The Birth of Psychology: Trading the Soul for Science

Editor’s Note: Kay Stevenson is a guest contributor to Winter Watch.

Wilhelm Wundt is not an easy topic to dissect. In part, it’s because you can read 10 of his pages and not find a coherent thought. So sometimes it’s necessary to find the bottom line of his agenda. To our eyes, it was yet another attempt to promote some false, Utopian, Brave New World, universal or multi-cultural man.

He wrote in “The Present Age” [“Beyond Gods and Heroes”]: “Thus there begins a development in which we of the present still participate; it cannot, therefore, be referred to otherwise than as an age that is coming to be. We may speak merely of an advance toward humanity, not of a development of humanity. This advance, however, begins immediately with the fall of the barriers that divide peoples, particularly with regard to their religious views” [Wundt (1916) pp. 9-10].

By Kay Stevenson

Next time you visit your doctor or shrink, ask them if they believe you have a soul. The answer may explain the queasy feeling you have in their office.

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (1832-1920) is credited with turning psychology into a science. Wundt — the first to be called a “psychologist” — achieved status for his line of inquiry as a “science” literally at the expense of his soul. And everyone else’s to hear him tell it.

A survey published in “American Psychologist” magazine in 1991 ranked Wundt as No. 1 among 29 American historians of psychology. William James and Sigmund Freud were ranked a distant second and third.

Wundt also built the first experimental psychological laboratory in 1879 in Leipzig, Germany.

The price of crowning his pursuits with the title of science was the casualty of belief in the human soul. Any qualms he may have entertained about reducing the human race to animals — specifically lab rats — were dispelled with pronouncements such as this quote from one of his textbooks:

“The soul can no longer exist in the face of our present day psychological knowledge” [Wilhelm Wundt, “Introduction to Psychology” (MacMillan Company, New York, 1912), English version, original written in 1911, p. 192].

The idea that a separate being from our body known as the soul was deemed to be a notion of “primitive races” [Wilhelm Wundt, “Ethics: An Investigation of the Facts and Laws of the Moral Life” (1897). Translated by Julia Henrietta Gulliver, Edward Bradford Titchener and Margaret Floy Washburn from the second German edition (1892), p. 104].

And Now for a Word from the Primitives

After the semantic hissy fits, allegedly religious wars, rumors of religious wars, solipsistic humbug, epistemological sloth, Hegelian hellionism, and all other apocryphal filigree concerning the divine, statisticians have produced evidence of majority consensus on earth — that most people believe in some kind of reincarnation (a synonym of resurrection). The same soul shows up in a future body after death.

Beliefs act as social constraint. People of many cultures are worried about “bad karma.” Who wants payday in the next life?

A precaution that used to prevail in Judeo-Christian thought:

Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs will hear His voice, and will come forth; those who did  the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment [John 5:28-29].

… having a hope in God, which these men cherish themselves, that there shall certainly be a resurrection of both the righteous and the
wicked [Acts 24:15].

Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap [Galations 6:7].

To not ascribe spiritual consequence to choice — “karma” if you will — was to deny God. Putting a person at risk of behaving with no moral compass:

The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.”
They are corrupt, they have committed abominable deeds;
There is no one who does good [Psalm 14:1].

Was Wundt the precursor of the later Frankfurt School? Besmirching everything to do with goodness? Critical examination of Wundt’s impact appears scant online. Wundt and his experimental devices are primarily described by his groupies.

There seems to be little graphic description of what torments were wreaked upon his victims.

As a source for this article noted, Wundt’s influence gradually altered dictionary definitions.

The early 19th century Webster definition of “soul” — as “an entity conceived as the essence, substance, or actuating [impelling] cause of individual life … it is the subject of the experience mediated by his body, it is not the mind, but that which thinks and wills. Second, the soul is identified with the totality of conscious experience …” — was scrapped.

Fast forward to the 1960s with Webster: “Recent psychology, for the most part, dispenses with the concept of the soul as an entity …”

Dispensing with any regard for humans as unique — simultaneous with denial of spiritual (soul/karma) consequence for behavior — the new pseudo-science of psychology was free to engage in manipulation and training of persons in the same manner as one would train any animal. Man was a mere animal, entirely explained by a combination of genetics and stimulus/response and a victim of his environment.

Transforming persons into victims became lucrative.

Dr. Tana Dineen observes that psychology has been “largely responsible for the creation of a world in which people live in fear that they will crumble” [Dr. Tana Dineen, “Manufacturing Victims” (Robert Davies Publishing, Quebec, Canada, Third Edition, 2000), p. 65].

From that point, it became acceptable as pragmatism to dole out death to undesirables in the eugenics movement. With no soul, death of a person was no more consequential that swatting a fly.

Wundt’s teachings infested all subsequent streams of medical, psychiatric and psychological inquiry. Wundt deserves credit as gatekeeper for the genocidal agenda of the ensuing eugenics movement.

Wilhelm Wundt: Godfather to Facebook?

Experimental laboratories are now open air. Most are unfortunately undocumented, unless you know how to lob Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests into the deep-state abyss. However, we are fortunate enough to have a firm, apocryphal snapshot of Facebook in action.

Mention this abuse of manipulation — deliberate emotional manipulation, let’s get that straight — of 689,000 Facebook users, and you’ll probably hear your “nothing-to-see-here” pals rationalize the huge public torture chamber. Or does it depend on who you are? Part of the group who get the happy posts? Or the sad ones? Gang-stalking, anyone?

Does anyone suppose the consciences of Facebook’s top brass (including this military officer, who has since gone on to other undisclosed horizons) smolder at night with guilt over treating us as lab rats? Or mentally audit their income stream as the U.S. Department of Defense’s darkest side contracts them for perennial torment of the masses?

Maybe this episode of the Corbett Report gives us the definitive picture.

So, what if Wundt is wrong? No opt-out for his soul on payday. Facebook as Wundt’s Promised Land? Maybe come back like Ray Kurzweil, busy suiting up for a DIY eternal life as a transhuman, awaiting a long-lasting fiery assignment?