5 - The University of Leipzig

Summary

I took my graduation exam after three years; my very good grades meant I could spend the fourth year exempt from attendance requirements.

I signed up for my PhD right away, with the intention of conducting research on the thesis proposed by Professor Goangă on the effects of practice on individual differences in skill development.

I worked on my thesis eight to ten hours a day, because the professor asked me to finish it as quickly as possible so that I could go to Germany to look into new labs and professional selection and orientation, which our Ministry of Labor wanted to introduce into our country as well. My thesis research, as well as its printing, were underwritten by the ministry.

In Germany I was to go to the professional orientation offices in big cities— Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Leipzig—and the psychology labs of the railway system in Berlin, Dresden, and Munich. Professor Goangă recommended I go to the railway lab in Dresden, which was led by a former colleague of his from Wundt Laboratories, then to Leipzig, the Mecca of psychology, where he had studied. Then I could decide which centers I would go to, and in what order.

I stepped into Wundt's psychology lab feeling quite emotional. For four decades, that lab was not only the main center for psychology in Germany, but the entire world. The development of psychology as an experimental science had also occurred there, under Wundt's methodological and theoretical direction, built on the model of physics and physiology developed by Helmholtz, whose student he had been. His three-volume treatise on physiological psychology is inspired by the theory and methodology of those sciences, which, in his view, psychology had to imitate in order to become a scientific discipline itself. This was a place of apprenticeship not only for Stanley Hall and John McCattell, who set up the first psychology labs in the United States, but also for Charles Spearman, who set up the one in London; it represented the same thing for professors Motru and Goangă, as well as for Gusti, Neniţescu, Toronţiu, and Topciu.