ABSTRACT
Psychology as a science is a German invention. Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century was a developing and politically fragmented land, within which various forms of philosophical, aesthetic, literary, and knowledge-constructing discourses were bubbling. A fragmented country with two basic power centers–Prussia and Austria–was a developing society within which the emerging sciences had their social cradle. Revolutions are ruptures in the social textures of societies, bringing with themselves transformations in the intellectual life. The move of psychology into a central place in German discourses in the nineteenth century grows out of the specific role the French Revolution played in the experiences of German intellectuals. The notion of "objectivity" was caught in the birth process of psychology between the two fighting sides of the German Wissenschaften–the knowledge of the Geist and that of the Natur.
