Gestalt & Field

Against the dissectors, around 1912, a Berlin school took the field whose watchword fits in one sentence: the whole is other than the sum of its parts. Wertheimer showed with two blinking lines that one can see motion where nothing moves; Köhler watched chimpanzees on Tenerife solve problems by insight rather than trial and error; Lewin transplanted the Gestalt idea from seeing to acting and made of person and environment a field of forces.

The school was blown apart in 1933 and emigrated to America almost as one — to the place where behaviourism ruled and had little use for wholes. Its concepts outlived the school: the Gestalt laws stand in every perception chapter, insight in every chapter on thinking, and Lewin’s field theory became the founding charter of modern social and organisational psychology.

For the archive this folder is the case of a double emigration: first across the Atlantic, then out of the school into the field’s toolbox.