17 - At the Department and Institute of Psychology in Cluj

Summary

The first psychology courses in our country were held by Titu Maiorescu at his department of philosophy and logic. Aside from his unsurpassed treatise on logic, he also published the study On Experience, where he uses not only French and German but also English reference material. The study contributes some personal observations, which are still useful now due to their original nature on the one hand, and due to their positivist methodology on the other. In both logic and psychology, Maiorescu was obviously influenced by John Stuart Mill, even though he studied philosophy and law in France and Germany. The influence of German philosophy is evident in his literary criticism and aesthetics articles, which are the masterpieces of his life.

The credit for introducing and systematically promoting scientific psychology into our country belongs to Constantin Rădulescu-Motru, who did his undergraduate thesis with Maiorescu, and his PhD with Wundt, with a philosophy dissertation on Kant's theory on physical causality. The dissertation was published in Wundt's journal, Philosophische Studien, and got a favorable review from H. Bergson in his Matter and Memory. Coming back to our country in 1896, Rădulescu-Motru was appointed senior lecturer at Maiorescu's philosophy department, teaching mostly psychology. In 1898 he published Problems in Psychology, where he defended the need to institute psychology as an exact science, modeled after the natural sciences, an idea promoted by Wundt and supported by Maiorescu. Two years later, his philosophy seat was turned into a psychology department, and Rădulescu-Motru became the first head of a psychology department in our country. As such, he published Power of the Spirit in 1908, and in 1922 his Course in Psychology, which is a synthesis of his lectures in theoretical psychology taught over two decades.

Professor Rădulescu-Motru's treatise is very well constructed, with bibliographical references in German and French running up to the year right before the year of publication. The only references to English and American psychology, however, are from a few works translated into French and German. He mentions psychoanalysis with obvious skepticism.

He did argue for building psychology as a scientific discipline, with an empirical and even experimental character, but without proceeding to put this program into practice.