Max Wertheimer: Biography and Theory

Max Wertheimer , He 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 years. Together with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler, he was one of the fathers of Gestalt psychology.

The Gestalt still has a great importance today. This branch of psychology focuses on examining different psychological phenomena as a whole, instead of trying to distinguish each of its components to be able to observe them 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 basis of the theory of Gestalt.

Some of his most important works are Three contributions to the theory of Gestalt (1925) and Productive thinking (1945). The latter was published after his death.

Biography

Childhood and adolescence

From a very young age, Max Wertheimer started playing the violin, composing 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 Charles University in Prague, where he was soon attracted by the philosophy of law, and later by criminal psychology. This interest caused him to abandon his career and go to Berlin to study psychology at Friedrich-Wilhelm University.

I work at the university

In 1904 Wertheimer got his PhD at the University of Wurzburg, thanks to the creation of a lie detector as a tool to study the testimonies of the accused. From this moment he began to research in different universities (among them those of Prague, Vienna and Berlin).

During this time he began to be interested in topics related to perception, especially by the way 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 theory of Gestalt.

During a train trip in 1910 Wertheimer was intrigued by the phenomenon of motion perception, so he took a stroboscope (a device that emits flashes with a certain frequency) to study it.

The studies derived from this moment in the train led him to discover the so-called"phi phenomenon", by which humans are able to perceive 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; This is how the psychology of Gestalt was born.

First years of the Gestalt

During the first years in which he worked on Gestalt theories, Wertheimer worked as a professor at the University of Berlin. In addition, 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 while conducting studies on social and experimental psychology. During this time the researcher criticized the predominant currents in this discipline, which sought to study each phenomenon separately.

Although most of Wertheimer's work had to do with human perception, the 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 working until his death.

During the last years of his life, the researcher was concerned mainly about the relationship between psychology and social ethics. Many of his ideas from this era 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 its 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 relate.

In this sense, Gestalt theory became one of the first humanistic currents within psychology. However, during his early years he focused on studying mainly phenomena of visual perception, such as optical illusions or the phi phenomenon.

Prägnanz

These early investigations served the parents of the Gestalt to propose their theory of emergent phenomena: in a set of elements, the properties of the same can not always be predicted by studying each of these separately. Later, this phenomenon received the name of Prägnanz .

The three main authors of the Gestalt (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 relied on 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 their ideas is among the most effective.

References

1. "Max Wertheimer"in: Britannica. Retrieved on: 21 April 2018 from Britannica: britannica.com.
2. "Max Wertheimer"in: Psychoactive. Recovered in: 21 April 2018 of Psychoactive: psychoactive.com.
3. "Max Wertheimer"in: Wikipedia. Retrieved into: 21 April 2018 from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org.
4. "Gestalt Psychology"in: Britannica. Retrieved on: 21 April 2018 from Britannica: britannica.com.
5. "Gestalt Psychology"in: Wikipedia. Retrieved into: 21 April 2018 from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org.