Kurt Lewin

Introduction

Any history of American psychology must include the contributions of one man who arrived in the United States as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany in the early 1930s and lived only until 1949: Kurt Lewin. Lewin was an experimental psychologist, an innovative researcher, a teacher with a zest for new areas of inquiry, and a pioneer in social psychology. He was close to the Gestalt psychology movement in Berlin and was a recognized philosopher of science (Schellenberg, 1978).

While Lewin was a scientist and a theoretician, his work was concerned with the actual circumstances of people's daily lives. His radical departure from orthodox research methodology sparked enthusiast õic interest in his projects from students and colleagues who were dissatisfied with the apparent triviality of much experimental psychology at the time. Others questioned his social agenda as an interference with pure scientific inquiry (Allport, unpublished notes to Marrow, 1965). Lewin felt he was a part of "the mounting aspirations of research toward an understanding of actual events and particular cases" as opposed to abstractly defined classes of behavior (Lewin, 1935, p. 11). It was Lewin's ideas and research work, according to Edward Tolman, that contributed insights which, along with Freud's contributions, "first made psychology a science applicable to real human beings and to real human society" (Tolman, APA address, 1947 - quoted in Marrow, 1969, p.ix).

Lewin contributed new research ideas to American academic psychology including many questions concerning child development and human motivation. As an heir to the German experimental Gestalt revolution in psychological thought, Lewin directed the focus of the science of psychology, away from the statistical focus of the other experimentalists of his time and toward the whole-making processes in human motivation and emotion (Ash, 1995, p.268). His studies of leadership and group dynamics, which brought exacting scientific inquiry out of the laboratory and into the real life work place, was employed by the Office of Special Services during World War II and in numerous community and industrial settings (Marrrow, 1969, p. 156).

Lewin also contributed to the history of clinical psychology in America, and particularly the third force of Humanistic psychology. This is well documented by writers who credit certain of Lewin's ideas as central concepts or principles of the philosophy of Gestalt therapy. These organizing principles include attention to boundary functions, or how an organism behaves at the point of contact with its environment; field theory, the premise that we are always functioning in an interactive realm in which organism and environment are interdependent parts of the whole; and the tendency of unfinished business to hold our attention, although often out of awareness . Carl Rogers and Ruth Sanford (in Kaplan and Saddock, 1989, p. 1484) identify Lewin's work as parallel, if not a root, to client-centered psychotherapy. Rogers also believed that the sensitivity training groups which evolved out of Lewin's work in group dynamics were "perhaps the most significant social invention of this century" (Rogers in Marrow, 1969, p. 214).

Beyond Kurt Lewin's influence on American academic psychology and the, as yet, unwritten history of clinical psychology there is still another field in which Lewin plays a central role. This i s the field of organizational development, which grew out of social psychology, but certainly claims a life of its own as an economic and political force today.

Certain terms of psychological theory began with Lewin, including group dynamics, action research, life space, levels of aspiration, and field theory. But like the interdependent concept of his field theory that is of lively interest in postmodern philosophical circles today, Lewin wrote that he "...always found myself unable to think productively as a single person". In the story of Kurt Lewin's life lies clues to how this man's great contributions have been assimilated into American life while the contributor himself has been eclipsed by other personalities in the history of contemporary academic and clinical psychology.

His life and ideas-- in Germany

Lewin was born on September 9, 1890, or as he was fond of saying "the ninth nine of 90" in the village of Mogilno in Prussia, now part of Poland. He was the second oldest of four children in a middle class Jewish family. His father owned a small general store where his mother also worked. The family lived above the shop. They also owned a small farm outside of town where Kurt learned to enjoy nature while he was growing up. Kurt credited his energetic and articulate mother with instilling in him an appreciation for respectful non-hierarchical relations. When he was 15 years old the family moved to Berlin and he was enrolled in the Gymnasium. There he was introduced to Greek philosophy for which he maintained a life-long passion. In 1909 Lewin entered the University of Frieberg to study medicine, intending to become a country doctor. He transferred first to the University of Munich to study biology, then to the University of Berlin, where he worked toward his doctorate in philosophy, with a special interest in the theory of science (Marrow, 1969, pp. 3-9).

The educational system at the time regarded all subjects that were not medicine, religion, or law as part of the field of philosophy. There was a very lively intellectual environment in Berlin at this time including exploration of philosophy, political science, psychology and the natural sciences. One area of particular interest was the relationship of experimental psychology to philosophy (Ash, 1995, pp. 9, 266, see also Shane, 1997).

One of Lewin's professors directed him to the Psychological Institute of the University of Berlin, then under the direction of Carl Stumpf, an experimentalist who had studied with Wilhelm Wundt, but who was less hierarchical in his teaching style. Here Lewin prepared to become a university professor á, despite the anti-Semitism throughout German universities, which he knew would limit his ability to obtain a position. His fellow students, which included a few women, engaged in long discussions about how to solve various social problems, including how to democratize Germany and how to change women's position in society. Between 1910 and 1912 these discussions involved Lewin and his friends with the young socialist movement. He and his fellow students organized an adult education program which they staffed themselves to serve working class women and men. This program was very popular and involved

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