Envisaging “Productive Thinking”

Abstract

This chapter talks about Max Wertheimer, who launched the Gestalt movement in psychology with the publication of his investigations of the phi phenomenon. Wertheimer pioneered an approach to psychological theory and methodology that was the antithesis of behaviorism. It also details how the author drew on Mitchell Ash’s work on Gestalt theory in German culture and considered the contributions of Christian van Ehernfels in Prague, Oswald Külpe in Würzburg, and Carl Stumpf in Berlin. The chapter highlights the Gestalt approach that formed a vocal counterpoint to the method of trained introspection stressed by Wilhelm Wundt and his students and to the anti-subjective strictures of behaviorism. Wundt limited the usefulness of experimental methods to restricted domains, calling the facets of human experience that lay outside experimental knowledge “folk psychology.”