Sommer was the youngest of six children of the lawyer Karl Friedrich Adolf Sommer (1824-1903) and his wife Anna, née Lange (1831-1872). Actually, Robert Sommer wanted to become a naval officer, but his nearsightedness did not allow it.
He studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg im Breisgau and Leipzig, relocating in 1885 to Berlin, where he composed a work on the philosophy of John Locke in relation to René Descartes. In 1887, he received his doctorate of philosophy, afterwards working as an assistant in the laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) at Leipzig. From 1889, he was an assistant at a psychiatric hospital in Rybnik, earning his habilitation at Würzburg in 1892.
In 1895, he became an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Giessen, where, during the following year, he established a "centre for psychiatry". In 1904, he was a co-founder of the Gesellschaft für experimentelle Psychologie (Society for experimental Psychology).[3]
In 1904, Sommer, together with his colleagues Georg Elias Müller, Hermann Ebbinghaus, Oswald Külpe, Ernst Meumann and Friedrich Schumann, convened the first "Congress for Experimental Psychology" in Giessen, at which the Society for Experimental Psychology was founded.
Sommer died in 1937 of pneumonia contracted during a six-hour winter hike.
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Giessen Psychiatric Clinic, the Robert Sommer Award Symposium was established, at which international scientists have since presented and discussed research results on schizophrenia, and the Robert Sommer Medal has also been awarded for special services in schizophrenia research.
In addition, a street in Giessen is named after Robert Sommer.
