91 Hendrik Verwoerd and the Leipzig School of Psychology in 1926 ...

Hendrik Verwoerd and the Leipzig School of Pscyhology
placed his trust in ethnopsychology when seeking the genesis of the human
psyche, because:
the child of a cultured people is surrounded by influences that cannot be
distinguished from what develops spontaneously within the child’s
consciousness. Ethnopsychology, on the other hand, leads us on the path of
a true psychogenesis by showing us the different stages of intellectual
development which can still be seen in mankind today. 76
For ethnologists the “primitive“ was the “original through the genealogy of
the peoples“, but ethnopsychology searched for a universal intellectual
development, arguing that it was possible for peoples who emerged in a
later period to be more primitive than historically older peoples. 77
Wundt was convinced that the belief in magic resulted from a reaction
of the affect to “awe and terror”: “Causality as we understand it doesn’t exist
for primitive man.” 78 When maintaining that primitive peoples should not be
judged by the norms of a “later” culture, but according to their own inner
logic, he drew an analogy to child psychology. 79 On the other hand, Wundt
took pains to reject the racist conclusion that the “primitives’” low level of
culture had anything to do with a lack of intelligence. 80
Wundt’s successor, Krueger, went so far as to regard
ethnopsychology as a part of developmental psychology, ranking character
attributes according to cultural evolutionary stages. 81 The importance of
ethnopsychology is easily overlooked as the Leipzig school published very
little on the topic; nevertheless, it played an important role in their teaching.
Volkelt maintained that Krueger gave credence to the concept of holistic
psychology “firstly through his experimental psychological work on acoustics
(1904) and not least through his lectures and courses on the psychology of
primitive cultures at Wundt’s school”. 82 This was possible because Wundt’s
76. W. Wundt, Elemente der Völkerpsychologie: Grundlinien einer psychologischen
Entwicklungsgeschichte der Menschheit (Alfred Kröner, Leipzig, 1913), p 4.
Translated from the original German.
77. Wundt, Elemente der Völkerpsychologie, p 6. Translated from the original German.
78. Wundt, Elemente der Völkerpsychologie, p 92f. Translated from the original
German.
79. Wundt himself moved ethnopsychology methodologically close to child psychology
in “Die Philosophie des primitiven Menschen”, in W. Wundt, Reden und Aufsätze
(Kröner, Leipzig, 1914), pp 119–162, especially pp 145ff.
80. Wundt, Elemente der Völkerpsychologie, pp 109ff.
81. Thiermann, “Zur Geschichte des Leipziger Psychologischen Institutes”, p 87; and
Wellek, Die Wiederherstellung der Seelenwissenschaft, pp 18f. On Krueger’s
combination of the psychology of the child and ethnopsychology, see also M.
Schubeius, Und das psychologische Laboratorium muss der Ausgangspunkt
pädagogischer Arbeiten werden! Zur Institutionalisierungsgeschichte der
Psychologie von 1890–1933 (Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 1990), p 249.
82. H. Volkelt, “Von den Anfängen der ‘Ganzheitspsychologie’”, in F. Sander, H.
Volkelt, Ganzheitspsychologie: Grundlagen - Ergebnisse - Anwendungen,
Gesammelte Abhandlungen (Beck, München, 1962), pp 1–14, especially p 3,
footnote 1; see also p 7, “that the main trajectories of development in fields, though
far distant from each other, are nevertheless congruent, for instance with children
and primitive peoples.” Quotations are translated from the original German.
111