KöHLER, WOLFGANG

(b. Reval [now Tallinn], Estonia, 21 January 1887; d. Enfield, New Hampshire, 11 June 1967). Gestalt psychology, animal behavior.

KRöhler was the son of Franz Eduard KRöhler director of the German-language gymnasium in Reval, and of Wilhelmine (Minni) Girgensohn KRöhler, both of whom were offspring of ministers. The family moved to Wolfenbüttel, Germany, when Wolfgang was six years old. He attended the gymnasium there and then went on to the universities of Tübingen, Bonn, and Berlin. he received his Ph.D. from Berlin in 1909 after studying philosophy and psychology under Carl Stumpf, and physical chemistry and physics under Walther Nernst and Max Planck.

KRöhler was appointed assistant at the Psychological Institute of Frankfurt am Main in 1909 and Privatdozent in 1911. In 1913 he was named director of the anthropoid research station established by the Prussian Academy of Sciences on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Isolated on Tenerife by World War I, he did not return to Germany until May 1920. He became acting director of the Psychological Institute at the University of Berlin in August 1920. In 1921 he was named professor at GRöttingen. He held this position for only one semester; in 1922 he was appointed professor of philosophy and director of the Psychological Institute at Berlin, the positions previously occupied by Stumpf.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, KRöhler was outspoken in his criticism of the new regime. In 1935 he resigned his positions in Berlin and emigrated to the United States, where he became professor of psychology (1935–1946) and then research professor of philosophy and psychology (1946–1958) at Swarthmore College. Earlier he had been a visiting Professor at Clark University (1925–1926) and Chicago (1935), and William James lecturer at Harvard (1934–1935). Upon retiring from Swarthmore he settled in New Hampshire and held the title of research professor at Dartmouth. He became a U. S. citizen in 1946.

KRöhler was married twice; in 1912 to The kla Gelb, with whom he had two sons and two daughters; and in 1927 to Lili Harleman, with whom he had one daughter. Among his many honors were Ehrenbuürger of the Free University of Berlin, honorary degrees from eight colleges and universities in the United States and Europe, presidency of the American Psychological Association (1959), and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Köhlerös doctoral dissertation under Stumpf at Berlin and his Habilitatkionsschrift at Frankfurt were studies of acoustic perception. his identification of vowel character as an attribute of tone, with the principal vowels separated by octaves, stimulated research among experimental psychologists. In addition, his experimental results concerning the physical and psychological dimensions of the perception of tones led him to challenge the common assumption that perception was a straightforward function of peripheral stimulation. At Frankfurt from 1910 to 1913 KRöhler was closely associated with Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka. With Wertheirmer providing the initial lead, the three men proceeded to lay down the foundations of Gestalt psychology.

In 1913, in his first major theoretical contribution to gestalt theory, KRöhler attacked what he called the “constancy hypothesis,” the idea of a one-to-one relation between peripheral stimulation and perceptual sensation. He maintained that modern investigators would have to give up the traditional distinction between (1) peripheral, physiologically produced sensations and (2) central, psychological operations upon these sensations, because organization was a basic, underived feature of perception.

The work that first brought KRöhler international fame was that on chimpanzees on Tenerife (1913– 1917). In experiments now regarded as classics, he showed that instead of learning simply by “trial and error,” which was the most that E. L. Thorndike would attribute to infrahuman animals, chimpanzees were able to solve problems by grasping the relations between means and ends. They displayed what Köhler called “insight” — “the appearance of a complete solution with reference to the whole layout of the field” (The Mentality of Apes [1925], 198). Köhler also investigated what kinds of problems chimpanzees were unable to solve. His challenge to associationist psychology, his observation of primate social behavior, his attention to individual differences, and his use of films were all major contributions to the study of animal behavior in this period.

On Tenerife, Köhler also did important experiments demonstrating relational learning in chimps and chickens, and he composed his most fundamental philosophical work; Die physischen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationaren Zustand (1920). In this book he sought to model psychological theory on the field theory of Faraday and Maxwell. Using examples from electrostatics, he argued that in the physical world there were Gestalt phenomena, the qualities of which could not be described as merely sums of parts. He then maintained that the same characteristics could be found in brain processes, and that the whole “somatic field” of the brain could be treated as a single physical system.

In the 1920’s Gestalt theory became one of the leading schools of German academic psychology, with Köhler as one of its leading spokesmen, He helped found and was coeditor of Psychologische Forschung (1921—s1938), he debated such prominent critics of Gestalt theory as Georg Elias Müller and Eugenio Rignano, and he wrote Gestalt Psychology (1929), a book designed to introduce Gestalt ideas to American psychologists, whose views were dominated by behaviorism, an approach Köhler found philosophically native in its attempt to remove consciousness from science and atomistic in its reduction of behavior to reflexes. At the same time he sought to extend the principles derived from studying perception to other areas of psychology. He developed gestalt explanations of association, memory, and the perception of other people. Köhler also pursued the problem of the relation between psychology and neurophysiology and laid the basis for a theory of organisms as “open systems.” His work in the United States on figural aftereffects and cortical currents in the brain grew out of his belief in an isomorphism between brain processes and perceptual structures. His theoretical conclusions from research on cortical currents, though challenged by Karl Lashley and other, remain open to investigation.

Köhler, like his co-workers, did not see Gestalt psychology as simply a response to technical questions in the psychology of perception. They felt that in demonstrating the structured nature of experience they were providing an alternative to the “atomistic” and “mechanistic” world view that dominated philosophic accounts of psychological reality and that was, in their view, threatening modern culture. Köhler, who throughout his career was interested in relating psychological experience both to philosophy and to physics and physiology, was especially keen to urge that one could reject atomism and mechanism without sacrificing one’s allegiance to natural science. His philosophical position, presented in the books of 1920 and 1929, was developed further in The Place of Value in a World of Facts (1938). He again promoted his field theory of perception in Dynamics in Psychology (1940). The posthumously published The Task of Gestalt Psychology (1969) reviewed the achievement of Gestalt psychology and identified problems for the future.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I.Original Works. The main collection of Köhlerös personal papers and manuscript correspondence is in the American Philosophical Society Archives, Philadelphia. A complete listing of Köhlerös published scientific writings and reviews, compiled by Edwin B. Newman, is in Mary Henle, ed., The Selected Papers of Wolfgang Köhler (New York, 1971), 437—s449. Henleös volume provides an excellent selection of Köhler’s papers.

II. Secondary Literature, Köhler’s work and its historical context through 1920 are analyzed in Mitchell G.Ash, “The Emergence of Gestalt Theory; Experimental Psychology in Germany, 1890—s1920” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1982). Ash has also treated aspects of Köhler’s work after 1920 in’ Gestalt Psychology; Origins in Germany and Reception in the United States,” in Claude E. Buxton, ed., Points of View in the Modern History of Psychology (Orlando, Fla., 1985). 295–344. On Köhler’s behavior toward the Nazis see Ash, ’ Ein Institut and eine Zeitschrift. Zur Geschichte des Berliner Psychologischen Instituts und der Zeitschrift’ Psychologische Forschung’ vor und nach 1933, ’ in Carl Friedrich Graumann, ed., Psychologie im Nationalsozializmus (Berlin, 1985). 113—s137; and Mary Henle, “One Man Against the Nazis—Wolfgang Köhler,” in American Psychologist, 33 (1978), 939—944. Other valuable treatments of Köhler’s work and / or career include Solomon E. Asch, “Wolfgang Köhler, 1887—s1967,” in American Journal of Psychology, 81 (1968), 110—s119; Rudolf Bergius, “Wolfgang Köhler Zum Gedenken,” in Psychologische Forschung, 31 (1967), i—sv; Mary Henle, “Wolfgang Köhler (1887—s 1967), 139—145—also, with minor changes, in Mary Henle, ed., The Selected Papers of Wolfgang Köhler (New York, 1971), 3—s10; W.C.H. Prentiss,” The Systematic Psychology of Wolfgang Köhler, “in Sigmund Koch, ed., Psychology: A study of a Science. 1 (New York, 1959) 427–455; Hans Lukas Teuber, “Wolfgang Köhler zum Gedenken,” in Psychologische Forschung, 31 (1967), vi xiv; and Carl B, Zuckerman and Hans Wallach, “Köhler, Wolfgang,” in David sills, ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social Science.VIII(NEW YORK, 1968), 438–442.

Richard W. Burkhardt, JR.