Max Wertheimer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Max Wertheimer
Born April 15, 1880
Prague
Died October 12, 1943
New Rochelle, New York
Nationality Czech
Fields psychology
Alma mater University of Prague

Max Wertheimer (April 15, 1880 – October 12, 1943) was a Czech-born Jewish psychologist who was one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology, along with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Wertheimer was born in Prague, Bohemia, where his father was the founder of a highly successful and innovative business school called Handelsschule Wertheimer. His mother was well-educated in culture, literature and the arts, and was also an accomplished violinist.

At age 18, having passed his comprehensive exams at the Prague Gymnasium, Wertheimer entered the University of Prague, with the intent of going into law. However, he was drawn to other subjects as well, including history, music, art, physiology and ethnology. In 1901, he formally switched his curricular plan from law to philosophy (of which psychology was a branch). Continuing his studies at the University of Berlin, then at the University of Wurzburg, he was granted a Ph.D (summa cum laude) from Wurzburg in 1904, for a dissertation that pertained to certain psychological aspects of law.

While at the University of Prague, Wertheimer became interested in the lectures of Christian von Ehrenfels, an Austrian philosopher who, in 1890, published what is often said to be the first paper on holistic form qualities or (as Ehrenfels called them) Gestalt qualities. By more than twenty years, this paper anticipated some of the findings of Wertheimer, Koffka and Kohler, in what is now commonly known as Gestalt psychology (or Gestalt theory, to imply that it also pertains to disciplines outside of psychology).

[edit] Gestalt Theory

No one is certain how Gestalt psychology came about. The same story is always told, but it may be apocryphal. It is said that Wertheimer was traveling by train on vacation in 1910 when he saw the blinking lights at a railroad crossing, like the lights that appear on a theatre sign. Sensing the significance of this ubiquitous phenomenon, he got off the train at Frankfurt am Main and bought a motion picture toy (called a zoetrope) with which to experiment. He ended up staying in Frankfurt until 1915, teaching philosophy and psychology at the Psychological Institute from 1912-14, while continuing his research of apparent movement (or the phi phenomenon).

In his research, rather than using a zoetrope, Wertheimer relied on a scientific instrument called a tachistoscope, by which he was able to flash shapes onto a screen, successively, for exact lengths of time. The people who served as his experimental subjects in this were two younger colleagues at Frankfurt, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Kohler. In 1912, Wertheimer published a seminal paper on Experimentelle Studien über das Sehen von Bewegung (Experimental Studies in the Perception of Movement), which his students referred to informally as his Punktarbeit or “dot paper” because its illustrations were abstract patterns made of dots. The three psychologists began to collaborate, to publish papers, and, in time, they became world-famous as the originators of Gestalt theory.

[edit] World War I

The collaborative work of the three Gestalt psychologists was interrupted by World War I. Both Wertheimer and Koffka were assigned to war-related research, while Kohler was appointed the director of an anthropoid research station on Teneriffe, in the Canary Islands. The three men reunited after the war ended and continued further research on the experiments.

[edit] Berlin Years

After the war, Koffka returned to Frankfurt, while Kohler became the director of the Psychological Institute at the University of Berlin, where Wertheimer was already on the faculty. Using the abandoned rooms of the Imperial Palace, they established a now-famous graduate school, in tandem with a journal called Psychologische Forschung (Psychological Research: Journal of Psychology and its Neighboring Fields), in which their students’ and their own research was initially published. The success of their efforts is evidenced by the familiarity of the names of their students in the literature of psychology, among them Kurt Lewin, Rudolf Arnheim, Wolfgang Metzger, Bluma Zeigarnik, Karl Duncker, Herta Kopfermann and Kurt Gottschaldt.

In 1923, while teaching in Berlin, Wertheimer married Anna (called Anni) Caro, a physician’s daughter, with whom he had four children: Rudolf (who died in infancy), Valentin, Michael and Lise. They divorced in 1942.

[edit] The New School

From 1929 to 1933, Wertheimer was a professor at the University of Frankfurt. When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Third Reich in 1933, it became apparent to Wertheimer (and to countless other “non-Aryan” intellectuals) that he must leave Germany. In the end, he accepted an offer to teach at the New School for Social Research in New York. The Wertheimers’ emigration was arranged through the U.S. consulate in Prague, and he and his wife and their children arrived in New York harbor on September 13, 1933.

[edit] Later life

For the remaining decade of his life, Wertheimer continued to teach at the New School, while remaining in touch with his European colleagues, many of whom had also emigrated to the U.S. Koffka was teaching at Smith College, Kohler at Swarthmore College, and Lewin at Cornell University and the University of Iowa. Although in declining health, he continued to work on his research of problem-solving, or what he preferred to call “productive thinking.” He completed his book (his only book) on the subject (with that phrase as its title) in late September 1943, and died just three weeks later of a heart attack. Wertheimer was buried in Beechwood Cemetery in New Rochelle, New York.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikisource
Wikisource has original works written by or about:

[edit] See also