Introduction: William Stern and the Founding of Differential Psychology: Some Historical Background

This chapter discusses the intellectual context within which William Stern’s call for a ‘differential’ psychology arose and unfolded, beginning with the time of his doctoral studies in Berlin during the 1890s and extending through his academic years at the universities of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) and Hamburg, to his eventual flight, with wife Clara, from Nazi Germany in 1934 to Durham, NC, USA, where, as a member of the faculty at Duke University, he died in 1938. The discussion highlights Stern’s understanding of ‘differential’ psychology both as an intermediary discipline between basic experimental psychology, on the one hand, and, on the other, an applied psychology addressed to real-world challenges arising outside of controlled laboratory settings. The chapter further highlights Stern’s ‘critically personalistic’ philosophical perspective on the crucially important role that a meticulously developed program for systematically studying individual and group differences in various domains of human mental functioning could play in complementing the general experimental psychology and, in the process, advance the discipline’s scientific agenda while enriching our understanding of human individuality.