Max Wertheimer Biography (1880-1943)

Max Wertheimer was a founding figures of the Gestalt psychology school of thought. 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 in psychology 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

Early Life

Max Wertheimer was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia during the late 1800s. His father was an educator, and serving as a teacher and the director of a local school. Wertheimer had an early interest in music, but he also became fascinated with philosophy. He 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, Wertheimer became increasingly interested in the study of perception. He called this illusion of movement the Phi phenomenon, which is the principle motion pictures are based on.

At the University of Frankfurt's Psychological Institute, Wertheimer began to work with two assistants named Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka. 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, Wertheimer 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 Wertheimer's contributions to the psychology departments, the New School became one of the leading schools for 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, 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."

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.

Summary

Max Wertheimer had an important role in the early development of psychology. In addition to founding a new school of thought in psychology that contributed to our understanding of how the mind works, Wertheimer also influenced countless other thinkers who also went on to make essential contributions to the field of psychology.