Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [198]
Decades later this central tenet of Gestalt psychology would be strikingly confirmed by several forms of research. Studies of language acquisition, for instance, showed that children sense the grammatical structure of sentences and begin speaking in grammatical sentences long before they are taught anything about grammar. Even more remarkably, a study of deaf children who had not been taught any sign language found that when they were three or four years of age, they communicated by making up strings of gestures—quasi-sentences—that distinguished between agent, action, and object, just as verbal language does.44
The antipathy of behaviorists toward Gestalt psychology was reciprocated: Koffka, Köhler, and Wertheimer all were dismissive of behaviorism (and other psychologies) and presented their own approach as the only valid one, thereby offending many American psychologists. Reviewing the reception of Gestalt psychology in America, the psychologist Michael Sokal writes:
American psychologists were especially bothered by the attitude of the Gestaltists… Recently the term “Mandarin” has been used to characterize the attitudes and behavior of many of the German university professors of the period. In some ways the entire Gestalt movement represented a revolt against traditional German university culture, but in other, deeper ways the Gestaltists shared many traits typical of the faculties of German universities.45
The result was that by the early 1930s, Gestalt psychology, though it had become a definite part of the American psychological scene, remained a subordinate part; like the structuralists, functionalists, Freudians, and others, Gestaltists were a minority in a behaviorist-dominated establishment.46 Nevertheless, they had an influence on the development of psychology out of all proportion to their numbers and position.
Wertheimer, a warm and impassioned teacher, had a loyal but small following at the New School for Social Research, but no physical research facilities to speak of. Yet according to his distinguished student Abraham S. Luchins, during Wertheimer’s decade in America (he died in 1943) he was a “conspicuous and disquieting figure” in the behaviorist milieu.47
Koffka, though dry and overly theoretical as a teacher, was adored by the girls he taught at Smith. However, because the college’s emphasis was on undergraduate education, he supervised only one Ph.D. in his years there. But he did have an extensive effect on the psychological community through his writings, particularly the encyclopedic Principles of Gestalt Psychology, and he would undoubtedly have produced other influential works had his life not been cut short in 1941, at the age of fifty-five, by heart disease.
Köhler, despite his Germanic stiffness, was best able of the three to fit into the traditional academic framework. He created a center of psychological research and scholarship at Swarthmore that attracted a number of top-notch doctoral candidates, among them David Krech, Richard Crutchfield, Jacob Nachmias, and Ulric Neisser. Köhler retired in 1958 but remained active in research until his death at eighty, nine years later. After his retirement, he received the highest accolade of American psychology, election to the presidency of the American Psychological Association, an acknowledgment both of his personal achievements and of the contributions of the Gestalt movement to psychology.
For paradoxically, even though by midcentury the movement had lost its identity and was fading from view, its most important ideas had become part of the mainstream of psychology. Indeed, they remain a significant part of it today, although