Contribution in gestalt psychology:

Max Wertheimer Biography (1880-1943)

Max Wertheimer was one of the founding figures of the school of thought known as Gestalt psychology.
The Gestalt approach focused on looking at things as a whole, suggesting that the whole was more than
simply the sum of its parts. This could be contrasted with the structuralist school of thought, which was
focused on breaking things down to their smallest possible elements.

Wertheimer's work and observations contributed to the Gestalt approach as well as to other areas such as
experimental psychology and the study of sensation and perception.

Best Known For

 Gestalt psychology
 Gestalt principles of perceptual organization
 The Phi Phenomenon

Birth and Death

 Max Wertheimer was born on April 15, 1880.

 He died on October 12, 1943.

Early Life

Max Wertheimer was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia during the late 1800s. His father was an educator
and served as the director of a local school in addition to teaching. While he had an early interest in
music, he also became fascinated with philosophy. Wertheimer originally studied law at university, but
soon switched to philosophy and psychology. In 1904, he graduated summa cum laude with a doctorate
degree from the University of Wurzburg.

Career
After observing how flashing lights at a train station created the illusion of movement, he became
increasingly interested in the study of perception. He called this illusion of movement the Phi
phenomenon, which is the same principle upon which motion pictures are based.
While at the University of Frankfurt's Psychological Institute, he began to work with two assistants
named Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Kaffka. The three men became lifelong colleagues and would go on to
form the school of thought known as Gestalt psychology.

After working as a professor at the University of Frankfurt for several years, he immigrated to the United
States in 1933. He then began teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York City and
continued to work there over the next decade.

Thanks to his work, the New School became one of the leading schools of psychology during the early
part of the twentieth century. On October 12, 1943, Wertheimer suffered a fatal coronary embolism at his
home in New York. Many people attended a memorial service held in his honor at the New School
several weeks after his death, including the famed scientist, Albert Einstein.

Wertheimer's son, Michael Wertheimer, is also a well-known psychologist and Professor Emeritus at the
University of Colorado-Boulder.

His Contributions to Psychology:

As one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology, Wertheimer had an enormous influence on the
development of psychology as well as on specific subfields including sensation and perception
and experimental psychology.
In 1946, psychologist 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."
Gestalt psychology formed partly as a reaction to the atomism of the structuralist school of thought.
Unlike structuralism, which focused on breaking down mental processes into their smallest possible parts,
Gestalt psychology took a holistic approach. According to the Gestalt thinkers, the whole is greater than
the sum of the parts.

From this school of thought emerged the Gestalt principles of perceptual organization. This set of
perceptual principles explains how smaller objects are grouped together to form larger ones.

Wolfgang Kohler:
Wolfgang Köhler, (conceived January 21 [January 9, Old Style], 1887, Revel, Estonia, Russian
Empire [now Tallinn, Estonia] — passed on June 11, 1967, Enfield, New Hampshire, U.S.),
German clinician and a vital figure in the advancement of Gestalt brain research, which looks to
grasp learning, insight, and different parts of mental life as organized wholes. Köhler's doctoral
postulation with Carl Stumpf at the University of Berlin (1909) was an examination of hearing. a
work that underlined knowledge and prompted an extreme update of learning hypothesis. . In
1921 Köhler became top of the mental foundation and teacher of reasoning at the University of
Berlin, coordinating a progression of examinations that investigated numerous parts of Gestalt
hypothesis and distributing Gestalt Psychology (1929). Straightforward in his analysis of Adolf
Hitler's administration, Köhler went to the United States in 1935 and was teacher of brain
research at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania until 1955.

Wolfgang Kohler Contributions to Psychology:

Gestalt brain research, school of brain research established in the twentieth century that gave the
establishment to the cutting-edge investigation of insight. Gestalt hypothesis underlines that the
entire of anything is more prominent than its parts. That is, the qualities of the entire are not
deducible from examination of the parts in disengagement. The word Gestalt is utilized in
present day German to mean the manner in which a thing has been "put," or "set up." There is no
definite identical in English. "Structure" and "shape" are the typical interpretations; in brain
science the word is frequently deciphered as "example" or "design."

Gestalt hypothesis started in Austria and Germany as a response against the associations and
underlying schools' atomistic direction (a methodology which divided insight into unmistakable
and inconsequential components). Gestalt concentrates on made use rather than phenomenology.
This technique, with a practice returning to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, includes just the
portrayal of direct mental experience, without any limitations on what is reasonable in the
depiction. Gestalt brain research was to some degree an endeavor to add a humanistic aspect to
what was viewed as a sterile way to deal with the logical investigation of mental life. Gestalt
brain research additionally looked to envelop the characteristics of structure, importance, and
worth that overall clinicians had either overlooked or attempted to fall beyond science.
Together, these three shaped the center of the Gestalt school for the following couple of many
years. (By the mid-1930s all had become teachers in the United States.) The earliest Gestalt work
concerned discernment, with specific accentuation on visual perceptual association has made
sense of by the peculiarity of deception. In 1912 Wertheimer found the phi peculiarity, an optical
deception in which fixed objects displayed in fast progression, rising above the edge at which
they can be seen independently, seem to move. The clarification of this peculiarity — otherwise
called determination of vision and experienced while survey films — offered solid help for
Gestalt standards.

Kurt Lewin:

Kurt Lewin, (conceived September 9, 1890, Miglino, Germany [now in Poland] — kicked the bucket
February 12, 1947, Newtonville, Massachusetts, U.S.), German-conceived American social analyst
known for his field hypothesis of conduct, which holds that human way of behaving is a component of a
person's mental climate.

Lewin concentrated on in Germany at Freiburg, Munich, and Berlin, accepting his doctorate from the
University of Berlin in 1914. In the wake of serving in the German armed force during World War I, he
joined the workforce of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1933 he moved to the United States and
started work at the State University of Iowa's Child Welfare Research Station (1935-45). In 1945 he
established and became head of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Cambridge. He held that situation until his passing.

Contributions to Psychology:

Kurt Lewin added to Gestalt brain research by developing gestalt hypotheses and applying them to human
way of behaving. He was additionally quite possibly the earliest analyst to efficiently test human way of
behaving, affecting exploratory brain research, social brain research, and character brain research. He was
a productive essayist, distributing in excess of 80 articles and eight books on different brain science
themes. Large numbers of his incomplete papers were distributed by his associates after his abrupt demise
at age 56.
Lewin is known as the dad of current social brain science in light of his spearheading work that used
logical techniques and trial and error to check social way of behaving out. Lewin was an original scholar
whose persevering through influence on brain research makes him one of the superior analysts of the
twentieth 100 years.