Wolfgang Köhler

Wolfgang Köhler (January 21, 1887 – June 11, 1967) was a German psychologist who, with Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, founded Gestalt theory.

Early life

Köhler was born in the port city of Reval (now Tallinn), the capital of and largest city in Estonia, which was at the time a German province. His family was of German origin, and shortly after his birth, they moved back to that country. There, raised in a setting of teachers, nurses and other scholars, he developed lifelong interests in the sciences as well as the arts, and especially in music.

Education

In the course of his university education, Köhler studied at the University of Tübingen (1905-06), the University of Bonn (1906-07) and the University of Berlin (1907-09). While a student at the latter, he focused on the link between physics and psychology, in the course of which he studied with two leading scholars in those fields, Max Planck and Carl Stumpf, respectively. In completing his Ph.D., for which his dissertation addressed certain aspects of psycho-acoustics, Stumpf was his major professor.

Gestalt Psychology

In 1910-13, he was an assistant at the Psychological Institute in Frankfurt where he worked with fellow psychologists Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka. He and Koffka functioned as subjects for Wertheimer’s now-famous studies of apparent movement (or the phi phenomenon), which led them in turn to conclusions about the inherent nature of vision. They collaborated on the founding of a new holistic attitude toward psychology called Gestalt theory (from the German word for “form” or “configuration”), aspects of which are indebted to the earlier work of Stumpf (Köhler’s teacher) and Christian von Ehrenfels (whose lectures at the University of Prague Wertheimer had attended).

Problem solving

In 1913, Köhler left Frankfurt for the island of Teneriffe in the Canary Islands, where he had been named the director of the Prussian Academy of Sciences anthropoid research station. He remained there for six years, during which he wrote a book on problem solving titled "The Mentality of Apes" (1917). In this research, Köhler observed the manner in which chimpanzees solve problems, such as that of retrieving bananas when positioned out of reach. He found that they stacked wooden crates to use as makeshift ladders, in order to retrieve the food. If the bananas were placed on the ground outside of the cage, they used sticks to lengthen the reach of their arms. Köhler concluded that the chimps had not arrived at these methods through trial-and-error (which American psychologist Edward Thorndike had claimed to be the basis of all animal learning, through his law of effect), but rather that they had experienced an insight (also sometimes known as an “aha experience”), in which, having realized the answer, they then proceeded to carry it out in a way that was, in Köhler’s words, “unwaveringly purposeful.”

Berlin Psychological Institute

Köhler returned to Germany in 1920, and soon after was appointed the acting director, and then (as Carl Stumpf’s successor) professor and director of the Psychological Institute at the University of Berlin, where he remained until 1935. In those fifteen years, his accomplishments were considerable, including, for example, the directorship of the school’s prestigious graduate program in psychology; the co-founding of an influential journal about perceptual psychology, titled "Psychologische Forschung" (Psychological Research: Journal of Psychology and its Neighboring Fields); and the authorship of an early book titled "Gestalt Psychology" (1929), written especially for an American audience.

Later life

Having fallen out of favor with the Nazis (for having opposed the dismissal of his Jewish colleagues), Köhler emigrated to the U.S. in 1935. He was offered a professorship at Swarthmore College, where he remained on the faculty for twenty years. In 1956, he became a research professor at Dartmouth College, and soon after also served as the president of the American Psychological Association. He died in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1967.

Books

* "The Mentality of Apes"
* "Gestalt Psychology"
* "The Place of Value in a World of Facts"
* "Dynamics in Psychology"
* "Gestalt Psychology Today"
* "The Task of Gestalt Psychology"

External links

* [http://www.gestalttheory.net/ Comprehensive Gestalt psychology website of the international Society for Gestalt Theory and its Applications - GTA]
* [http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/gestalt.html Short biography on Köhler, et al.]
* [http://www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/dec02/em_kohler.html Köhler Biography at Swarthmore]
* [http://wkprc.eva.mpg.de/english/files/wolfgang_koehler.htm Memoir Wolfgang Köhler - Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center, Leipzig]
* [http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/people/data?id=per312 Biography and bibliography] in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

ee also

* Gestalt Psychology
* Max Wertheimer
* Kurt Koffka
* Kurt Lewin
* Rudolf Arnheim

References