Lewin and the (other) Gestalt psychologists (1922–1934)

After hisHabilitation, Kurt Lewin got appointed as Hand Rupp’s assistant at the University of Berlin where he joined Köhler and Wertheimer in their research endeavor committed to Gestalt psychology. He found a nearly optimal academic niche under the Gestalt umbrella in Berlin, where he was employed between 1922 and 1934. Holding a position within a highly estimated school in a world-wide renowned institute, he enjoyed the liberty to pursue his diverse academic interests. Within the epistemologically inspired holistic framework of Gestalt, he could combine research and teaching in experimental psychology and philosophy of science without far-reaching restrictions.¹⁹⁴ In the present section we do no more than introducing the general terms of collaboration between Lewin and the (other) Gestalt psychologists.

Various concrete links in their research will be outlined in the course of this work. The interdisciplinary constitution of both theoretical approaches is discussed in Part II while experimental practices are focus in Part III.

4.3.1 Lewin’s niche

After Wertheimer published his programatic paperUntersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt, I: Prin-zipielle Bemerkungen in 1922,¹⁹⁵ Lewin worked his way into Gestalt-style research with a 1923 paper on the perception of upside-down figures and a 1925 study with Japanese visitor Kanae Sakuma on depth effects in motion perception. In these studies the authors adjusted Lipman’s memory apparatus and Heting’s haploscope (Hetingsche Haploskop) in order to manipulate and grasp the proband’s visual perception of words or figures.¹⁹⁶ Up until 1926, Lewin was also involved in measurement-focused re-search. For instance, he delivered two papers suggesting improvements on apparatus measuring sound intensity and finally a separate paper on his invention of the “self-timing chronographer” based on the Hipp chronoscope, a device that was commonly used for time measurement in the first psychological laboratories (see fig. 8).¹⁹⁷ These rather diverse partly technical publications over around four years point to a phases of a scholarly identity-forming Lewin went through.

However, Lewin bypassed the “unfocused phases” by 1926 when he set up his individual research pro-gram on “Psychology of Action and Emotion”. Since mid-1920s he organized and headed a proper student circle and installed an own publication series in thePsychologische Forschung. Thus, a partly autonomous infrastructure was established within the Gestalt framework and maintained up to Lewin’s emigration in 1933/34. Certainly, a precondition to this partly independence was that Lewin accepted the Gestalt theoretical claims and shared holistic views of the part-whole-relationships without restrictions.

None of Lewin’s concepts was strictly opposed to those of the Gestalt theorists. No significant theo-retical contradictions existed. Another precondition was that convenient collaboration modes between Lewin and the (other) Gestalt psychologists were found. Lewin identified himself with Gestalt psychol-ogy, willingly lectured Gestalt concepts and systematically used some of these in his publications. He gave a range of public lectures devoted to Gestalt psychology and its distinction from other contem-porary schools.¹⁹⁸ Also after the emigration he promoted Gestalt ideas and the work of his Gestalt colleagues.¹⁹⁹

194Most of the staff in the Berlin Institute taught philosophy as well as psychology. Between 1921 and 1932, Lewin had offered a total of 70 courses of which 20 had addressed topics related to philosophy or theory of science and 50 themes pertaining to experimental psychology, in particular in psychology of action and emotion, and developmental psychology. An extensive account on the teaching in Berlin is given in Chapter 8.

195See [Wertheimer, 1922] .

196See [Lewin and Sakuma, 1925, esp. 199]. Lipman’s memory apparatus was introduced in the previous section.

197See [Lewin, 1923], [Lewin, 1922d, Lewin, 1922c, Lewin, 1926a]. The illustration is from [Zimmermann, 1904], reproduced in the Max Planck Virtual Laboratory: http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/technology/data?id=tec119, 23 June 2014.

198One of Lewin’s lectures on Gestalt psychology was, for instance, "Gestalttheorie und Kinderpsychologie" (1929), [Lewin, 1982b]. See also [Wittmann, 1998, 90].

199SeeSome Social-Psychological Differences between the United States and Germany(1936), [Lewin, 1936b].

Figure 8: Hipp’s chronoscope, 1904

During the whole period between 1922 and 1934, Köhler ensured support in matters of administration and funding. In 1927, Köhler addressed the Ministry of Education in order to prolong Lewin’s appoint-ment and upgrade it to an associate professorship (“ nichtbeamte außerordentliche Professur”). Therein he insisted, referring to the series on Psychology of Action and Emotion: with his successful research in the field of general psychology Lewin became increasingly indispensable (“Prof. Dr. Lewin, ist durch seine erfolgreichen Forschungen auf allgemein-psychologischen Gebiet für die theoretische Abteilung immer unentbehrlicher geworden" W. Köhler, 20 Oct. 1927).²⁰⁰ He emphasized the same for his con-tract extension two years later adding that nobody besides Lewin would be competent to head the work in psychology of will and affection:

“Dr. Lewin ist nach wie vor die treibende Kraft für eine neue und wertvolle Forschungsrich-tung, die er eingeführt hat, und deren weitere Entwicklung ganz von ihm abhängt. Die Stu-dierenden, die in Berlin unter seiner Leitung arbeiten und das Institut überhaupt, können ihn keinesfalls entbehren” (Köhler, 27 Aug. 1929).²⁰¹

In 1932 and 1933, when Lewin was about to leave Germany for the US, Köhler still did as much as possible to prolong his contracts.

"Über kurz oder lang werden wir diese ganz hervorragende Kraft ohnehin durch eine Beru-fung verlieren. Inzwischen würde das Berliner Psychologische-Institut sich garnichts Besse-res wünschen können, als dass Herr Lewin, solange wie es irgend geht, bei uns bleibt. Da es sich schon jetzt um eine wissenschaftliche Persönlichkeit ersten Ranges handelt, deren Ar-beiten in der ganzen Welt grösstes Ansehen geniessen, darf ich wohl von der Überreichung einer Liste der Lewin’schen Arbeiten absehen. Ihre Zahl wird dauernd durch Beiträge von der grössten Bedeutung erhöht" (Köhler, 1 August 1932).²⁰²

It is curios to note that all extensions of Lewin’s work appointment at the Berlin University were specif-ically motivated by the importance of his experimental achievements without regards to his natural phi-losophy.

200Request to the Ministry of Science, Art and Popular Education no. UI8501; in: GStA PK, I.HA, Rep.76 Va, Sect.2, Tit.X, Nr.

150, III, p.254).

See also request no. UI5768 from the same year: “Herr Dr. Lewin leitet eine Serie von besonders wichtigen Untersuchungen, deren Unterbrechung wir auf keinen Fall verantworten können” (Köhler, W., in: GStA PK, I.HA, Rep.76 Va, Sect.2, Tit.X, Nr. 150, III, p.249).

201Köhler quoted in the admission of the contract extension by the Ministry of Science, Art and Popular Education, in: GStA PK, I.HA, Rep.76 Va, Sect.2, Tit.X, Nr. 150, III, p.286.

202Köhler, W., request of the contract extension of an assistant no. UI 7284, in: GStA, PK, I. HA, Rep.76 Va, Sect. 2, Tit.X, Nr.

150, III, p.350.

4.3.2 The contradictions

However, despite this extensive support, Lewin never belonged to the core triad in the most intimate way. Some students of the Berlin Institute pointed out that a certain private aloofness existed between Lewin and the Gestalt trio. The Gestalt psychologists did not share with him the informal “Du” they used among themselves. Carl Frankenstein, another student at the Psychological Institute between 1923 and 1926, wrote to Alfred Marrow that “little contact seemed to exist between him [=Köhler] and Lewin”.²⁰³ At least to some extent, Lewin was the marginalized one in this group of four. As the student Norman Meier summed up: “Lewin was on the fringe”.²⁰⁴

Reasons for the indicated distance might have been diverse. First, as the youngest one, Lewin joined the group in 1921/22 when the core theory was already written down and implemented in Wertheimer’s, Köhler’s and Koffka’s research. Second, he was an originally rural Jew who moved to Berlin. Wittmann suggests that a somewhat significant marginalization reason was the social gap between Lewin’s modest origins and the milieu of Bildungsbürgertum the others belonged to.²⁰⁵ Third, no contradictions but differences in matters of theory existed between Lewin and his collegues.

“Sie wissen, wie hoch ich Lewin schätze, aber ich würde auch ihm gegenüber die Ansicht vertreten, dass W. [=Wertheimer] fruchtbarere und weniger formale Probleme anpackt, zum mindesten bisher" (Köhler, 30 Sept. 1923).²⁰⁶

We explicitly discuss theory-related contradictions at the example of natural-scientific elements in Gestalt and in Lewin’s field approach (cf. Section 7.4).

Ultimately, a certain rivalry between Wertheimer and Lewin might have played a role:

“I could imagine that Lewin with his more active and ambitious temperament surpassed Wertheimer very soon. In so far as one could understand that Max stood in certain de-fense against Kurt Lewin... Max Wertheimer, altogether, was quite a rather tender man, a more shy, sensitive, introverted person” (Metzger).²⁰⁷

In any case, no potentially existing tensions were carried out openly.

“It came as a surprise to many of Lewin’s former students of Berlin’s Psychological Institute to hear the opinion expressed that in the U.S.A. Wertheimer felt that Lewin was teaching non-Gestaltist and/or heretical ideas, and that Lewin and Wertheimer did not get along because the latter could not tolerate ideas that were different from his” [Luchins and Luchins, 1986, 14].

By and large, in the 1920s Weimar a whole variety of controversial discussions between different psy-chological currents and schools (e.g. Würzburg, Leipzig) was carried out. In their light the listed internal differences were minor and Lewin was constantly bracketed together with the Gestalt school.²⁰⁸ The umbrella of the Gestalt group at the Berlin University offered Lewin a combination of infrastructure, re-search resources and substantial work liberty which he needed to develop and implement his proper agenda, and which he lacked as student under Stumpf. Lewin’s formal belonging to the Berlin Insti-tute, where the core of Gestalt was established, was supported by Köhler over years. In these years, he essentially contributed to the publishing and teaching endeavor of the institute. While Gestalt gave Lewin the infrastructural stability and nurtured him with scientific ideas, it granted him the needed liberty to carry out his own increasingly independent research program. In 1926, Lewin set up an individual

203Letter from Frankenstein to Marrow, 27 March 1968; quoted as in [Wittmann, 1998, 91].

204Cf [Luchins and Luchins, 1986, 15].

205Cf. [Wittmann, 1998, 33f., 90f.].

206Köhler’s letter to Reichenbach, 30 Sept. 1923. Quoted as transliterated in [Wittmann, 1998, 191]. The original can be viewed at the University of Pittsburgh Libraries, Pittsburgh, Penn.

207Metzger, quoted as in [Luchins and Luchins, 1986, 12].

208Cf. [Graumann, 1982, 31].

research program onPsychology of Action and Emotionas a part of which he assembled and headed a proper student circle and installed an own publication series in thePsychologische Forschung. This partly autonomous research infrastructure that was established within the Gestalt framework subject of discussion in Part III of the present dissertation.

5 Constitution of new concepts in Lewin’s pragmatic philosophy of science

Lewin’s major philosophical work derived from the period between 1919 and 1931. In 1919, he fin-ished and submitted hisHabilitationpaperDer Typus der genetischen Reihen in Physik, organismischer Biologie und Entwicklungsgeschichtein which he comparatively treated the development of conditional-genetic concepts in physics and biology. With this writing, he introduced a series of works theorizing the nature and challenges of science to which I will further refer as Lewin’s “comparative theory of science”.

In 1931, Lewin published his subsuming essayDer Übergang von der aristothelischen zur galileischen Denkweise, in which he integrated most of his views on philosophy of science developed in the past dozen of years and set up programmatic goals for empirical research in psychology. No more significant work in philosophy of science appeared in his American period. Though, in 1946, Lewin wrote a recol-lection on Cassirer as his teacher for Arthur Schilpp’s volume–Cassirer’s Philosophy of Science and the Social Sciences– that was not published but in 1949, after Lewin’s death.

The first priority of Lewin’s effort at creating a new type of experimental psychology was its functional application derived from the belief that his discipline, the yet “immature” psychology, needs the sup-port of the philosophy of science to find out what a truly scientific psychology might look like. Lewin aims at grasping the implications of philosophical insights for his work on psychological work.²⁰⁹ For instance, the early developmental state of psychology requires a proper specification of its principles and conditions of manifestation. Hereby, philosophy should take a consulting function towards empirical psychology.

“Ihm [= dem Forscher] kommt es ja nicht auf formalphilosophische Probleme in sich, son-dern auf inhaltliche Erkenntnis einer Gegenstandswelt an. Philosophische Thesen haben für ihn letzten Endes nur insofern Interesse, als sie inhaltliche Thesen über die Welt dieser Un-tersuchungsobjekte mitenthalten oder sich in bestimmten praktischen Folgerungen für die Methode der Forschung, für die Art des Beweisganges oder für die konkrete Fragestellung äußern. Auch die Wissenschaftslehre wird, sofern sie als ’empirische’, nicht spekulative Wis-senschaft auftreten will, gut daran tun, sich mehr an den in der tatsächlichen Forschungs-praxis der Einzelwissenschaften implizit enthaltenen philosophischen Thesen zu orientieren, als an ihrer philosophischen ’Ideologie’ ” [Lewin, 1981b, 2].

In the middle of the academic controversy between the emerging new type of empirical psychology and its “parental discipline” philosophy, most philosophers felt the need to take a self-delimiting position towards the emerging experimental psychology over questions on the theoretic and empirical research methods on the nature of the consciousness. In contrast, Lewin was concerned with the question: How can philosophy substantially contribute to the development of empirical sciences? Clearly, there have been also other – earlier and possibly more substantial – arguments on the same question that inspired epistemic investigations. One of those was delivered by Lewin’s admired teacher Ernst Cassirer and had direct influence upon Lewin’s proper work. Another influence significant to Lewin’s philosophy of science was Hans Reichenbach, whom Lewin met in a sociodemocratic student group. Later on Reichenbach founded the Society for Scientific Philosophy, with which Lewin was associated for a period of time in Berlin.²¹⁰

After a short introduction to the early work of Ernst Cassirer, I delineate the general traits of Lewin’s philosophy of science, and discuss his treatment and extension of Cassirer’s work. Further, I introduce

209For the most detailed account in German language s. Lewin-Werk-Ausgabe,vol. 1 (1981): Wissenschaftstheorie I and vol. 2 (1983): Wissenschaftstheorie II,[Métraux, 1981, Métraux, 1983] and in English see [Métraux, 1992, 379-382]. See also [Wittmann, 1998].

210On the relationship and exchange of letters between Lewin and Reichenbach see [Wittmann, 1998], on the Society for Scien-tific Philosophy see [Hecht and Hoffmann, 1991, 44, 49f.] and [Hoffmann, 2007a], and on the relationship between Lewin, Gestalt theory and logical empirism see [Ash, 1994].

his comparative theory of science as an epistemic system and discuss the implications of its key com-ponents, such as "lawfulness" and “conditional-genetic concept type”. Eventually, I highlight the inherent functional side of Lewin’s theoretical construct that he later on translated into a theoretical framework for applied research.