“Die Anfänge der modernen angewandten Psychologie liegen vielleicht noch mehr außerhalb als innerhalb des Feldes der Psychologie selbst” [Münsterberg, 1914, 25].
In the prewar period, the commitment to functional (or applied) research made by a majority of psycholo-gists substantially extended psychology’s territory, and stimulated its emancipation as an academic and applied discipline. History of science knows a long range of cases in which social and practical prob-lems stimulated research, and practitioners’ experience helped reshaping the essentials of a discipline no less than the work of theorists.87 Psychology of the 1910s was no exception to this kind of dynamics.
Nothing else than practical problems shaped its research practice and the theoretical realms. The fast growth of applied psychology, not only in German-speaking Europe, was largely a consequence of the success of the wartime industrial applications of psychology in testing programs and personnel classifi-cation systems. The constitution of the technological battlefield in the context of World War I sealed the alliance of technology and research in many fields including psychology.88
In 1914, when the war broke out, only few German psychological laboratories were appropriately equipped for experimentation that would go beyond demonstrative and pedagogical needs. Among those the largest and most wealthy two were Leipzig and Berlin; others were Göttingen, Würzburg, Munich and Frankfurt.89 With the fast-growing significance of applied psychology, the situation radically changed, leaving behind the former purely philosophical and pedagogical canon. Scientists in numerous ways strived to demonstrate the usefulness of basic research by using their laboratories, instruments and techniques to solve military problems. This trend ranged from the development of sound-ranging de-vices in physics to the preparation of poison gas in chemistry.90 In this process, psychology, too, had become an instrument of military technology, and by that a primarily applied domain.91
During these years, psychology tackled divers practical challenges. However, at least two new applied fields of experimental research that arose and were established stimulated through military problems have to be named, i.e. “human factor psychology” and "psychotechnics". The new research aimed at integrating and controlling the "human factor" in human-machine interaction. The focus of these efforts was on the "human factor", the human organism as a functioning part of a fighting machine. Psycholo-gists adopted psychophysical measurement to skills-testing regarding the selection of vehicle operators, communications specialists and pilots. In particular, they evaluated the soldiers’ sensory perception and ability to act (such as reaction to environmental stimuli). Others, for instance Max Wertheimer and Erich von Hornbostel (1877–1935), got involved in the development of specialized equipment such as the artillery range finder (Schallmeßverfahren).92
85Cf. [Goldschmidt, 1912, 96].
86For extended recapitulations of the struggle for academic positions in German academia (Lehrstuhlstreit) see e.g.
[Ash, 1985a, 52ff.], [Ash, 1989, 52], [Ash, 1995, ch. 3] and [Kusch, 1995b].
87See, for instance, case examples from early modern science are given by [Renn et al., 2001, Valleriani, 2010].
88Cf. [Geuter, 1986, 13-85].
89Cf. [Stumpf, 1918]. See also [Geuter, 1986, 13-85].
90For details, see [Kevles, 1978] and [Johnson, 1991].
91For instance, in a speech held on March 19, 1918, as part of an experimental psychological class organized by Emergency Medical Services, Carl Stumpf gives an overview over successful military applications of psychology. See [Stumpf, 1918, 278-281].
92See, for instance, [von Hornbostel and Wertheimer, 1920]. On the military involvement of psychology see also [Ash, 1995, 187-90].
In the context of war services the significance of work psychology grew, as well.93 Applied psycholo-gists in the new field called "psychotechnics"94were concerned with problems of rational use and fast replacement of manpower. For instance, they selected machine operators with skills best suited for the tasks in question, searched for female replacement of those left for army, etc. Other practical fields in which German psychologists and neurologists employed their knowledge during the World War I were the examination and treatment of brain injuries, reintegration of traumatized people into the everyday working life, investigation of changes in psychical performance in stress situations, and the training of war dogs by specialists in animal psychology.95
The war and the ensuing economic situation did not only change the standing of psychology within German academia but above all it changed the self-conception of the discipline. In the 1910s, the still philosophically oriented experimental psychology lived in uneasy balance with varied attempts to trans-form the field into a science-based profession and to expand its subject matter and methodological op-tions accordingly.96 The commitment to practical accomplishments asked for methodological changes.
The new trend was to treat subjects of investigation not much different than objects or machines; the individual mattered less than the optimization of the workflow. This kind of methodological change brought experimental or applied psychologists much closer to natural science enlarging the divide be-tween the experimental psychologists and the philosophers. Meanwhile, the philosophers accused the experimentalists of reducing mental life to an interplay of essentially meaningless hypothetical “ele-ments”. The philosopher-pedagogue Eduard Spranger drew the controversy’s bottom line by stating that natural-scientific (naturwissenschaftliche) and humanistic (geisteswissenschaftliche) psychology were fundamentally opposed.97
93Cf. [Stumpf, 1918, 278-281].
94The field of applied psychology “psychotechnics” (Psychotechnik) was founded by the German-American psychologist Hugo Münsterberg in hisGrundzüge der Psychotechnik (1914), cf. [Münsterberg, 1914, 6]. Although the term had been coined by William Stern (1903), and used to demarcate “psychological impact” (psychologische Einwirkung) in all areas of life from psycho-logical diagnostics, see [Stern, 1903].
95Cf. [Jaeger, 1985, 101]; see also Stumpf’s contemporary testimony, [Stumpf, 1918, 278-281].
96Around the same time, a growing university network and the rise of private research foundations in the United States offered greater opportunities for institutional independence than were given in Europe. The more advanced professionalization of psychol-ogy implied the demand that academic psychologists present their work as both quantitative and socially relevant. Cf. [Ash, 1992, 198].
97See [Spranger, 1913, forward] and [Spranger, 1926, esp. 199]. More on the “clash” between philosophy and psychology and on the academic controversy in the period between 1890 and 1933 in [Ringer, 1983, 273-282, 330-44] and [Ash, 1991, 398-401].
3 The whole and the parts: Gestalt in Weimar Germany
The concept of holism gained public resonance in 1926, after being introduced by the South African statesman Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870–1950) in his monograph Holism and Evolution. He defined holism as "the tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution" [Smuts, 1927, 88]. Smuts’ formulation of holism has been linked with his political-military activity, especially his aspiration to create a League of Nations. Yet, in fact, as early as at the beginning of the 20th century, Germany was already prevailed by, what the historian Ernst Plaum calls, a “holistic climate”, which then stood for a socio-political emancipation from the “machine-like society”.98 The self-evident political turning point was 1890, when the old emperor died and the new one, Wilhelm II, dismissed Bismarck, lifted the Anti-Socialist Laws and indicated that he would be willing to institute social reforms. Those were the years when in the universities academicians first began to turn urgent calls for professional and national “wholeness”, “oneness” and the “whole” in their fight against the fragmentation of knowledge. Those years also saw the rise of quasi-religious and occult movements, all with the aim to reconnect the individual, lost in the bourgeois society, to his “organic”, “whole” self. The new generation began to insist that the goal of individual wholeness required that human beings no longer restricted themselves to thinking like machines. From the high levels of academia the call went out for willingness to explore mental horizons beyond empiricism and the passive association of ideas.99 The philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) was one of the most systematic and influentialfin de sièclechallengers of the old positivist ways; he argued that a person’s perception of the surrounding world (Weltanschauung) goes beyond the rational and analyzable, and must also include the irrational and the holistic.
„Die Weltanschauungen sind nicht Erzeugnisse des Denkens. Sie entstehen nicht aus dem bloßen Willen des Erkennens. Die Auffassung der Wirklichkeit ist ein wichtiges Moment in ihrer Gestaltung, aber doch nur eines. Aus dem Lebensverhalten, der Lebenserfahrung, der Struktur unserer psychischen Totalität gehen sie hervor“ [Dilthey, 1911, 86].
At the beginning of the 20th century, holism was widely present in different scientific doctrines, such as, for instance, quantum theory,100 ensuring that by the 1920s and until 1933 holistic science had an un-equally strong voice in socio-cultural debates on the means and costs of modernization.101 The scholar, who probably first related holistic thinking with the concept of Gestalt was the Austrian philosopher Chris-tian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932). His work Über Gestaltqualitäten(1890) treated a problem occupying many contemporary thinkers, the problem of the relationship between the mental whole and its parts or elements. He first stated that the whole equals the sum of its parts plus another element, i.e. the
“Gestalt quality”.102
In the early years of the new century, appeals were made against the unreasonable predominance of classical associanism, which tried to defend mind “associates” to arrive at “rational conclusions” stress-ing the (de facto, limited) role of conscious reasonstress-ing in human thought. Oswald Külpe’s school of psychology in Würzburg and the Berlin psychologists were the first to put up an agenda against the associanist approach to mind.103 Köhler’s first institutionalized Gestalt assuming the psychological chair in Berlin in 1921/22. During the 1920s, Gestalt psychology expanded to the universities of Frankfurt and Giessen, when Kurt Koffka and Max Wertheimer secured their own chairs. Between 1921 and 1933, Kurt Lewin worked first as an assistant, and later on as associate professor at the Psychological Institute of Berlin, then headed by Wolfgang Köhler. There he was part of the flourishing of the Gestalt psycholog-ical movement together with Wertheimer, Köhler, Koffka and many of their followers. The Leipzig school
98Cf. [Plaum, 1993, 32].
99Cf. [Harrington, 1996, 24f.].
100See e.g. Darrigol’s paper about quantum statistics, where holism is a central topic, [Darrigol, 1991].
101Cf. [Plaum, 1993, 32] .
102See [Ehrenfels, 1890].
103Cf. [Harrington, 1996, 28].
ofGanzheitspsychologie, a competing holistic school, formed about the same time, and was headed by Felix Krueger (1874–1948), who succeeded Wilhelm Wundt as the chair of the Psychological Faculty at Leipzig in 1917.
In the present Chapter we focus on the development and institutionalization of Gestalt in German-speaking experimental psychology of the 1920s and the early 1930s. The rise of Gestalt psychology was both an offspring of the institutional, methodological, conceptual, and political situation German psychol-ogy found itself in the end of World War I and its countermovement. The Gestalt school of psycholpsychol-ogy was centered at the University of Berlin.
3.1 Gestalt psychology coming of age
"Trotz der grundsätzlichen Übereinstimmung, die die Zusammenarbeit dieses brillanten Tri-os so fruchtbar machte, gab es auch Differenzen, was bedeutete, daß jeder seinen eigenen Beitrag zum gemeinsamen Werk geleistet hatte. Wertheimer war der temperamentvolle und inspirierte Künstler; Köhler der immer etwas reservierte Physiker, der viel in räumlichen Be-griffen dachte; und Koffka war der wortgewaltige Jurist und Logiker, der alles in ein Gesamt-system zu bringen suchte” [Heider, 1984, 111].
Stumpf’s Psychological Institute in Berlin: Teaching and students
Figure 1: Carl Stumpf as portrayed in his auto-biography [Stumpf, 1924]
At the turn of the 20th century, the Psychological Sem-inar at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin had been upgraded to a Psychological Institute; this was accompanied by a substantial raise of funding and new ample accommodations in the Dorotheenstraße 95/96.
The Institute was headed by Carl Stumpf, its founding director, and shared the location with the Philosophical Institute headed by the neo-Kantian Alois Riehl (1844–
1924), who was specialized in the criticism of percep-tion and philosophy of science.104
As mentioned, Stumpf was a dedicated experimentalist striving to create an elite of suitable experimenters who could accurately observe and report their own experi-ences.105 Therefore some philosophy students looking for an intellectually and emotionally exciting worldview might have been repelled. One such student, Ludwig, Marcuse, reports about Stumpf’s lecture in the spring of 1913:
“The professor was a man of world-wide au-thority, so I was told. I entered his lecture hall and left it just as quickly; for a larger-than-life-sized picture of an ear labyrinth
hung on the blackboard. Obviously I had wandered into a medical course. Eventually, I discovered that the psychology of Professor Carl Stumpf was not at all what I understood under that name.”106
104Cf. [Riehl, 1910] and [Stumpf, 1910].
105Cf. [Ash, 1995, 39f.].
106“Der Professor war ein Mann, von dem man mir sagte, er sei Welt-Autorität. Ich betrat seinen Hörsal und war ebenso schnell wieder draußen; denn es hing an der Tafel das überlebensgroße Abbild eines Ohr-Labyrinths, ganz offenbar war ich in ein medi-zinisches Kolleg geraten. Schließlich entdeckte ich, daß die Psychologie bei Carl Stumpf gar nicht war, was ich darunter verstand [Marcuse, 1960, 24].
Some students in Berlin put their observations into a song: “Philosophy here is no big deal / It’s being destroyed by Stumpf and Riehl” (ebd.).107
In the 21 years of Stumpf’s directorship (1900–1921) 21 doctoral dissertations were successfully accom-plished.108 What appears to be a modest number was a consequence of Stumpf’s own selectiveness and distinct requirements towards his protégés. Under Stumpf, not research but pedagogy was the primary obligation of his institute. Therefore despite the impressive number of enrollments, the Berlin Institute produced just a few experimenting psychologists. As Stumpf put it in 1910:
"In such a young research tendency with so little developed methodology, so many sources of error, such great difficulties in the exact setting up and carrying through of experiments, it could not be the main goal [of the Institute] to produce as many dissertations as possible.
Instead, the leading aims must be these two: first, support of the lectures by means of demonstrations and exercises; second, provision of the necessary aids for the experimental work of the director, the assistants, and a few especially advanced workers."109
Kurt Lewin, who started his doctorate under Stumpf in 1911, recalled the supervision somewhat anec-dotally:
“Stumpf gewährte seinen Studenten ein ungewöhnliches Ausmaß an Freiheit. Ich wählte zum Beispiel ein Thema für meine Dissertation aus; es wurde Stumpf von einem Assistenten unterbreitet, während ich in einem anderen Raum wartete. Der Assistent kam heraus, um mir zu sagen, daß das Thema angenommen war; während der nächsten drei oder vier Jahre, die ich mit dieser Arbeit zubrachte, erinnere ich mich nicht, jemals die Sache vor der endgültigen Übergabe mit Stumpf besprochen zu haben” [Lewin, 1981a, 343].
Meanwhile, among the "few especially advanced workers" capable of meeting Stumpf’s high experi-mental standards there were nearly all of the founders or associates of the future Gestalt movement – Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Köhler, Adhemar Gelb, Erich von Hornbostel and Johannes von Allesch; Kurt Lewin was one of Stumpf’s last doctoral students. All except for Wertheimer received the doctorate for experimental work done in Berlin from 1906 to 1914. Wertheimer worked for two years in the Berlin Institute before completing his dissertation under Oswald Külpe in Würzburg in 1904; he then often returned for discussion and research. All of these scholar-scientists also studied at other universities, but Stumpf was the person under whom the Gestalt psychologists learned the experimental metier.110
The starting point
The starting point of Gestalt psychology in Germany is typically taken in 1912, the year in which Max Wertheimer published his article Experimental Studies on the Seeing of Motion (Experimentelle Studien über das Sehen und Bewegung) describing thephiphenomenon. This article reveals the future Gestalt maxim that “the whole is different from the sum of its parts”. The preamble of this discovery was a personal experience made by Wertheimer in 1910. While traveling in a train he observed an optical phenomenon that gave him the idea of an experiment, which he set up a few hours later in a hotel room.
He used a stroboscope to substitute strips of paper on which he had drawn series of lines and found that by varying the time interval between the exposure of the lines he could observe completely different things, i.e. either one line after the other, or two lines standing side by side, or one line moving from
107"Die Philosophie gilt hier nicht viel Man rottet sie aus mit Stumpf und Riehl.”
The literary translation is suggested by Mitchell Ash, [Ash, 1995, 35].
108For a complete list of doctoral dissertations supervised by Stumpf see [Ash, 1995, 419f.].
109“[...] daß es bei einer so jungen Forschungsrichtung mit so wenig durchgebildeter Methodik, so zahlreichen Fehlerquellen, so großen Schwierigkeiten in der exakten Anstellung und Auslegung der Versuche nicht der Hauptzweck sein dürfe, eine möglichst große Anzahl von Dissertationen durch Studierende anfertigen zu lassen” [Stumpf, 1910, 203].
110Cf. [Ash, 1995, 34] and [Ash, 2002, 130].
one position to another. The apparent movement observed by Wertheimer that day came to be known as the phi phenomenon. Of course, there have been psychologists and philosophers before him, who believed that movement was a sensationsui generisrather than an inference from static sensations on the retina. Yet, they had not demonstrated this in a scientific manner. By contrast, in his 1912 paper Wertheimer formulated the underlying problem as well as the way to solve this problem, which made experimentation possible. Thephi phenomenon launched Gestalt psychology and became illustrative of its central tenet. Unlike in phenomenology, experience has to be studied in the way it occurred, as a whole, and not broken down in an artificial analysis.111
However, the virtual birthplace of the Gestalt theory was not Berlin but Frankfurt am Main. In 1910, Köhler was promoted to second assistant at the Psychological Institute in Frankfurt where Wertheimer and Koffka were employed. Wertheimer was already pursuing his research on apparent motion, and therefore needed experimental subjects. Köhler wrote later:
“The winter term had barely begun when Max Wertheimer appeared with a primitive strobo-scope in his suitcase and with many ideas in his head. At the time, none of us knew much about the two others; but Wertheimer stayed, and working together we became the first three Gestalt psychologists” [Köhler, 1942, 97].
As Kurt Koffka recalled in 1935:
“Wertheimer had just completed his experiments on the perception of motion in which Köhler and I had served as the chief observers. Now he proposed to tell me the purpose of his experiments, of which, as a good subject, I had been entirely ignorant. Of course I had had many discussions with those two men before. One could not live in constant contact with Wertheimer without learning some aspects of gestalt theory, even in those old times”
[Koffka, 1935a, 53].
And so Koffka recalls that when, in 1911, he left to take a position in Giessen some forty miles away from Frankfurt both he and Köhler were convinced of the promising Gestalt theoretical views.112
Before the noteworthy encounter with Köhler and Koffka in 1910, Max Wertheimer had studied philos-ophy with Christian von Ehrenfels in Prague.113 However, he spent the years 1902 to 1904 in Berlin working under Stumpf.114 He had then conducted a dissertation study on psychology of testimony.
Together with Julius Klein, his law school friend from Prague, he devised an associative lie detection procedure.115 In 1910, he was the eldest and most experienced in empirical work of the three.
Kurt Koffka started his academic career in 1903, as philosophy student under Alois Rhiel. Yet, as he himself stated later, he “was too realistically minded to be satisfied with pure abstractions”, so he switched to psychology.116 Köhler entered university in 1905. In the years 1905 to 1910 he attended 25 courses in sciences, 13 in philosophy and 10 in psychology. His most attended teachers were Max
Kurt Koffka started his academic career in 1903, as philosophy student under Alois Rhiel. Yet, as he himself stated later, he “was too realistically minded to be satisfied with pure abstractions”, so he switched to psychology.116 Köhler entered university in 1905. In the years 1905 to 1910 he attended 25 courses in sciences, 13 in philosophy and 10 in psychology. His most attended teachers were Max