Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Preface; Introduction; Part I. The Social and Intellectual Settings: 1. The academic environment and the establishment of experimental psychology; 2. Carl Stumpf and the training of scientists in Berlin; 3. The philosophers' protest; 4. Making a science of mind: styles of reasoning in sensory physiology and experimental psychology; 5. Challenging positivism: revised philosophies of mind and science; 6. The Gestalt debate: from Goethe to Ehrenfels and beyond; Part II. The Emergence of Gestalt Theory, 1910–1920: 7. Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler; 8. Laying the conceptual and research foundations; 9. Reconstructing perception and behaviour; 10. Insights and confirmations in animals: Köhler on Tenerife; 11. The step to natural philosophy: Die Physischen Gestalten; 12. Wertheimer in times of war and revolution: science for the military and toward a new logic; Part III. The Berlin School in Weimar Germany: 13. Establishing the Berlin School; 14. Research styles and results; 15. Theory's growth and limits: development, open systems, self and society; 16. Variations in theory and practice: Kurt Lewin, Adhemar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein; 17. The encounter with Weimar culture; 18. The reception among German-speaking psychologists; Part IV. Under Nazism and After: Survival and Adaptation: 19. Persecution, emigration and Köhler's resistance in Berlin; 20. Two students adapt: Wolfgang Metzger and Kurt Gottschaldt; 21. Research, theory and system: continuity and change; 22. The post-war years; Appendices; List of unpublished sources; Notes; Index.

Promotional Information

A full-length historical study of Gestalt psychology in Germany, based on exhaustive research in primary sources.

Reviews

"Mitchell Ash has written a book...that exemplifies the best current work in the social history of ideas." Geoffrey Cocks, Central European History "Ash's book offers an ingenious web of various intertwined life histories...the book is a masterpiece...The book's expansiveness commands unadulterated admiration...His style undeniably displays an aesthetic view on research and writing...Ash writes in a clear, seeming effortless prose. His polished details include German words added between brackets. The well-chosen illustrations offer extra information and meticulously taken care of are the appendixes, notes and index." Trudy Dehue, Contemporary Psychology "...a book that not only is the most comprehensive and authoritative narrative history of Gestalt psychology we are apt to see, but also a study concerened with recentering a number of our assumptions about what this research effort was all about-an effect achieved by situating it systematically in its various shaping, facilitating and constraining contexts: philosophical/intellectual...The work is particularly impressive for the author's dedication to integrating attention to the actual stuff of Gestalt psychology itself-the studies, what they were asking, how they were carried out-into a theoretically-sensitive, thickening and evolving narrative over more than a half-century of disciplinary formation, elaboration, and finally partially disintegration." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Science