In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
HM–1863–2026  ·  The Consulting Room

Hugo
Münsterberg

1863  —  1916
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Hugo Münsterberg
Hugo Münsterberg
Danzig, 1863  ·  Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1916

The Harvard psychologist who put psychology to work in the courtroom, the factory, and the cinema — and died a suspect in his adopted country.

A student of Wundt, he was brought to Harvard by William James to run its laboratory, and made psychology useful. On the Witness Stand showed how witnesses misremember and innocent people confess. Psychology and Industrial Efficiency founded industrial psychology. The Photoplay was the first serious theory of film. He was famous, combative and sure of himself.

When he defended Germany in 1914, Harvard shunned him and the papers called him a spy. He died on the lecture platform at Radcliffe, mid-sentence.

Consultation

Attention, memory,
imagination, and emotion.

Münsterberg speaks from 2,000 chunks across six works — On the Witness Stand, Psychotherapy, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, Psychology and Social Sanity, The Americans, and The Photoplay.

His discourse holds Hugo Münsterberg: His Life and Work, the biography his daughter Margaret wrote six years after his death. It is fond, and it does not hide the war years.

Ask him how far an eyewitness can be trusted. Ask him whether a lie detector can work. Ask him what he thinks of the movies now. Ask him why he defended Germany — and what he told juries about women.

Eyewitness TestimonyFalse ConfessionIndustrial PsychologyFilm TheoryPsychotherapyHarvard1914
The photoplay tells us the human story by overcoming the forms of the outer world, namely, space, time, and causality, and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world, namely, attention, memory, imagination, and emotion.
The Photoplay: A Psychological Study  ·  1916

Drawn From the Corpus