Modern social psychology does not have a single, uniform, or straightforward historical origin. One of the important origins of psychological attention to the social emerged at the very earliest moments of scientific psychology; in the German tradition, this origin is known as Völkerpsychologie, or the psychology of nations. Using a historical-analytical approach, the present article examines the formation of this tradition within the intellectual, political, and cultural context of nineteenth-century Germany. It seeks to show how concepts such as nation, culture, language, and national spirit became psychological objects of inquiry. In this form of psychology, the social is not merely an external environment for individual behavior; rather, it is a constitutive domain within which mind, language, meaning, and human action take shape. From this perspective, Völkerpsychologie was an attempt to understand those psychological phenomena that emerge not in the isolated individual, but in the historical and collective life of human beings. The article first reconstructs the theoretical background of this tradition in the thought of Herder, Humboldt, and Herbart. It then shows how Lazarus and Steinthal, through the concept of national spirit, made possible the psychological study of collective life. The article further examines Wundt’s redefinition of Völkerpsychologie, according to which this field was not a rival to experimental psychology, but its necessary complement in the study of higher mental processes, language, myth, religion, and custom. The findings indicate that Völkerpsychologie, despite its conceptual ambiguities and institutional failure, opened an alternative horizon for understanding the relation between individual and society. The significance of rereading this tradition lies not only in achieving a more accurate understanding of the history of modern social psychology, but also in its capacity to contribute to a critique of methodological individualism in social psychology and to make possible a reconsideration of the social as a condition for the formation of the human mind.