Background
Stern was born in Berlin, the grandson of the German-Jewish reform philosopher Sigismund Stern (1812-1867).
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Stern was born in Berlin, the grandson of the German-Jewish reform philosopher Sigismund Stern (1812-1867).
He received his PhD in psychology from the University of Berlin, where he studied under Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1893. He taught at the University of Breslau from 1897 to 1916. In 1916, he was appointed Professor of Psychology at University of Hamburg, where he remained until 1933 as Director of the Psychologic Institute. Stern, a Jew, was ousted by Hitler's regime after the rise of Nazi power. He emigrated first to the Netherlands in 1933, before fleeing to the United States, where he was appointed Lecturer and Professor at Duke University. He taught at Duke until his death from a heart attack in 1938.
Upon graduating from Berlin, he followed Ebbinghaus to Breslau, where Stern became an instructor of philosophy and psychology in 1897 and then an associate professor in 1907.
Stern’s career at Breslau was seriously delayed because he was a Jew. It was quite unusual for a university lecturer to wait over ten years to be appointed associate professor. After another wait of almost ten years, Stern was offered a full professorship on condition that he convert to Christianity. Thus, in 1919, after having laid the foundation for his academic and scientific career during twenty years at Breslau, Stern felt obliged to continue at Hamburg. After two decades of productivity and proliferous writing at Hamburg University and only two years after being unanimously elected as president of the German Psychologiocal Society, Stern was expelled from Hamburg University by the Nazis. Having previously held that anti-Semitism was an isolated instance of ignorant behavior, Stern exclaimed, “My Weltanschauung has collapsed” and decided to leave Germany altogether. He went first to Holland where he worked on one of his main works, General Psychology, which he could not publish in Germany. With a long list of important published works behind him, Stern joined the multitude of German Jewish scholars going to America. Stern was already well-known in the United States and, on a previous visit, had been awarded an honorary degree by Clark University for his contribution on the subjects of memory, testimony, and lying. He spent his last five years in the United States, where he was a professor at Duke University and lectured extensively at Harvard and other eastern colleges.
Stern was the author of many works, contributing greatly to the field of personalistic psychology in addition to the filds of differential psychology, forensic psychology, psychotehcnics, child psychology, and intelligence testing. At Breslau, he invented an instrument, the tonvariator, to study the perception of change in many sense modalities. He sought to isolate the basic elements of perception and thus get at the one-to-one relationship between stimulus and response. Stern improved on the Binet method of intelligence testing by suggesting the use of an intelligence quotient (I.Q.), which represents the child’s mental age divided by his or her chronological age. This score allows for simple comparison between individuals’ intelligence. He also suggested that there there is collaboration
between heredity and environment so that inner and outer conditions converge in any psychological process. Known as the convergence theory, this was later incorporated and expanded upon by Gestalt theorists. His interest in child psychology had been prevalent in Hamburg, where he published several papers, including an analysis and commentary on the diaries of a young boy. He later acknowledged that it was his own diary. In the field of child psychology he was helped by his wife, Clara Joseephy (1878-1945), a child psychologist, in studying their own three children in addition to other children.
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He was married to Clara Joseephy, a psychologist. They had 3 children: Hilde, Eva and Günther, who became an essayist and thinker as well.