Gestalt psychology in German culture, 1890–1967: Holism and the quest for objectivity
✍ Scribed by Anne Harrington
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 21 KB
- Volume
- 33
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In a commentary-essay written in 1993, Mitchell Ash reviewed the state of the field of history of psychology and noted that it had "undergone a renaissance during the past ten years." Having begun by challenging "formerly unqueried textbook generalities," a small cohort of scholars had worked on various fronts to establish an alternative, theoreticallysophisticated research program that aimed to bring the field more directly into the mainstream of historical studies of science, even as it did not wholly disregard a perceived obligation to remain "relevant" to psychology proper. Perhaps no one in this cohort has been more activist and tireless than Ash himself. The paper trail of his conceptual contributions to the larger effort mark out an effort particularly to insist that the history of psychology is integrally tied to the making and unmaking of institutions, to the history of the university, to questions about disciplinary formation, and to the migration and trasmutation of ideas across national contexts. His new book, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, is the seasoned contribution of a scholar who has infused his long-standing interest and knowledge of a particular and important effort and moment in the history of psychology with a digested mix of these broader historiographic commitments.
The result is a book that not only is the most comprehensive and authoritative narrative history of Gestalt psychology we are apt to see, but also a study concerned with "recentering" (to use a term coined by the Gestalt psychologists themselves) a number of our assumptions about what this research effort was all about -an effect achieved by situating it systematically in its various shaping, facilitating and constraining contexts: philosophical/intellectual; laboratory/practical, institutional; and political/cultural. As Ash puts it, "Scientists live simultaneously in all of these social realms. Focusing on a single important group of scientists, such as the Gestalt theorists, is a way of showing how their multiple social identities and their discourses interact."
What follows is a labor of scholarly love, steeped in the archival literature, enlivened by interviews with survivors from those years, and grounded in exhaustive mastery of the published primary sources. The work is particularly impressive for the author's dedication to integrating attention to the "actual stuff" of Gestalt psychology itself -the studies, what they were asking, how they were carried out -into a theoretically-sensitive, thickening and evolving narrative over more than a half-century of disciplinary formation, elaboration, and finally partially disintegration.
Although Gestalt theory came of age in the late Wilhelminian and Weimar years in Germany, a late-curtain drama in Ash's story involves, of course, the impact of the rise of Nazism on the people, institutions, and knowledge-claims associated with this movement. Here Ash aims, also, to make a contribution to the still-evolving literature on science and National Socialism, particularly the revisionist school that is, in various ways, empirically challenging older arguments that the "irrationalist," "antimodern" thrust of National Socialism was systematically destructive to science. In fact, as Ash shows in tempered form in his own study, certain forms of science could and did survive under the Nazis and even advanced in productive ways (however we might judge the ethical costs of such productivity).
The "figure-ground" thrust of the larger argument made by this book is clear, even if it sometimes demands disciplined reading: Ash is teaching us to "see" Gestalt theory (the fig-