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In the wake of the critical reorientation in the historiography of psychology, a number of scholars challenged the one-sided structuralist and positivist interpretation of Wilhelm Wundt's work. This paper aims at contributing to these recent efforts, by providing an analysis of the way in which Wundt's apperceptionism conditioned his account of the relation between thought and speech, and by extrapolation, of disorganized thought and speech. While Wundt's pivotal role in the development of the psychology of language is relatively well-known, discussions on this part of his theorizing tend to focus exclusively on his gestural or motor account of language. This obliterates the complex theoretical background of Wundt's theory of language and speech, as well as its systematic place within his psychological system. Highlighting this neglected dimension of Wundt's theorizing, however, could open up a new horizon of pressing research questions in the historiography of psychology.

This paper takes Hermann von Helmholtz’s (1821 – 1894) psychophysiological theory of perception as a point of departure to examine the conditions of possibility for the process of objectification which necessarily mediates the interactions of complex living beings with their environment. By means of an analysis of the 1855 statement ‘to see is to understand sensation’, I will argue that the epistemological framework of Helmholtz’s optics can be analyzed transcendentally on two levels of analysis, namely critical and metacritical. Both levels are concerned with the way in which objectivity is constituted by an active, sensitive being, but while the former is concerned with the imposition of structure by our cognitive organization, the latter deals with the constitutional role of the (sensitivity) to constraint. It will be demonstrated how this general epistemological strategy could also help structuring the questions involved in accounting for the internal models that necessarily underlie the activity of anticipation. More specifically, I will argue that Helmholtz’s work could provide some powerful insights into the notion of ‘constraint’, which is considered to be crucial in accounting for the ability for anticipation according to Stepp and Turvey (2010), amongst others.

The failure to recognize the programmatic similarity between (post-)Kantian German philosophy and early psychology has impoverished psychology's historical self-understanding to a great extent. This article aims to contribute to recent efforts to overcome the gaps in the historiography of contemporary psychology, which are the result of an empiricist bias. To this end, we present an analysis of the way in which Hermann von Helmholtz's theory of perception resonates with Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Ego-doctrine. It will be argued that this indebtedness is particularly clear when focusing on the foundation of the differential awareness of subject and object in perception. In doing so, the widespread reception of Helmholtz's work as proto-positivist or strictly empiricist is challenged, in favor of the claim that important elements of his theorizing can only be understood properly against the background of Fichte's Ego-doctrine.