On mental causality and the principle of psychophysical parallelism

Abstract

Debates on how psychology and psychological research should be, have been ongoing since the very beginning of the field. The present article written by one of the classics Wilhelm Wundt was aimed to establish psycho-logical science as being independent and autonomous field of science. Here Wundt formulated the principles that distinguish psychological phenomena from others as well as he described specific characteristics of psy-chological causation compared to natural sciences. By introducing the principle of genuine activity of phe-nomena, the principle of creative synthesis and the principle of relativeanalysis Wundt consistently argued against the substitution of psychological description with physiological ones. Based on the same principles he declared that psychological subject must be established from the same psychological matter as the psyche.