Lewin, Kurt - Historical Context
Gestalt psychology
The most important intellectual influence on Kurt Lewin was Gestalt psychology, a German school of thought that developed in the late nineteenth century in opposition to associationist and behaviorist views. Psychologists in both these groups broke down psychological events into separate parts and then proceeded to analyze the parts without reference to the whole. The Gestaltists insisted that psychological events had to be interpreted as integral wholes. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is regarded as a forerunner of Gestalt psychology. Kant argued in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) that human perception by its nature organizes data received from the body's sense organs into unities or wholes that the person can understand. Although Max Wertheimer...
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