentally researched higher mental processes.

literature

  • Wilhelm Janke: One hundred years of the Institute for Psychology and the Würzburg School of Thinking Psychology . Hogrefe, Göttingen 1999, ISBN 3-8017-1310-5 , pp. 508 .
  • Lois Madison: The Würzburg School and the Function versus Content Debate. In: Würzburger medical historical reports 12, 1994, pp. 315–322.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gernot Huppmann, Reinhold Ahr: Erich Stern (1889-1959) and medical psychology: an ergobiographical sketch. In: Medical historical messages. Journal for the history of science and specialist prose research. Volume 34, 2015, pp. 137–155, here: p. 139.