Max Wertheimer was a Czech-born psychologist who was one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology, along with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Kohler.
31 Facts About Max Wertheimer
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Max Wertheimer is known for his book, Productive Thinking, and for conceiving the phi phenomenon as part of his work in Gestalt psychology.
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Max Wertheimer then went on to obtain his PhD in 1904 under Oswald Kulpe, at the University of Wurzburg and then began his intellectual career teaching at the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University.
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Max Wertheimer eventually joined the faculty of The New School in New York, a position he held until his death.
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Max Wertheimer was born on April 15,1880, in Prague, then part of the Bohemian Austria-Hungary.
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Max Wertheimer was born to Wilhelm and Rosa Wertheimer, second to his brother Walter.
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The Wertheimer household was extremely intellectual, therefore Max received education from both his parents; he engaged in political and educational discussions at home, as well as taking piano and violin lessons.
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Max Wertheimer felt that he and Spinoza shared a culture and common traits.
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Max Wertheimer began his formal education aged five, at a private elementary school maintained by the Piarist order of the Roman Catholic Church.
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Max Wertheimer first began to study law at Charles University, where he explored philosophy, and other fields such as music, physiology, and psychology.
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At Berlin, Max Wertheimer was able to work in the company of figures such as Carl Stumpf, Friederich Schumann, Georg Elias Muller, and Erich von Hornbostel.
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Max Wertheimer began his academic career at an institute in Frankfurt, later to become the University of Frankfurt.
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Max Wertheimer left Frankfurt from 1916 to 1929 to pursue a job at the Berlin Psychological Institute but returned to Frankfurt in 1929 as a full professor, where he stayed until 1933.
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In 1923, while teaching in Berlin, Max Wertheimer married Anna Caro, a physician's daughter, with whom he had four children: Rudolf, Valentin, Michael.
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The Max Wertheimer family joined other German emigres and moved to the United States.
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The family became citizens as well; that's why Max Wertheimer is referred to as a German-American psychologist.
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Max Wertheimer remained in touch with his European colleagues, many of whom had emigrated to America.
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Max Wertheimer died from a heart attack just three weeks after the book's completion at his home in New Rochelle, New York.
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Max Wertheimer was the father of Michael Wertheimer, a psychologist.
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Max Wertheimer began the formal founding of Gestalt psychology in 1910 as he began experiments on the phi phenomenon.
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Max Wertheimer published these experiments in a paper titled "Experimental Studies on the Perception of Movement".
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Max Wertheimer illustrated this phenomenon on an apparatus he built that utilized two discrete lights on different locations.
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Max Wertheimer worked with partners Koffka and Kohler to collect data which ultimately led to their launch of the Gestalt movement.
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Max Wertheimer was interested in making a distinction between reproductive thinking and productive thinking.
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Max Wertheimer argued that only insightful reasoning could bring true understanding of conceptual problems and relationships.
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Max Wertheimer believed creativity was crucial to engage in positive thinking.
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In Productive Thinking, similar to his lectures, Max Wertheimer used concrete examples to illustrate his principles.
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Max Wertheimer used these illustrations to demonstrate the transition from S1, a state where nothing really seems to make sense, to S2, where everything seems clear and the concept grasped.
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Max Wertheimer believes that this blind obedience forestalls a person from uncovering the solution.
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Max Wertheimer developed his Gestalt theory in 1910 while he was on board a train from Vienna for a vacation in Germany's Rhineland.
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Max Wertheimer's ideas challenged structuralism and atomism, in that he and other gestalt psychologists were more concerned about the whole rather than small structures or fragments of an object.