We become authentic by thinking about being, by facing anxiety and death head-on. Here, he says, lies joy.

This philosophy, as difficult as it is to express and live, proved to have a great impact on any number of thinkers in this century. Among them are philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Buber, Ortega у Gassett, Gabriel Marcel, Paul Tillich, Merleau-Ponty, psychologists such as Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, Rollo May, and Viktor Frankl, and even the post-modernist movement's Foucault and Derrida. Less directly, Heidegger has influenced American psychologists such as Carl Rogers. The influence continues to this day.

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Unit 6

History of Psychology: Gestalt and Humanistic Psychology

Gestalt Psychology, founded by Max Wertheimer, was to some extent a rebellion against the molecularism of Wundt's program for psychology, in sympathy with many others at the time, including William James. In fact, the word Gestalt means a unified or meaningful whole, which was to be the focus of psychological study instead.

It had its roots in a number of older philosophers and psychologists:

Ernst Mach (1838-1916) introduced the concepts of space forms and time forms. We see a square as a square, whether it is large or small, red or blue, in outline or technicolor... This is space form. Likewise, we hear a melody as recognizable, even if we alter the key in such a way that none of the notes are the same.

Christian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932), who studied with Brentano in Vienna, is the actual originator of the term Gestalt as the Gestalt psychologists were to use it. In 1890, in fact, he wrote a book called On Gestalt Qualities. One of his students was none other than Max Wertheimer.

Oswald Kiilpe (1862-1915) was a student of G. E. Miiller at Gottingen and received his doctorate at Leipzig. He studied as well with Wundt, and served as Wundt's assistant for many years. He did most of his work while at the University of Wurzburg, between 1894and 1909.

He is best known for the idea of imageless thoughts. Contrary to Wundtians, he showed that some mental activities, such as judgments and doubts, could occur without images. The «pieces* of the psyche that Wundt postulated — sensations, images, and feelings —were apparently not enough to explain all of what went on.

He oversaw the doctoral dissertation of one Max Wertheimer.

Max Wertheimer

So who was this Max Wertheimer? He was born in Prague on April 15,1880. His father was a teacher and the director at a commercial school. Max studied law for more than two years, but decided he preferred philosophy. He left to study in Berlin, where he took classes from Stumpf, then got his doctoral degree (summa cum laude) from Kiilpe and the University of Wurzburg in 1904.

In 1910, he went to the University of Frankfurt's Psychological Institute. While on vacation that same year, he became interested in the perceptions he experienced on a train. While stopped at the station, he bought a toy stroboscope — a spinning drum with slots to look through and pictures on the inside, sort of a primitive movie machine or sophisticated flip book.

At Frankfurt, his former teacher Friedrich Schumann, now there as well, gave him the use of a tachisto-scope to study the effect. His first subjects were two younger assistants, Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka. They would become his lifelong partners.

He published his seminal paper in 1912: «Experimental Studies of the Perception of Movement*. That year, he was offered a lectureship at the University of Frankf urt. In 1916, he moved to Berlin, and in 1922 was made an assistant professor there. In 1925, he came back to Frankfurt, this time as a professor.

In 1933, he moved to the United States to escape the troubles in Germany. The next year, he began teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York City. While there, he wrote his best known book, Productive Thinking, which was published by his son, Michael Wertheimer, a successful psychologist. He died October 12,1943 of a coronary embolism at his home in New York.

Wolfgang Kohler

Wolfgang Kohler was born January 21, 1887, in Reval, Estonia. He received his PhD in 1908 from the University of Berlin. He then became an assistant at the Psychological Institute in Frankfurt, where he met and worked with Max Wertheimer.

In 1913, he took advantage of an assignment to study at the Anthropoid Station at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and stayed there till 1920. In 1917, he wrote his most famous book, Mentality of Apes.

In 1922, he became the chair and director of the psychology lab at the University of Berlin, where he stayed until 1935. During that time, in 1929, he wrote Gestalt Psychology. In 1935, he moved to the U.S., where he taught at Swarthmore until he retired. He died June 11, 1967 in New Hampshire.

Kurt Koffka