Köhler, Wolfgang

Köhler, Wolfgang (kö`lər), 1887–1967, American psychologist, b. Estonia, Ph.D. Univ. of Berlin, 1909. From 1913 to 1920 he was director of a research station on Tenerife, Canary Islands. Later he served as both professor of psychology and director of the Psychology Institute, Berlin. He came to the United States in 1934, where he became professor of psychology at Swarthmore College. Köhler is best known for his experiments with problem-solving in apes at Tenerife and the influence of his writings in the founding of the school of Gestalt psychology. His writings include Gestalt Psychology (rev. ed. 1947) and The Mentality of Apes (rev. ed. 1948).

Bibliography

See his selected papers, ed. by M. Henle (1971).

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Köhler, Wolfgang

(born Jan. 21, 1887, Tallinn, Estonia, Russian Empire—died June 11, 1967, Enfield, N.H., U.S.) German-U.S. psychologist. His studies of problem solving by chimpanzees (The Mentality of Apes, 1917), in which he examined learning and perception as structured wholes, led to a radical revision of existing theory, and Köhler became a key figure in the development of Gestalt psychology. He continued his research during the 1920s and early '30s at the University of Berlin, publishing Gestalt Psychology (1929, rev. 1947), but emigrated from Germany to the U.S. after the Nazi takeover and taught at Swarthmore College (1935–55). His other writings include Dynamics in Psychology (1940), The Place of Values in a World of Facts (1938), and The Task of Gestalt Psychology (1969).

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Köhler, Wolfgang (1887–1967) psychologist; born in Reval, Estonia. He was one of the early proponents of Gestalt psychology along with Kurt Koffka and Max Wertheimer. He emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1935. He became professor of psychology and then research professor of philosophy and psychology at Swarthmore (Pa.) College (1935–58). He developed a physiological theory of perception, which he extended to memory and attention.

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Köhler, Wolfgang 

Born Jan. 21, 1887, in Tallinn; died June 11, 1967, in Enfield, New Hampshire. German psychologist, with M. Wertheimer and K. Koffka, one of the founders of gestalt psychology.

Köhler became a professor of psychology and philosophy at the universities of Göttingen and Berlin in 1922 and director of the Psychology Institute at the latter. In 1935 he moved to the USA, where he became a professor at Swarthmore College.

Köhler’s work at the zoological station on the island of Tenerife between 1913 and 1940 investigating the intellect of anthropoid apes attained wide renown. He came to the conclusions that (1) the rational behavior of the chimpanzee is of the same type as that of man, the difference lying only in the degree of complexity of the forms or structure of the behavior; (2) the structure of behavior consists in a certain integrated structure of action, or gestalt, that arises in connection with the visual perception of a situation; and (3) the nature of that perception is that of an integrated and simultaneous “grasp” of relationships (insight), irreducible to separate elements. Köhler’s rejection of the differences in principle between the intellects of man and anthropoids has since been subjected to criticism by psychologists.

Köhler’s work from the 1940’s through the 1960’s was devoted to an attempt to establish the structural identity of physical and psychic phenomena. Proceeding from an erroneous naturalistic point of view, he attempted to demonstrate the principle of the isomorphism of the brain’s physicophysiological structures and its psychic processes, in particular, by trying to infer psychic laws (the concept being approached in a gestalt sense) from an analysis of the brain’s electrical activity.

WORKS

Diephysischen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationären Zustand. Erlangen, 1920.
Psychologische Probleme. Berlin, 1933.
The Place of Value in a World of Facts. New York, 1938.
Dynamics in Psychology. New York, 1942.
In Russian translation:
Issledovanie intellekta chelovekopodobnykh obez’ian. Moscow, 1930.

REFERENCES

Vygotskii, L. S. “Strukturnaia psikhologiia.” In the book Osnovnye techeniia sovremennoi psikhologii. Moscow-Leningrad, 1930.
Prentice, W. C. H. “The Systematic Psychology of W.Köhler.” In the book Psychology, vol. 1. Edited by S. Koch. New York-Toronto-London, 1959.

M. S. ROGOVIN and V. N. SADOVSKH