The legacy of Max Wertheimer and gestalt psychology - Sixtieth Anniversary, 1934-1994: The Legacy of Our Past

Social Research, Winter, 1994 by D. Brett King, Michael Wertheimer, Heidi Keller, Kevin Crochetiere

In 1946, Solomon Asch wrote that the "thinking of Max Wertheimer has penetrated into nearly every region of psychological inquiry and has left a permanent impress on the minds of psychologists and on their daily work. The consequences have been far-reaching in the work of the last three decades, and are likely to expand in the future" (Asch, 1946, p. 81). Asch's article on "Max Wertheimer's Contributions to Modern Psychology" appeared in Social Research as a tribute, and in response to a challenge by the first president of the New School for Social Research, Alvin Johnson, to study "the work of Max Wertheimer and its meaning for social science" (Johnson, 1943, p. 398). Indeed, the legacy of Wertheimer, founder of Gestalt psychology and one of the first members of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at the New School, has been substantial.

Wertheimer was born April 15, 1880 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he matriculated at Charles University in 1989; although he was initially a student of law, courses with the illustrious philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels managed to divert Max's interests to philosophy. On October 27, 1902, he enrolled at the Friedrich-Wilheim University of Berlin as a student of philosophy and psychology. At the University of Berlin, as in Prague, Wertheimer gave his intellectual interests wide rein in the study of psychophysics, experimental psychology, logic, and philosophy. In 1904 he attended the University of Wurzburg where, in less than half a year, he completed his doctoral degree with Oswald Kulpe and Karl Marbe, on the use of the word association method in the detection of criminal guilt, a theme on which he had already been working two years earlier in Prague.

From 1905 to 1916 Wertheimer held intermittent appointments at Prague, Vienna, Berlin, and Frankfurt, working at psychiatric clinics and at physiological and neurological institutes. His work during this period was devoted to a broad range of interests, including the psychopathology of language, Volkerpsychologie (sociocultural psychology), pedagogy, epistemology, the aforementioned diagnosis of guilt by word association, detailed individual experiments on patients suffering from alexia (an inability to use the spoken language), analyses of the music and thinking of indigenous non-Western tribes, studies of the perception of apparent motion, and, perhaps most importantly, investigations of the psychology of thinking and of logic.

In 1929, Wertheimer accepted a call to become professor of psychology and director of the Psychological Institute at the University of Frankfurt. He was to be in Frankfurt only four short years, interrupted by a heart attack and then the advent of Hitler, before his immigration to the United States in 1933 at the age of 53. Although he was among the more visible German psychologists of his time, Wertheimer was fortunate to have an offer from the New School before coming to America.

During the founding year of the New School's Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science, Alvin Johnson helped initiate the General Seminar, an interdisciplinary meeting devoted each semester to a different shared topic of social and political interest. Graduate students and faculty from other institutions joined the Graduate Faculty in seminars devoted to "America and Europe," "Political and Economic Democracy," and "Power in the United States." Inspired by the liberal, interdisciplinary spirit of the New School, Wertheimer was instrumental in the creation of a seminar on the methodology of the social sciences that met from 1933 to 1943. He participated over the years with diverse social scientists including Karen Horney, Albert Salomon, Arnold Brecht, and Adolph Lowe in the exploration of themes relating to the "Problem of Value," "Current Problems of the Social Sciences," and "Methodology of the Social Sciences." As leader of the seminar, Wertheimer "consciously sought to relate the political concerns of the General Seminar to more fundamental philosophical issues of epistemology and value" (Rutkoff and Scott, 1986, p. 105).

To further strengthen the impact of the Graduate Faculty's scholarship, beyond the modernist walls of the New School, Johnson spearheaded the founding of Social Research, a journal that published contributions from the General Seminar. Emil Lederer, dean of the University in Exile and later of the Graduate Faculty, joined sociologist Hans Speier in editing the new journal. In 1934, Wertheimer joined Johnson, Max Ascoli, Horace Kallen, Emil Lederer, Hans Speier, Frieda Wunderlich, and other members of the Graduate Faculty as members of Social Research's first editorial board. Wertheimer's deep compassion for the human condition and his dedication to the ideals of ethics, truth, freedom, and democracy were clearly evident in several essays that he wrote in the United States, including two published in Social Research (Wertheimer, 1934, 1935). In an unpublished introduction to a collection of these papers, Albert Einstein wrote that Wertheimer's essays