Here is a sentence from Anne Lander's column.

'I bet I'll be on probation before you can say "Wilhelm Wundt"'.

I can see that "before you can say Wilhelm Wundt" means "very soon", but is there a story behind this German psychologist?

Apple

"Wilhelm Wundt" is not a household word, so Ann Landers must have been using it as a meaningful alternative to "before you can say Jack Robinson," which is an expression that means very, very soon.

The column might be about a prisoner about to be released, or possibly a student about to fail courses. In either case, the writer has some psychological issues to deal with, and has possibly studied or learned about the theories of this man.
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Here is the entry about Wilhelm Wundt from the Columbia Electronic Encyclyopedia*:

Wundt, Wilhelm Max 1832–1920, German physiologist and psychologist. From 1875 he taught at Leipzig, where he founded the first laboratory for experimental psychology. Wundt stressed the use of scientific methods in psychology, particularly through the use of introspection. The German psychiatrist, Emil Kraepelin, was his student. His works include Elements of Folk Psychology (tr. 1916, repr. 1983), and Introduction to Psychology (1911, tr. 1912).
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Here is the entry from Wikipedia**:

Wilhelm Max Wundt (August 16, 1832-August 31, 1920), German physiologist and psychologist, is generally acknowledged as the founder of experimental psychology. His chief method of investigation was introspection; he asked participants to look inwards and then describe how they saw their minds as functioning. Special training was supposed to make them more complete and careful in their observations, and to prevent them from interpreting their own minds too much. This experimental introspection was in contrast to what had been called psychology until then, a branch of philosophy where people introspected themselves, rather than being studied by a psychologist.

Wundt subscribed to a "psycho-physical parallelism", which was supposed to stand above both materialism and idealism. His epistemology was an eclectic mixture of the ideas of Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel.
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There were many entries on Google, including this one -- http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/wundt.shtml -- referring to this psychologist.

I know of no special reference for this person's name, but maybe one of our readers does?

Rachel
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*The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Columbia University Press. 2003. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/
**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Wundt

Thank you, Rachel, the response mades a perfect sense in the context from which the sentence comes from.

The speaker is a student who just keeps pugging in, but is about to fail.

Thank you again.

Apple