Background
Lewin, Kurt was born in 1940 in Posen, Germany ■now Poznaq, Poland).
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Kurt Lewin
Edit ProfileEducation
University of Berlin, 1909-1914.
Career
Taught psyc ology University of Berlin, Professor in 1927. Ernigrated to USA, 1933, working first at Cornell and then Iowa. After the Second World War, ■rector.
Research Centre for Group Dynamics, assachusetts Institute of Technology.
^aln Publications:
5) ^ Dynamic Theory of Personality, trans. D. K. ^ams and K. E. Zener. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company
11936) Prin
ciples of Topological Psychology, New,|^ork: McGraw-Hill Book Company
2) Field theory of learning', in Forty-first earbook of the National Society for the Study of
Education 41,2.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(1948) Resolving Social Conflict, New York: Harper.
(1949) ‘Cassirer's philosophy of science and the social sciences’, in P. A. Schilpp. Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, Evanston, 111.: Tudor Publishing
Company
(1951) Field Theory in Social Science, New York: Harper.
Views
Feigl, Herbert (1951) ‘Principles and problems of theory construction in psychology’, in Wayne Dennis, Current Trends in Psychological Theory, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Leeper, R. W. (1943) Lewin s Topological and Vector Psychology, Eugene: University of Oregon Press. Wolman, Benjamin B. (1960) Contemporary Theories and Systems in Psychology, New York: Harper. (1966) Historical Roots of Contemporary Psychology, New York: Harper. Kurt Lewin was among the most philosophically minded of the psychologists active in the first half of this century. Concerned with the reconciliation of nomothetic and idiographic accounts of behaviour, he sought to apply concepts derived from physics and geometry to psychology. The starting-point for Lewin’s theory is the distinction, introduced by Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, between the natural sciences, which are nomothetic disciplines, and the cultural sciences which are idiographic. Lewin included psychology among the cultural sciences, placing the unique individual at the centre of enquiry. At the same time he insisted that the assertions made by psychology about an individual case must be capable of being tested by general laws. Psychology had not always had this characteristic: it had been through an ‘Aristotelian’ stage concerned with psychological essences, and a ‘descriptive’ stage in which facts were collected and minutely analysed. It now had to move on to a ‘Galilean’ stage in which psychological laws were framed in terms not of patterns of recurrent activity but of the totality of each individual concrete situation. Thus far, Lewin’s account adds little to the qualitative insight of Gestalt psychology that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. But he went on to develop a quantitative treatment of the Gestalt. He sought to model ‘individual psychological situations’ mathematically by analogy with the mathematical models of ‘individual physical situations’ employed in physics. In physics, field theory can be used to describe the sum of the facts relevant to the behaviour of a given physical system, and Lewin sought to apply this to psychology, positing the notion of a psychological field, the ‘Life Space’, capable of describing the sum of the facts relevant to the behaviour of a given psychological system. It includes the individual's personality and environment, both key determinants of experience and behaviour. In later work he applied geometrical concepts to the description of the life space, drawing a direct parallel between the unity of the space-time continuum in general relativity and Gestalt holism. He argued that psychological space is a new kind of space, one in which ‘moving towards’ is mathematically distinct from ‘moving away’. Lewin's mathematical treatment of psychology was an ingenious development of the qualitative Gestalten. His theories have not proved capable of unambiguous application. Nor have they generated new hypotheses or experimental work. They remain none the less a remarkable attempt to reconcile the nomothetic and idiographic in psychology.
