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Völkerpsychologie

Völkerpsychologie is a method of psychology that was discovered in the nineteenth century by the famous psychologist, Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt is widely known for his work with experimental psychology. Up until this time in history, psychologists were using experiments as a source of researching information. Wilhelm thought that there must be a different method for research and came up with the idea of Völkerpsychologie. Experimentation was too limited for studying individual consciousness, especially with the application to mental processes, such as language. Wundt’s idea was that language was distinguished among the collective human processes and since it seemed to be crucial to the entire upper mental functions, those functions were concluded as exempt to experimental research. All of this led to the design of Völkerpsychologie, which Wundt created as a branch of psychology which would work best for the use of historical and comparative methods instead of experiments alone.

Völkerpsychologie comes from the German culture. To this day, there is no clear English word that is similar to it. The derivative Volk, a German word, refers to “people, nation, tribe, or race”. Wundt simply wanted to create a new way to complete research without the use of experiments. This led him to discovering a new type of psychology which dealt with the communal and cultural products of human nature, which includes religions, languages, and mythologies.