Max Wertheimer

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Max Wertheimer

(b. April 15, 1880, Prague, Czech. — d. Oct. 12, 1943, New Rochelle, N.Y., U.S.) German psychologist. He taught at the Universities of Frankfurt and Berlin (1916 – 29) before immigrating to the U.S. to teach at the New School for Social Research (1933 – 43). With Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka (1886 – 1941), he was instrumental in establishing Gestalt psychology. Much of his work dealt with perception, though he also explored thinking and problem solving. His Productive Thinking was published posthumously in 1945.

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Biography: Max Wertheimer

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The German psychologist Max Wertheimer (1880-1943) was the originator of Gestalt psychology, which had a profound influence on the whole science of psychology.

Max Wertheimer was born in Prague on April 15, 1880. At the University in Prague he first studied law and then philosophy; he continued his studies in Berlin and then in Würzburg, where he received the doctorate in 1904. During the following years his work included research on the psychology of testimony, deriving no doubt from his early interest in law and his abiding interest in the nature of truth; he also carried on research in music, another lifelong interest.

In 1910 Wertheimer performed his now famous experiments on apparent movement, that movement which we see when, under certain conditions, two stationary objects are presented in succession at different places (a phenomenon familiar in moving pictures). This was the beginning of Gestalt psychology - a major revolution in psychological thinking.

The phenomena which Wertheimer was investigating could not be explained by the then-prevailing psychology. Psychology was, in 1910, characteristically analytical: in naive imitation of the natural sciences, it attempted to reduce every complex phenomenon to simpler ones, the elements which were supposed to make up the whole.

But it was already clear that this analytical procedure could not account for many well-known psychological facts. Some advocates of the older psychology tried to patch it up by adding assumptions to take care of troublesome findings, while leaving the old framework intact. Other scholars, seeing the inadequacy of the customary approach, denied that the problems of psychology could be treated scientifically.

For Wertheimer, neither line of criticism went to the core of the problem. The difficulties of the older psychology went far beyond its failure to explain special laboratory findings. Everything that was vital, meaningful, and essential seemed to be lost in the traditional approach. The trouble, he held, was not in the scientific method itself but rather in an assumption generally made about that method - that it must be atomistic.

But science need not only be analytical in this sense. The viewing of complex wholes as "and-sums, " to be reduced to accidentally and arbitrarily associated elements, Wertheimer described as an approach "from below, " whereas many situations need to be approached "from above." In these cases what happens in the whole cannot be understood from a knowledge of its components considered piecemeal; rather the behavior of the parts themselves depends on their place in the structured whole, in the context in which they exist.

These are precisely the situations which are most important for psychology, those in which we find meaning, value, order. Thus, apparent movement cannot be understood if one knows only the "stills" by which it is produced; nor can the form of a circle, the peacefulness of a landscape, the sternness of a command, the inevitability of a conclusion be understood from a knowledge of independent elements. Here whole properties are primary, and the characteristics of parts are derived from the dynamics of their wholes.

Wertheimer became a lecturer in Frankfurt in 1912. Later he went to Berlin and in 1929 returned to Frankfurt as professor. All this time he was developing his ideas and influencing students who themselves became distinguished psychologists. Although he preferred the spoken to the written word as a vehicle for communication, he wrote some notable articles applying the new approach "from above" to the organization of the perceptual field and to the nature of thinking.

Just before the German elections in 1933, Wertheimer heard a speech by Hitler over a neighbor's radio. He decided that he did not want his family to live in a country where such a man could run, with likelihood of success, for the highest office in the land; and the next day the family moved to Marienbad, Czechoslovakia. Soon Wertheimer realized that Hitler was not a passing phenomenon, and he accepted an invitation from the New School for Social Research in New York City to join its University in Exile (later the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science). He resumed his studies of thinking, completing his major work, Productive Thinking, a highly original and penetrating examination of the processes that occur in thinking at its best. In a series of articles he showed the application of Gestalt thinking to problems of truth, ethics, freedom, and democracy. Unfortunately he did not live to write his projected Gestalt logic.

Further Reading

Wolfgang Köhler, The Task of Gestalt Psychology (1969), is an overview of Gestalt psychology by one of its founders and shows Wertheimer's role in its development.

Columbia Encyclopedia: Max Wertheimer

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Wertheimer, Max (mäks vĕrt'hīmər), 1880-1943, German psychologist, b. Prague. He studied at the universities of Prague, Berlin, and Würzburg (Ph.D., 1904). His original researches, while he was a professor at Frankfurt and Berlin, placed him in the forefront of contemporary psychology. Wertheimer came to the United States in 1933, shortly before the Nazis seized power in Germany. He immediately joined the graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research (1933-43). Wertheimer's discovery (1910-12) of the phi phenomenon (concerning the illusion of motion) gave rise to the influential school of Gestalt psychology. His early experiments, in collaboration with Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, introduced a new approach (macroscopic as opposed to microscopic) to the study of psychological problems. In the latter part of his life he directed much of his attention to the problem of learning; this research resulted in a book, posthumously published, called Productive Thinking (1945, repr. 1978).

Wikipedia: Max Wertheimer

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Max Wertheimer
Born	April 15, 1880 (1880-04-15) Prague
Died	October 12, 1943 (1943-10-13) 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 psychologist who was one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology, along with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler.

Gestalt psychology (also Gestalt of the Berlin School) is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is different than the sum of its parts. The classic Gestalt example is a soap bubble, whose spherical shape is not defined by a rigid template, or a mathematical formula, but rather it emerges spontaneously by the parallel action of surface tension acting at all points in the surface simultaneously. This is in contrast to the "atomistic" principle of operation of the digital computer, where every computation is broken down into a sequence of simple steps, each of which is computed independently of the problem as a whole. The Gestalt effect refers to the form-forming capability of our senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves.

1 World War I
2 Berlin years
3 The New School
4 Later life
5 References
6 External links
7 See also

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.

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.

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.

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.

References

Michael Wertheimer, A Brief History of Psychology. 4th edition. Fort Worth TX: Harcourt Brace, 2000.
American Psychological Association. Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology. New York: APA and Ehrlbaum, 2000.
D. Brett King and Michael Wertheimer, Max Wertheimer and Gestalt Theory. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2005.
Sarris, V (1989), "Max Wertheimer on seen motion: theory and evidence.", Psychological research 51 (2): 58–68, doi:10.1007/BF00309358, PMID 2687920
"Max Wertheimer memorial issue.", Psychological research 51 (2): 43–85, 1989, ISSN 0340-0727, PMID 2687919
Sarris, V (1988), "[Max Wertheimer in Frankfurt--on the origin and development crisis of gestalt psychology. III. Further studies of motion perception (1929-1933)]", Zeitschrift für Psychologie mit Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie 196 (1): 27–61, PMID 2905852
Sarris, V (1987), "[Max Wertheimer in Frankfurt--on the beginnings and developmental crisis of Gestalt psychology. II. Structural rules of motion and space perception (1911-1914)]", Zeitschrift für Psychologie mit Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie 195 (4): 403–31, PMID 2895554
Sarris, V (1987), "[Max Wertheimer in Frankfurt--on the beginnings and developmental crisis of Gestalt psychology. Initial studies of motion perception (1910-1912)]", Zeitschrift für Psychologie mit Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie 195 (3): 283–310, PMID 2895552
Miller, A I (1975), "Albert Einstein and Max Wertheimer: a Gestalt psychologist's view of the genesis of special relativity theory.", History of science; an annual review of literature, research and teaching 13 (2): 75–103, 1975 Jun, PMID 11610002
Wertheimer, M; King, D B; Peckler, M A; Raney, S (1992), "Carl Jung and Max Wertheimer on a priority issue.", Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences 28 (1): 45–56, 1992 Jan, doi:10.1002/1520-6696(199201)28:1<45::AID-JHBS2300280104>3.0.CO;2-P, PMID 11612657

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	Kurt Koffka (American psychologist)
	Kurt Koffka
	Gestalt (philosophy)

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