Psychology as science and as discipline: the case of Germany

This paper examines the history of psychology in Germany. It directs attention to the salient role played by examination regulations in the development of psychology. To highlight this, the term "discipline" is employed not as a synonym of "science" but according to its original meaning, as denoting a social entity consisting of teachers, disciples, more or less canonised subject matters, examinations, and resulting changes of the social status of the examinee. In the early nineteenth century a succession of state rescripts and regulations introduced to university curricula an examination subject named psychology, thereby making psychology an obligatory subject of university lectures, and creating a discipline of psychology next to the science of psychology. The two were far from being identical. This situation, thus far neglected in historiography, profoundly influenced the further development of psychology in Germany.