History of Psychology in Dresden
Scientific psychology has a long history at Dresden's academic educational institutions, dating back to Carl Gustav Carus' contributions to developmental psychology. Regular and thematic courses on psychology have been offered to students of education and technical sciences at the Royal Saxon Polytechnic since Fritz Schulze's appointment as early as 1876. Theodor Elsenhans, known for his widely used textbook on psychology, continued Schulze's work, including the diverse lecture cycles for Dresden's public.
In the 1920s, two psychological institutes were founded at TU Dresden: the Psychotechnical Institute in 1922 and the Psychological Department of the Philosophical-Pedagogical Seminar in 1926.
The foundation of the Psychotechnical Institute was driven by both Karl Bühler and the industrial scientist Sachsenberg; Blumenfeld and Dolecal, with their dual training in engineering and psychology, were able to contribute significant results to psychotechnology and did extensive work for Saxon industry. Other important psychologists who worked in Dresden include Charlotte Bühler, who in 1919 became the first woman in the history of German psychology to habilitate as a private lecturer, as well as Karl Bühler, Gustav Kafka, Walter Blumenfeld, and their assistants Jan Dolecal and Philipp Lersch. In addition to outstanding publications on comparative developmental and linguistic psychology, and later on expressive and personality psychology, an exemplary teaching program was developed, especially with the psychological internships founded by Karl Bühler in 1920, mainly for academic elementary school teacher training.
National Socialism and World War II largely brought psychological work in Dresden to a halt. Kafka, Blumenfeld, and Dolecal had to leave the Technische Hochschule Dresden due to Nazi rule (1933 and 1934, respectively). It was not until 1936 that Lersch was appointed to the chair and was able to continue his work, supported by Werner Straub. Straub's work as Lersch's successor from 1938 was interrupted from 1939 - 1947 due to the war. In 1940, all the psychology departments of the Technical University were incorporated into an Institute of Psychology. In 1942, a course of study for graduate psychologists was established there.
Straub continued the integration of basic psychology with practical research, founded in particular by K. Bühler, W. Blumenfeld and G. Kafka, and the differentiated methodological training based on practical courses at the Technische Hochschule/Technische Universität, with work initially on the psychology of the will. During the reconstruction of the university after World War II, psychology was assigned to the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the instigation of Werner Straub. Oriented to the Russian cultural-historical school (Leontjew, Rubinstein), he developed the first approaches of an action-related regulation theory and advanced research on learning and work process design. Erwin Gniza and Ursula Köhler, as Straub's assistants, developed their own contributions to this, among other things with a weighty influence on the theory of occupational safety and health and the methodology of psychological work analysis.
Winfried Hacker was appointed as Straub's successor in 1967. His book "Allgemeine Arbeitspsychologie" (General Work Psychology), first published in 1973, is considered an important milestone in the development of German-language work psychology. The link between general and industrial psychology, based on action theory, proved to be extremely fruitful, and not only for Dresden. Underpinned by the series "Spezielle Arbeits- und Ingenieurpsychologie" (Special Work and Engineering Psychology), published since 1980, central content-related and methodological/methodological questions of the analysis and design of work activities were clarified. Against this background, an independent Dresden family of methods was developed, which was oriented to the concept of complete activities that promote health and personality. This was not conceivable without the wide-ranging applied and basic research work of Winfried Hacker's students and co-workers. Representative of many are mentioned here: Bärbel Bergmann (Matern), Rolf Görner, Jürgen Neubert, Peter and Wolfgang Quaas, Hans-Eberhard Plath, Harald Raum and Peter Richter.
In 1968, the reform of higher education in the GDR led to the classification of psychology in an occupational science section, which determined the profile of application-oriented teaching and research activities until 1989. After 1989, the Department of Psychology was reestablished at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the TU Dresden. This reorganization was completed in 1994. 12 professorships and now 2 endowed professorships now represent the entire profile of psychology including the three main specializations.
Literature recommendation
Westhoff, K. (ed.) (2003). Decisions for psychology at the TU Dresden. Lengerich: Pabst. 219 pp.