Kurt Lewin in retrospect--a psychiatrist's view.

Abstract

Kurt Lewin's work opened to experimental study a realm of human functioning that was essentially ignored by the experimental psychology of his time: the interactions of cognitions, affects, and behavior. Contributing to this achievement was his remarkable ingenuity in devising experiments applicable to “real-life” phenomena, based on a conceptual scheme which placed significant determinants in the directly observable and manipulatable interaction of the person with the immediate environment. Also important was his definition of a fact as anything that has effects, thereby circumventing irrelevant metaphysical issues. From the standpoint of individual and group psychotherapy, his concepts of action research, group dynamics, level of aspiration, and personality structure of the mentally deficient are pertinent and may have had considerable influence, although indirect and largely unacknowledged.