Lost Ideas: The Lewin which was not Assimilated into America

Abstract

When Kurt Lewin attempted to transplant his German psychology into American soil, he found that some ideas flourished, some whithered, and others were lost through modification. Concepts such as the Zeigarnik affect and level of aspiration were easily assimilated, but Schwarz's «action units» and Birenbaum's work on the forgetting of intentions never took hold, and Dembo's work on regression took on a completely different meaning. Most important, Lewin's original method (best seen as a type of experimental phenomenology) became modified into the «statistical experimentation» familiar to contemporary social psychology. This paper resurrects some of Lewin's lost ideas and methodology in the hope that the current soil may be more conducive to their growth. I hope that some of these ideas can flourish again because psychology appears to be in danger of splitting into two disciplines. One of these uses the approach of natural science, thinking in terms of objective stimuli and responses which exist in a «real» world which exists apart from persons. Behavior is determined by these conditions —as they interact with the states of the organismand, consequently, there is no personal freedom or responsibility. Hence we may formulate abstract conceptualizations which will enable us to predict and control behavior. The other discipline uses a more subjective, clinical approach and thinks in terms of personal interpretations, with as many «realities» as there are persons. Since persons give meaning to the world, they are at least potentially responsible for their behavior. We cannot especify abstractions which will hold for ah persons but only «loolcing rules» which may or may not be applicable to the case at hand. Is there any way to reconcile these two disciplines, to maintain the unity of psychology? Lewin's basic approach is part of a tradition which offers an alternative to the split, a view of psychology as a unique science, a way to objectively study our subjectivity. The key explanatory concept in the scientific psychology of Lewin's day was the associative bond, the mechanical linkage between two ideas that was the equivalent of the S-R bonds making a comeback in contemporary psychology. Computer models of behavior are, essentially, sophisticated elaborations of this