7 - The University of Berlin

Summary

Configurational psychology, Gestaltpsychologie, at the University of Berlin, was familiar to me, because it had been debated at a seminar in Cluj. I thus went to the Institute of Psychology in Berlin to present the first paper on the school promoted by its members. Three decades later, similar papers appeared in German, French, and English. The chair at Cluj had the priority of initiative, which delighted not only Köhler, the head of the department and director of the institute, but also his colleagues, Wertheimer and Lewin. Metzger, Köhler's assistant, who went on to become professor at Münster University and chairman of the German Psychology Society, was tasked with sending all the papers published by the members of the institute to Cluj.

The discovery of the configurational properties of perception was made by Wertheimer, assistant to Professor Stumpf of the University of Frankfurt. Köhler and Koffk a were his research subjects. Shortly after, Stumpf was called to Berlin, where he brought Wertheimer and Köhler, who in the meantime had gotten their degrees in psychology and physics. In Berlin, in fact, Köhler continued studying physics with Planck and Einstein, writing a groundbreaking paper, “Physical configurations.” He had long conversations with Einstein at the imposing mansion of Wertheimer's father-in-law Eppinger, a gynecology professor from the same university who had a very rich clientele. With a subsidy from Eppinger, Köhler went to Tenerife to study the intelligence of monkeys. World War I caught him on that island, which, to his great fortune, he could not leave until the war was over, and he continued his research, deepening and defining his ideas so that when he published them he not only got a PhD but also the chair that Stumpf had left two years previously, on the condition he be succeeded by his most gifted student, as he considered Köhler. Such a beautiful example! Wundt went about it differently, pushing Külpe aside, although he was no less gifted than Köhler. Meanwhile, Köhler continued to insist that the promoter and head of the configurational school was his good friend and older colleague, Wertheimer, of whom Einstein had an excellent opinion.