Wolfgang Kоhler psychologist

Wolfgang Kоhler (22 January 1887 – 11 June 1967) was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer, and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology.

During the Nazi regime in Germany, he protested against the dismissal of Jewish professors from universities, as well as the requirement that professors give a Nazi salute at the beginning of their classes. In 1935 he left the country for the United States, where Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania offered him a professorship. He taught with its faculty for 20 years, and did continuing research.

 

Early life

Kоhler was born in the port city of Reval (now Tallinn), Governorate of Estonia, Russian Empire. His family was ethnic German, and shortly after his birth, they moved to Germany. Raised in a family including 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, Kоhler studied at the University of Tbingen (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.

Later life

Having fallen out of favor with the Nazis (for having opposed the dismissal of his Jewish colleagues), Kоhler emigrated to the U.S. in 1935. He was offered a professorship at Swarthmore College, where he served on the faculty for twenty years.

In 1956, he became a research professor at Dartmouth College. Soon after, he also served as the president of the American Psychological Association. He lectured freely in the United States and made yearly visits to the Free University of Berlin. Here, he acted as an adviser for the faculty. He kept the psychologists in touch with American psychology by collaborating with them in research and enthusiastically engaging in discussions with them. He died in 1967 in Enfield, New Hampshire.^[1]

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 the authorship of an early book titled Gestalt Psychology (1929), written especially for an American audience. During the 1920s and early 1930s psychology reached a high point at the institute. Aside from Kohler, many other influential minds were at work. Max Wertheimer was part of the institute from 1916 to 1929, until he left to take a position in Frankfurt.