Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [187]
In Germany, Koffka rose only to the rank of Professor Extraordinarius at the University of Giessen. He gave a series of lectures in America and in 1927 obtained a full professorship at Smith College—not a center of psychological research—and remained there for the rest of his life.
Köhler alone achieved major status in Germany. After several years of teaching and over six years of brilliant experimental work in the Canary Islands, in 1921 he was appointed head of the Psychological Institute at the University of Berlin—the premier post in German psychology—at the age of thirty-four, and made it a center of Gestalt studies. But he held the post only fourteen years; in 1935, after courageously but vainly struggling to keep Nazi influence out of the institute, he resigned, came to America, and spent the rest of his career at Swarthmore College.
Yet even before Köhler rose to his high position at Berlin, the three young men, in only ten years, breached the defenses of Wundtian psychology and established the legitimacy of their new mentalism—a psychology of the mind based on demonstrations and experimental evidence rather than on rationalist arguments and metaphysical speculations.
Although they published relatively little in that time (partly because of the disruptions of World War I), it was enough to show that Gestalt theory offered a better explanation than earlier cognitive psychologies of both perception and higher mental functions. Their evidence was so striking and their arguments so plausible that by 1921 Gestalt psychology had begun to supplant Wundtian psychology, as evidenced by Köhler’s appointment.6
Until the mid-1930s, Gestaltism was a major force in German psychology and a growing one in many other countries. It had only limited effect on American psychology before the arrival of the triumvirate between 1927 and 1935. Then, although none of the men held a leading position in the American psychological establishment, their ideas infiltrated psychological thinking and slowly began to expand it beyond the confines of behaviorism.
The Laws of Gestalten
From the outset, Wertheimer saw Gestalt theory as far more than an explanation of perception; he believed it would prove to be the key to learning, motivation, and thinking.
He based this view not only on the odds and ends of evidence offered by the predecessors of Gestalt theory but on some early research of his own. Shortly after his Frankfurt work on the illusion of motion, he was asked by the director of the children’s clinic at the Psychiatric Institute of Vienna to find ways of teaching deaf-mute children. One method he experimented with consisted of his building a simple bridge with three wooden blocks while a deaf-mute child watched, and then dismantling it. The child would then try it, and usually, after one or two mistakes, would catch on and successfully build a number of bridges of different shapes and sizes. The child’s thinking, it appeared to Wertheimer, was based not on the number and size of the items used in the demonstration but on the perception of a stable configuration—a Gestalt—in which both uprights are of the same length and are positioned toward the ends of the horizontal piece.7
Wertheimer also read anthropological reports of numerical thinking by primitive peoples and wrote a paper on it in 1912. Speakers of certain South Sea languages, he learned, have different ways of counting fruit, money, animals, and men; each way represented a Gestalt appropriate to the item. He also discovered that people who lack our