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Introduction

1880–1943

GERMAN-AMERICAN PROFESSOR, LECTURER UNIVERSITY OF PRAGUE, PHILOSOPHY, 1902; UNIVERSITY OF WÜRZBURG, PhD IN PHILOSOPHY, 1904

Science is rooted in the will to truth. With the will to truth it stands or falls. Lower the standard even slightly and science becomes diseased to the core. Not only science, but also man. The will to truth, pure and unadulterated, is among the essential conditions of his existence; if the standard is compromised, he easily becomes a tragic caricature of himself.

—Max Wertheimer, "On Truth," published in Social Research in 1934.

For Max Wertheimer and the Gestalt therapy for which he became best known, truth began with a train trip and a simple child's toy. When 30-year-old Wertheimer left Vienna, Austria for a vacation in Germany's Rhineland in 1910, he had no idea that his holiday would never come to be. Equally he had no idea that his idle thoughts on that train trip would lead to a discovery that would irrevocably alter not only his own life, but produce profound changes in psychology-related disciplines all over the world. Gestalt, the notion that the whole is not only greater than its components, but also different from those components; was little more than a lone, obscure, and struggling concept that summer day in 1910 as Wertheimer rode the train.

On that day, psychology was little more than a fledgling discipline, still widely considered a sideline for philosophers. "Gestalt" was the name Christian von Ehrenfels, one of Max Wertheimer's teachers, had coined to describe the philosophical concept nearly

25 years earlier. Yet so impressive was Wertheimer's work on the subject that he would become to be known as the father of the movement. Much of Wertheimer's research and unique experiments were merely the initial battles in a rebellion against a notion prevailing in European psychology at the time: the "Elementalism or Structuralism" of famed German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. But Max Wertheimer's version of Gestalt psychology would do far more than negate previous psychological assumptions. It would profoundly change the way educators, psychiatrists, psychologists, rehabilitation specialists—anyone involved in the helping professions—look at their clients and their work.

Wertheimer's train trip exposed him to a phenomenon that would ignite his imagination. As he rode from Vienna to Frankfurt, he became aware of two separate and alternating light patterns from the train's window. As he watched, Wertheimer discovered that if the spacing, on-time, and off-time were just right for these lights, his mind would perceive the dual lights as one single flashing light moving back and forth. Reaching Frankfurt, Wertheimer disembarked from the train and put an end to his vacation plans. He proceeded to a store and bought a toy stroboscope, then a popular child's toy, and checked himself into a hotel room.

There he repeated his visual perception experiment over and over to test the validity of what he had seen on the train. Stroboscopes, the precursors of motion pictures, were a revolving disk that can be synchronized with movement to make an object appear either to be standing still or moving slowly forward or backward. This simple experiment, not even terribly original in its nature, would lead Wertheimer to an original name for what he had just observed—the phi phenomenon. His observations, though, would go far beyond what researchers and thinkers before him had seen or realized. From the phi phenomenon Wertheimer would go on to rethink and revolutionize psychology's notions about how human beings see and experience things. It would also make him one of the many people responsible for the creation of early cartoons and motion pictures.

It was in those early years in Frankfurt that Wertheimer also found two soul mates. His two research partners at the University of Frankfurt, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, would become his lifelong colleagues in both their testing and formation of the Gestalt theories. They would revolutionize the psychological world with their new way of looking at things. Though Wertheimer believed in Gestalt psychology as avidly as any of his disciples, he appears to have acted more in the role of a facilitator than preacher. He never published a definitive summation of the Gestalt psychology he made famous. Though he was a man given to passionate beliefs, neither did he engage in the tiresome dialogues about the efficacy of his hypotheses that seemed to have plagued so many of his contemporaries. He wrote far less prolifically and therefore was far less known than many other mental health figures of his time, notably Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, or Carl Rogers. Yet his impact upon psychology is undeniable.

Wertheimer was rather like a shooting star that streaked across the study of the mind, shooting off sparks of brilliant insights and then moving on, leaving others to fill in the more mundane facts and procedures deduced from his insights. As his friend Edwin B. Newman noted in his 1944 American Journal of Psychology article, "Max Wertheimer: 1880–1943," "He tended to be impatient with experimental plans that called for meticulous care in their details. The neatest of plans was invariably upset and rearranged after he had finished with them. It was not easy to work under Wertheimer just because of this restlessness."

In addition, the early papers that he did manage to publish, many written during the years that Germany was a combatant nation in World War I, did not receive worldwide recognition until well after the war, in the early 1920s. Yet quietly and with humility, Max Wertheimer influenced his colleagues and countless students. It would be those students who would carry on the research and develop the principles that would become an accepted worldwide school of psychological thought. But both Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, who provided so much of the structure for Gestalt psychology, would always acknowledge that it was Wertheimer who originally saw the flaws in the then-current psychological ideas and recognized the significance of what he had observed for a brief time on a train. Koffka referred to Wertheimer as "the first founder" (of Gestalt theory).

As had happened to so many other German Jewish intellectuals, Hitler and the Nazis would force Wertheimer out of Germany and across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. Initially the language and cultural barriers he experienced would mask a brilliant mind. But like many of the other intelligentsia, Wertheimer would find a second home in the New School of Social Research initiated in New York City in the 1930s. A well-rounded individual who deeply cared about the social issues of his time, Wertheimer became an intellectual giant operating at the new school.

He would go on to write and lecture on an eclectic array of psychological and philosophical subjects ranging from ethics and morality to the meaning of freedom. In all of his philosophical discourses, he would demonstrate how Gestalt principles applied to even these ethereal philosophical concepts. Many observers have described Wertheimer's Gestalt psychology as applicable only to how we perceive things. For Wertheimer, howver, perception was only one side of the equation. Thinking and problem-solving were the other aspects of that equation, something Wertheimer would demonstrate again and again. He would show it in his much-publicized conversations with Albert Einstein on the development of the theory of relativity, which became part of his last work, published posthumously as Productive Thinking.