Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [186]
Ernst Mach, a physicist with an interest in psychology, noted in 1897 that when we see a circle at different angles, it seems circular to us even though it looks ellipsoidal to a camera, and that when we see a table from different angles, the image on the retina changes but the inner experience of seeing a table does not. The mind interprets the sensations to mean what it knows the object to be.
In 1906 Vittorio Benussi, experimenting with the famous Müller-Lyer illusion, in which two lines (the horizontal ones in the following illustration) look different in length although they are exactly the same, found that even when he told his subjects to concentrate on the horizontal lines, they could not make themselves ignore the whole figure; they could reduce the illusion but not eliminate it.
FIGURE 2
The Müller-Lyer illusion
And while Wertheimer was conducting his first experiment in Frankfurt, David Katz, a psychologist at Göttingen, was exploring the phenomena of “brightness constancy” and “color constancy.” When we see an object in shadow, he found, we perceive it as having the same brightness and color as when we see it in sunlight, even though objectively it is darker and its color different. We see it, that is, within a known context.
Wertheimer, Koffka, and Köhler had all been exposed to such findings and concepts in their training, and had all been influenced at Berlin by Carl Stumpf, who had imported phenomenology from philosophy into psychology. (In phenomenological psychology, the primary materials of research are everyday real-life experiences, not elemental sensations and feelings.) Wertheimer and Koffka had also studied at Würzburg, where the research emphasis was on thought processes. All three, moreover, had done research involving higher mental functions: Wertheimer on the thinking of feeble-minded children and patients with reading disorders, Koffka in his dissertation on rhythmic Gestalten,* Köhler in his on the psychology of acoustics.
Still, they were a distinctly dissimilar threesome, and hardly looked like an intellectual attack force capable of assaulting and defeating Wundtian psychology.
Wertheimer, reared in Prague, was a Jew. Boyish of feature but balding, he sported a huge, martial, Bismarckian mustache but was poetic, musically gifted, warm, humorous, and cheerful. He was an exciting and fluent speaker; his ideas brimmed and bubbled over. But reining in his thoughts to set them down on paper was so difficult and painful for him that he was genuinely phobic about writing.
Koffka, a Berliner, was half Jewish. Small and frail, with a long, thin face and a somber look, he was introverted, sensitive, and insecure; inexplicably, these traits, though they made him an uninspiring lecturer, endeared him to his female students. Ill at ease at the rostrum, he was comfortable at the writing table and produced systematic, scholarly expositions of the Gestalt psychology.
Köhler, a Gentile born in Estonia and reared in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, was hawk-featured, with a short, stiff thatch of hair parted in the middle. He was the most painstaking experimenter of the three, and later became a strong institute administrator. Arrogant, stiff, and formal in person—he had to know someone socially for ten years before he would use the personal du instead of the formal Sie— in his writing he could be surprisingly relaxed and charming.
In the end, the differences among the three produced an advantageous specialization of function. As one history of the Gestalt movement puts it, Wertheimer was “the intellectual father, thinker, and innovator,” Koffka “the salesman of the group,” and Köhler “the inside man, the doer.”5
But only one of the three ever held a major position