Münsterberg's Photoplays - continued...

As already noted, the photographs of the psychological laboratory at Dane Hall were taken for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The organizer of The Section on Psychology at this Exposition was Joseph Jastrow (1863-1944). The aim of this Section was, as Jastrow explained, to illustrate the "chief lines of activity in the modern study of psychology" (Jastrow, 1893, p. 50). According to him, this comprised 1. experimental psychology, 2. comparative psychology, and 3. abnormal psychology. This research agenda implicitly confirmed Münsterberg’s comprehensive vision of psychological science.

Psychology Show in Chicago 1893, first room with images of the Harvard lab.
Point your mouse to the image to zoom in (contrasts have been partically enhanced to show more detail).

Lodged in the Anthropology building, the Section on Psychology was presented in two rooms: "the one fitted out as a laboratory in operation and the other containing a collection of apparatus used in the experimental study of mental phenomena" (Jastrow, 1893, p. 50). In the first room, numerous mental tests were presented. In addition, photographs of psychological laboratories in the US and other countries were on display: on the one side Brown, Clark, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Toronto, Wellesley, Wisconsin and Yale, on the other Bonn, Geneva, Paris, Prague, Rome, and Tokyo. On one of the surviving photographs of this room, one can recognize six of the photographs taken at Münsterberg’s Harvard lab [second mise en abyme]. Harvard also contributed instruments for display in the second room of the psychology exhibit, among them some made by Elbs in Freiburg.