Max Wertheimer - one of the founders of Gest alt psychology: biography, books, contributions to psychology

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

The article will introduce you to the outstanding German psychologist, one of the founders of Gest alt psychology, Max Wertheimer. In his writings, special attention is paid to the problems of human dignity, personality psychology, the theory of ethics, which he was engaged in throughout his life.

Biography

Max Wertheimer (1880-1943), creator of Gest alt psychology, was born in Prague. He was the second of two sons of Wilhelm and Rosa Zwicker Wertheimer. His father was the founder of a very successful and innovative business school called Handelsschule Wertheimer, and his mother was a professional pianist well educated in culture, literature and the arts. From an early age, his mother taught him to play the piano, and as he got older, Max received violin lessons. As a teenager, he composed chamber music and even wrote symphonies. It seemed to his parents that he would connect his life with music, become a professional musician.

Thanks to art, Max Wertheimer established social relationships, toTake Albert Einstein, for example. They quite often played chamber music and discussed philosophical and scientific problems. Max's friends and students recalled how he liked to improvise on the piano, and then asked him to guess what he was describing with this musical composition - a person or an event. He also liked to use examples from various composers in his lectures and works to demonstrate the concept of structure.

Introduction to Spinoza

Wertheimer became acquainted with the social and philosophical thought of his maternal grandfather Jakob Zwicker, who was so pleased with his grandson's maturity that on his tenth birthday he gave him some of Spinoza's works. Max Wertheimer's complete absorption in a book given to him by his grandfather led his parents to restrict reading. This did not stop him from reading Spinoza secretly, taking advantage of the kindness of the maid, who hid the book from her parents in her chest. Spinoza was not something that came, he had a lifelong influence on Wertheimer.

Max Universities

Wertheimer, after graduating from high school (at the age of 18), could not decide which specialization to choose. However, he chose the Faculty of Law of the University of Prague. He studied law and law. By the time he graduated from university, he was more interested in the philosophy of law than in practice. He did not like that the ongoing trials were not looking for the truth, but were more interested in defense and prosecution. He was also interested in ways to achieve truth, and thismade him work in the psychology of testimony.

In 1901, Max continued his studies at the University of Berlin, where he studied psychology and did research with Karl Stumpf and Friedrich Schumann. But the range of his interests was wider than the main subject of study, so he also includes history, music, art and physiology in the course of study. In 1903, he studied at the University of Würzburg, under Oswald Külpe, and received a Ph. D. The dissertation was devoted to detecting the guilt of a criminal during the investigation using the method of associative linking of words.

Doctoral Research

His doctoral research included the invention of lie detectors, which he used as an objective way of examining evidence. Another aspect of his work was the collocation method, which he created before C. J. Jung developed it as a diagnostic method.

Because Max Wertheimer was financially independent, he did not need to hold any academic position and could devote himself to independent research in Prague, Berlin and Vienna. He continued to work on the credibility of testimonies, and at the Neuropsychiatric Clinic of the University of Vienna, he worked with the anamnesis of patients with speech disorders and those who had impaired reading, with damage to various parts of the cortex of the left hemisphere. He developed new diagnostic methods that showed that speech impairment is associated with a loss of the ability to perceive ambiguous and complex visual structures. This workis the link between Gest alt psychology and the theory of neurologists Ademar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein.

Early Gest alt theories

Working in Vienna, Wertheimer formulates ideas that have become important components of Gest alt psychology. What is Gest alt psychology? This is a branch of psychology that focuses on questions of explaining the perception and thinking of the individual, while the key is how the individual perceives information.

To Max Wertheimer it seemed that psychology had become detached from the concrete realities of everyday life: the problems at the center of academic psychology bore little resemblance to real human behavior. According to Wertheimer, it was necessary to develop methods that would meet strict scientific standards.

Methods of dealing with witnesses

Through his research, Max Wertheimer has elaborated methods for determining the authenticity of testimonies:

• The method of associations is the reaction of the subject to the proposed words. He must answer with the word that comes to his mind, as an association to the proposed one.
• The reproduction method is to use a memorization text that contains information similar to hidden facts, similar to hidden facts and has nothing to do with hidden facts. After a while, the subject will make mistakes when reproducing the text.
• Method of associative questions. The study is based on a special list of leading questions. In the process of finding answers tothere will be those that will lead to a solution to the problem.
• Method of perception. It is based on the recognition of the type of person depending on his representational systems: visual, auditory, kinesthetic and digital. Further work with a person in the key of his representative system.
• The distraction method includes many variations, including deceit, shock, excessive flow of distracting information.

Experiments and interpretations

Wertheimer in his research was constantly looking for examples from the field of perception. So, watching the flashing lights at the train station create the illusion of movement, or the Christmas garlands of lights that seem to "run" around the trees, he thought of an optical phenomenon that turned out to be suitable for his work. To do this, he bought a toy strobe light, a rotating drum with viewing slots and pictures inside, and experimented with replacing strips of paper on which he drew a series of lines for the pictures in the toy.

The results were as expected: by changing the time interval between the exposure of the lines, he found that he could see one line after another, two lines next to each other, or a line moving from one position to another. This "movement" became known as the phenomenon of phi and was the basis of Gest alt psychology. This phenomenon - the phi phenomenon, is used in cinematography when creating movies. On the screen, the viewer sees something that is not actually what he sees. You can call it an illusion. Wertheimer explained thatthe viewer sees the effect of the "whole event" but not the sum of its parts. Similarly, with a running garland of lights. The observer sees movement, even though only one bulb is lit in a row of similar bulbs.

The work of three psychologists

Max Wertheimer and his two assistants, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, used their work and research to form a new Gest alt school, convinced that the segmented approach of most psychologists to the study of human behavior was insufficient. As a result of experimental research, Wertheimer's article "Experimental Research in Motion Perception" is published.

The First World War interrupted the joint work of Gest alt psychologists. Only after its completion did they continue their further research. Koffka returned to Frankfurt, and Köhler became director of the Psychological Institute at the University of Berlin, where Wertheimer was already working. Using the abandoned rooms of the Imperial Palace, they founded the now famous graduate school, in tandem with a journal called Psychological Research.

Productive thinking

Before World War II, Wertheimer and his family leave for the States. There he continues to conduct research on problem solving or, as he preferred to call it, "productive thinking". Max Wertheimer was in contact with Koffka and Köhler, whose earlier work with chimpanzees on insight was similar. He continued research in the field of human thinking. A typical exampleThis productive thinking is a child trying to solve a problem with a geometric figure - the creation of a parallelogram area. Suddenly, the child takes the scissors and cuts the triangle along the line of height from the top of the triangle, turns it and attaches it to the other side, forming a parallelogram. Or, working with puzzles, puts them in the right places.

Wertheimer called this kind of learning "productive" to distinguish it from "reproductive" thinking, simple associative or trial and error learning that lacked understanding. He considered true human understanding as a transition from a situation that is meaningless or incomprehensible to one in which the meaning is clear. Such a transition is more than just creating new connections, it involves structuring information in a new way, forming a new gest alt.

Productive Thinking by Max Wertheimer, which discussed many of his ideas, was published posthumously in 1945.

Legacy

Max Wertheimer's Gest alt psychology was radically different from that of Wilhelm Wundt, who sought to understand the human mind by identifying the constituent parts of human consciousness in the same way as the chemical composition that can be decomposed into elements. To Sigmund Freud's complex approach to psychopathology, an alternative method has been proposed, outlined by Max Wertheimer. The contribution to the psychology of Wetrheimer and his colleagues is confirmed by the acquaintance with the names of their students in the literature of psychology, among them Kurt Lewin, RudolfArnheim, Wolfgang Metzger, Bluma Zeigarnik, Karl Dunker, Herta Kopfermann and Kurt Gottschaldt.

Books by Max Wertheimer are currently used by students, doctors, psychologists. These include:

• "Experimental studies of motion perception".
• "The laws of organization in perceptual forms".
• "Gest alt Theory".
• "Productive thinking".

"The incredible complexities of human thought are connected with something greater than the sum of its parts, that something in which the parts and the whole are connected to each other," said Max Wertheimer.