Max Wertheimer was a German psychologist originally from Czechoslovakia who later obtained American citizenship. He was born on April 15, 1880 in Prague and died on October 12, 1948 in New Rochelle (New York), at the age of 68. Along with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler, he was one of the fathers of Gestalt psychology.
Gestalt still has great importance today. This branch of psychology focuses on examining different psychological phenomena as a whole, instead of trying to distinguish each of their components so that they can be observed separately.
Wertheimer worked for years at the universities of Frankfurt and Berlin, but later moved to New York. In this new city he began to specialize in phenomena related to learning and perception, which form the foundations of Gestalt theory.
Some of his most important works are Three Contributions to Gestalt Theory (1925) and Productive Thought (1945). The latter was published after his death.
Biography
Childhood and adolescence
From a very young age, Max Wertheimer began to play the violin, to compose music (both symphonic and chamber) and focused on the musical world. Therefore, everything seemed to indicate that he was destined to become an artist.
However, in 1900 he began studying law at the Charles University in Prague, where he was soon drawn to the philosophy of law, and later to criminal psychology.
This interest caused him to abandon his career and go to Berlin to study psychology at Friedrich-Wilhelm University.
Work at university
In 1904 Wertheimer obtained his doctorate at the University of Würzburg, thanks to the creation of a lie detector as a tool to study the testimonies of the accused. From this moment he began to investigate in different universities (among these those of Prague, Vienna and Berlin).
During this time he became interested in issues related to perception, especially in the way in which we interpret complex or ambiguous structures. Thanks to his studies on the subject, he began to formulate the first sketches of what would later become the Gestalt theory.
During a train trip in 1910 Wertheimer was intrigued by the phenomenon of the perception of movement, so he got a stroboscope (a device that emits flashes with a certain frequency) to study it.
The studies derived from this moment on the train led him to discover the so-called "phi phenomenon", by which humans are capable of perceiving movement in an object that is immobile.
These investigations, carried out with the help of Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, convinced Wertheimer of the need to study the human mind as a whole; thus was born Gestalt psychology.
Early Gestalt years
During the early years in which he worked on Gestalt theories, Wertheimer worked as a professor at the University of Berlin.
Additionally, in 1921 he founded a research journal known as Psychologische forschung (Psychological Research), which became one of the cornerstones of Gestalt.
In 1929 Wertheimer returned to the University of Frankfurt to teach psychology classes, while directing studies on social and experimental psychology.
During this time the researcher criticized the prevailing currents in this discipline, which sought to study each phenomenon separately.
Despite the fact that most of Wertheimer's work had to do with human perception, Gestalt soon expanded to other areas, but always maintaining the dynamic analysis of reality and the understanding of the elements as a whole, having as a motto that "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."
Before the Nazis came to power in Germany, Wertheimer fled to the United States in 1933. There he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he continued to work until his death.
During the last years of his life, the researcher was concerned above all with the relationship between psychology and social ethics. Many of his ideas from this time were compiled in a posthumously published book called Productive Thinking.
Theory
The term "Gestalt" literally means "everything." The theory received this name because it focuses on studying the way in which different elements come together to form something greater than the simple sum of their parts. Therefore, one of the premises of Gestalt is that it is impossible to study the elements of something in isolation.
This theory arose, in part, as a rejection of phenomenology, the current that had prevailed within psychology since its inception as a scientific discipline.
Phenomenology focused on describing some mental phenomena such as perception or memory, without worrying about the meaning of each of these or how they are related.
In this sense, the Gestalt theory became one of the first humanistic currents within psychology.
However, during his early years he focused mainly on studying phenomena of visual perception, such as optical illusions or the phi phenomenon.
Prägnanz
These early investigations served the Gestalt fathers to propose their theory of emergent phenomena: in a set of elements, its properties cannot always be predicted by studying each of these separately. Later, this phenomenon was named Prägnanz.
The three main Gestalt authors (Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka), in addition to their students, soon expanded their areas of study and stopped focusing only on the phenomena of perception.
Some of the first fields studied by this new branch of psychology were problem solving, thinking, and learning.
In the following decades, a large number of researchers used the ideas formulated by Gestalt to study other phenomena such as personality, motivation or social psychology.
Today, Gestalt continues to be studied in universities around the world, and therapy based on its ideas is among the most effective.
References
- "Max Wertheimer" in: Britannica. Retrieved on: April 21, 2018 from Britannica: britannica.com.
- "Max Wertheimer" in: Psicoactiva. Retrieved on: April 21, 2018 from Psicoactiva: psicoactiva.com.
- "Max Wertheimer" in: Wikipedia. Retrieved on: April 21, 2018 from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org.
- "Gestalt Psychology" in: Britannica. Retrieved on: April 21, 2018 from Britannica: britannica.com.
- "Gestalt Psychology" in: Wikipedia. Retrieved on: April 21, 2018 from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org.