Kurt Gottschaldt

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kurt Gottschaldt (born April 25, 1902 in Dresden , † March 24, 1991 in Göttingen ) was a German psychologist and university professor. He is considered the Nestor of early GDR psychology and one of the most important representatives of the second generation of the school of Gestalt psychology and Gestalt theory in Germany (together with Wolfgang Metzger and Edwin Rausch ).

Life

Gottschaldt was born in Dresden in 1902 as the son of the businessman Hans Gottschaldt, who later became a factory director in Schwarzenberg / Erzgeb. and worked in Hanover , was born. He attended the community school in Schwarzenberg, the Realgymnasium I in Hanover and finally passed his school leaving examination at the Falkrealgymnasium in Berlin. From 1920 Gottschaldt studied physics and chemistry at the University of Berlin , but then turned to studying philosophy and psychology - attracted by Wolfgang Köhler's ideas on the connection between philosophy and natural science. With the approval of Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka , he received a paid assistant position at the Berlin Psychological Institute in 1926, where he received his doctorate with his study on the influence of experience on the perception of characters .

In 1929 he was one of the first in Germany to get a full-time job as a clinical psychologist at the Rhenish Provincial Institute for Mental Abnormalities in Bonn , where he headed the psychological department. This facility was headed by Otto Löwenstein and had the task of looking after and assessing children. During this time, his habilitation thesis, based on Gestalt psychology, was created, The Structure of Child Action , which also earned him the right to teach at the University of Bonn . In it he presented the methods he had developed for diagnosing feeble-minded and normal children, which represented an independent further development of the examination methods of Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Lewins .

At the time of National Socialism , as Mitchell Ash explains, Gottschaldt continued his line, which was based on Max Wertheimer and above all on Kurt Lewin , in his work on genetic psychology and twin research . That is why Gottschaldt was denied a full professorship at Berlin University.

From 1935 he was associate professor at the University of Berlin, headed the Department of Hereditary Psychology at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWI-A) and the outpatient clinic for nervous and difficult-to-educate children at the Berlin-Wedding Children's Hospital .

Against the background of his consistently critical stance on National Socialist racial policy, Gottschaldt was appointed to the so-called Lewinsky Commission after 1946 , which was supposed to assess and assess Verschuer's involvement in the implementation of racially justified persecution.

In September 1946 Gottschaldt was appointed full professor and director of the almost completely destroyed psychological institute, which was now located in the mathematics and natural science faculty of the Friedrich Wilhelms University, renamed Humboldt University in Berlin (HUB) in 1949 . By 1961 Gottschaldt expanded the institute into one of the largest and most efficient psychological institutes in Europe at the time. From 1953 to 1957 Gottschaldt was Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. From 1955 he was also head of the department for experimental and applied psychology at the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin (DAW). In 1959 he was elected to the board of the German Society for Psychology as the only psychologist in the GDR .

But then Gottschaldt's work was to be restricted for ideological reasons; because he was seen as a representative of a “bourgeois”, non-Pavlovian psychology. After his unsuccessful attempts to protect psychology from ideological influences, as well as corresponding conflicts in the institute, he resigned from his teaching post at the HUB and retired to the academy in 1960. In February 1962, Gottschaldt followed a call he had received in 1961 at the Georg-August University of Göttingen on the escape route . Since they did not want to allow him to leave the country, he had to leave the GDR “illegally” because of the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 ; but he was able to secretly transfer about 1/3 of his scientific documents to Göttingen beforehand.

From 1962 to 1970 Gottschaldt continued at the University of Göttingen as Director of the Institute of Psychology his work in the field of personality psychology , developmental psychology , the psychological assessment and social psychology gone, he is best known for. In 1991 he accepted honorary membership of the Society for Gestalt Theory and its Applications , with which his services to a personality psychology based on gestalt theory were recognized.

Many of Gottschaldt's academic students from his time at Humboldt University (HU) became professors : Walter Gutjahr (lecturer in clinical psychology, HU), Johannes Helm (professor of clinical psychology, HU and later painter in the Drispeth artists' colony ), Rolf Jakuszek ( Lecturer in Educational Psychology, HU), Friedhart Klix (Professor of General Psychology, Jena, HU), Gerhard Rosenfeld (Professor of Educational Psychology, HU), Hans-Dieter Schmidt (Professor of Developmental and Personality Psychology, HU), Jürgen Mehl ( Senior Assistant HU), Hans Szewczyk (Professor of Medical Psychology at the Charité Neurological Clinic), Hans-Dieter Rösler (Rostock), Erich Kurth (Rostock), Gisela Prillwitz (Professor of Educational Psychology, HU), Hans-Jürgen Lander (Professor at at HU and later in Leipzig), Edith Kasielke (Professor for Psychodiagnostics, HU), Lothar Sprung (Professor for Methodology and Methodology, HU)

Ernst Plaum (professor for differential and personality psychology, Eichstätt) and Peter Fass hebel (professor in Göttingen who began his studies in Berlin) are among his students from the Göttingen period .

The neurologist Matthias Gottschaldt was a son of his.

Selected publications

  • 1926: On the Influence of Experience on the Perception of Figures. I: About the influence of accumulated imprinting of figures on their visibility in comprehensive configurations . In: Psychological Research, 8 , 261–317
  • 1929: On the influence of experience on the perception of figures. II: Comparative studies on the effect of figural imprinting and the influence of specific events on the perception of optical complexes . In: Psychological Research, 12 , 1–87
  • 1933: The structure of child behavior . Special issue of the journal for applied psychology , Leipzig
  • 1940: Co-editor of: Outline of the human heredity theory and racial hygiene
  • 1942: The methodology of personality research in hereditary psychology . In: Erbpsychologie , volume 1. u. 2, Leipzig.
  • 1950: Problems of youth neglect: A report on psychological investigations in d. Post war period . Leipzig: Barth.
  • 1954–1962 editor of the Zeitschrift für Psychologie
  • 1960: The Problem of the Phenogenetics of Personality . In: P. Lersch & H. Thomae (Eds.), Personality Research and Personality Theory , Handbook of Psychology (Volume 4, pp. 222–280). Göttingen: Hogrefe.
  • 1968: talent and inheritance. Phenogenetic findings on the problem of talent . In: H. Roth (Ed.), Talent and Learning (pp. 129–150). Stuttgart: Klett, ISBN 978-3129268407 .
  • 1972: Psychology of Programmed Learning . Hanover, Berlin, Darmstadt, Dortmund: Schroedel, ISBN 978-3507380196 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gestalt Psychology in German Culture , Cambridge University Press: New York 1995
  2. ^ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 194.
  3. ^ Peter Weingart , Jürgen Kroll, Kurt Bayertz: Race, Blood and Genes. History of Eugenics and Racial Hygiene . Frankfurt am Main 1992, p. 576
  4. ^ Heinz-Elmar Tenorth: History of the University of Unter den Linden 1810-2010: Practice of their disciplines. Volume 6: Self-Assertion of a Vision Sven Ebisch, Mitchell G. Ash: Psychology at the Humboldt University. Reconstruction under Kurt Gottschaldt 1945-1962. de Gruyter 2010
  5. ^ Institute history Berlin: The Gottschaldt era
  6. ↑ Kurt Gottschaldt: Biographical information from the manual "Who was who in the GDR?"
  7. ↑ see Anna Arfelli Galli , Kurt Gottschaldt and the psychological diagnosis , in: A. Arfelli Galli, Gestaltpsychologie und Kinderforschung , Krammer: Wien 2013, pp. 89-100.
personal data
SURNAME Gottschaldt, Kurt
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gottschaldt, Kurt Bruno Carl Otto (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German psychologist, representative of Gestalt psychology and university lecturer
DATE OF BIRTH April 25, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Dresden
DATE OF DEATH March 24, 1991
Place of death Goettingen