LANDMARKS IN THE EVOLUTION OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY IN ROMANIA 1 Prof. Phd. Mihai ANIğEI University of Bucharest Associate Lect.Phd. Julien-Ferencz KISS 2 University of Oradea Abstract: The development of scientific psychology in Romania begins in the late nineteenth century under the auspices of the new methodological paradigm of experimentalism. After Eduard Gruber established the first experimental psychology laboratory in 1893 in Iasi, Romania becoming the tenth country in the world to have such a laboratory, the new current was strongly supported by the local scientific community. Constantin Rădulescu-Motru (1906) and later Florian Ştefănescu-Goangă (1921), disciples of Wundt, as Gruber in fact, succeeded to to implement experimental psychology as the main direction in Romanian psychology, which in the interwar period came to an unanimous international recognition. The landmarks of the evolution of experimental psychology in Romania, as presented in this article are meant to invite the community of psychologists to initiate a debate, from the historical point of view, on the Romanian experimental psychology, especially after the social and epistemic changes that followed during the totalitarian and postdecembrist period. Keywords: experimental psychology, history of psychology, natural sciences, historism, ideology We believe that a historical perspective on the evolution of the experimental psychology in Romania is a challenge for the entire scientific community of Romanian psychologists. The first argument on the matter, a more general one, focuses on the role of the experimentalism in strengthening scientific psychology. We know that psychology, at least until the eve of the second half of the nineteenth century, did not enjoy the status of independent science. French philosopher Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism (doctrine with remarkable influence in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century), considered psychology at that time as a sub- branch of biology. The dominant pattern in terms of science was certainly derived from the field of natural sciences and it is not surprising that the pioneers of experimental research in psychology came from this area. In this respect we mention physiologist Johannes Peter Muller (1801-1858), physiologist and physicist Herman von Helmholtz (1821-1894), Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887), biologist and physicist, or the physician Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795-1878). All of them, using the already well-established experimental methods, have contributed in one form or another to the delimitation of a new “mental” or “psychological” variable in the equation of research in the area of physics, biology or medical sciences. This step along with the establishment by Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) of the first experimental psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig in 1879 will finally acquire the long awaited status of independent science (Mânzat, 2007). The second argument in favor of a history of Romanian experimental psychology lies in the need of a comprehensive perspective on the origin and evolution of experimentalism in Romania. The dominant historiographic perspective, namely the explanatory-descriptive one, consolidated the didactic model of presenting the evolution of experimental psychology and the challenge we mentioned earlier in this article is to overcome this model and to enrich it by taking into account the historism into the perspective on the evolutionary process of experimental psychology. The aim is to capture as accurately as possible, how psychology entered the Romanian scientific culture, and further to pursue it’s development on the experimental foundations in relation to the transformations that took place in Romanian society. Even though the essential historiographical works on the Romanian psychology as those of Ralea and Botez (1958), Bejat (1972) or Herseni (1980) reveals that there were many well-established elements of implicit 1 Romanian Journal of Experimental Applied Psychology, Vol.3, Nr.4, 2013, p. 3-12 2 E-mail: julien.kiss@gmail.com Tel: 004 0744139168