Erich Rudolf Jaensch

Erich Rudolf Ferdinand Jaensch (born February 26, 1883 in Breslau ; † January 12, 1940 in Marburg ) was a German psychologist and philosopher with a chair at the Philipps University of Marburg . Jaensch was particularly committed to the National Socialist harmonization and the reorganization of academic life in the German Reich after the NSDAP came to power .

Life

Jaensch studied at the University of Breslau with Hermann Ebbinghaus and at the University of Göttingen with Georg Elias Müller . At Ebbinghaus he was particularly interested in experiments on the perception of time and movement. He was also interested in the phenomenon of the illusion of the sense of touch, which explains his continuing interest in the psychology of the blind , as he himself carried out experiments with blind subjects during this time. Due to Müller there was a shift in Jaensch's thinking towards the direct psychological issues of perception. In Göttingen he received his doctorate for the analysis of facial perception . Here he made further considerations on the Aubert-Förster phenomenon that the perceived size of an object does not coincide with the size of the image on the retina . Lateral vision was given particular attention. He received his habilitation from the University of Strasbourg with a thesis on the perception of space . His theory of duplicity begins here. Jaensch assumed that periodic vibrations were picked up by the cochlea , while aperiodic ones were picked up by other parts of the ear. Vibrations that show both periodic and aperiodic character, on the other hand, would be perceived by the cochlea as well as by other organs. The first reflections on cultural anthropology can already be found in this publication : Jaensch assumed that in human history noise was more likely to be perceived than tone. In the same way, bars were more present in the evolution of mankind than conical shapes.

Jaensch was director of the Psychological Institute and the Philosophical Seminar and from 1912 to 1913 professor of philosophy at the University of Halle . In 1913 Jaensch became a full professor at the University of Marburg. Jaensch's ordination caused quite a stir in Marburg. As the successor to Hermann Cohen , he pushed his idealistic Neo-Kantianism out of the Marburg faculty and put his own experimental psychological approach in its place. The confrontation became a traumatic experience for both the followers of Hermann Cohen and the representatives of the experimental psychological direction around Erich Rudolf Jaensch. In 1919 Jaensch was elected a member of the Leopoldina .

Erich Rudolf Jaensch died in 1940 as a result of an operation. He was the brother of Walther Jaensch , the director of the Institute for "Constitutional Medicine" in Berlin. His and thus Cohen's successor on the chair was the Kantian Julius Ebbinghaus , who was immune to any National Socialist infection and whose father Erich Rudolf Jaensch had once learned experimental psychology from.

Erich Rudolf Jaensch's estate is in the Psychology History Research Archive (PGFA) of the Distance University in Hagen.

National Socialism

Jaensch was a member of several National Socialist organizations, an avowed supporter of Hitler - and on many points operated a völkisch theory in the sense of National Socialism. While Jaensch was characterized by a rather moderate political stance during the Weimar Republic (although he was a member of Alfred Rosenberg's Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur ), he was a supporter of National Socialism by 1932 at the latest when he became a supporting member of the SS .

After the National Socialists came to power , he joined the NSDAP and the NS teachers' association in 1933 . In March 1933 he signed the declaration of 300 university teachers for Adolf Hitler , and on November 11, 1933, the professors at German universities and colleges signed the declaration of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist state . He was one of the main propagandists of Nazi ideology in the psychology department. In the opinion of the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Metzger , he developed into a “driver of National Socialism”. In 1933 he founded the "Institute for Psychological Anthropology" in Marburg, which also became a supporter of National Socialist ideas. He wanted to make Marburg the center of National Socialist philosophy. From 1936 he was chairman of the German Society for Psychology . At the latest with his work Der Gegenypus , published in the year of the Reichspogromnacht , his typology became a doctrine of justification for the National Socialist racial ideology. According to Wolfgang Metzger - who was himself a member of the SA and NSDAP at the time and made a career during the Nazi era - "to eliminate dissenters, especially Jewish experts". So he agitated against his predecessor Hermann Cohen . Jaensch's work The Counter Type has also found its way into literary history through the biting criticism of the poet Gottfried Benn .

Jaensch's interest in parapsychology , which also fell during the Nazi era, should also be mentioned. His foreword to a work by Hans Bender on the problem of extra-sensory perception (1936) should be emphasized . After the war, Bender became the best-known representative of German-speaking parapsychology and founded his own institute in Freiburg.

In 1939 Jaensch was appointed rector of the University of Marburg. How largely Jaensch identified with the new rulers is also shown by the fact that he accepted this appointment in Nazi uniform. His attempts to substantiate the völkisch ideology in the same year, meanwhile, took on increasingly obscure forms. To prove the validity of the Nazi ideology, Jaensch carried out experiments on chicken farms that were intended to serve as “research and educational tools on human race issues”.

plant

With his psychological work, Jaensch was the most cited psychologist of his time in the 1920s . The focus of his studies was an independent teaching of the constitutional types as well as work on eidetics . Self- experiments with mescaline contributed significantly to his eidetic hypothesis formation.

From the time he took over the professorship in Marburg until the mid-20s, he developed his own eidetics. Jaensch continued the research discovered by the Viennese senior physician Viktor Urbantschitsch on the description of so-called visual images within oneself. He assumed that these visual images were typical for children and young people in particular. According to Maria Krudewig, six features are characteristic of Jaensche eidetik:

• Perceptible, vivid content (the appearances always remain the same)
• Pictoriality (visual images are usually two-dimensional - in Graves' disease, three-dimensional)
• Non-corporeality (what is seen has no physical properties, e.g. weight)
• Location (the visual images are projected into the outside space)
• Color character (the background of the picture determines the eidetic view)
• Definition of the visual image (how long does it take to emerge ?, what size is it?)

The research found application particularly in the field of education.

In the 1920s, Jaensch took over the management of the Zeitschrift für Psychologie , one of the most famous German-language psychological journals. In relation to his work, his previously purely experimental approach expanded into a well-developed cultural-anthropological blueprint during this time. In his work on the structure of the world of perception and the foundations of human knowledge (1924), Jaensch u. a. an eidogical model of the origins of religion, which u. a. based on Lucien Lévy-Bruhl . Jaensch's friendship with the Protestant theologian and religious scholar Rudolf Otto should also have started at this time. What is certain is that both authors influenced each other in their views. Furthermore, Jaensch himself developed his own religious psychological approach at the end of the 1920s , which is based heavily on his typology . This typology emerged in the mid-1920s. It represents an extension of his eidology and is also essentially based on perceptual psychological considerations. Accordingly, there are four forms of perception types. The types would deal with their perception in an integrating or disintegrating manner:

• J1: Obtains its stimuli solely from perception of the outside world.
• J2: Lives out of one's own ideas (ideas, ideals).
• J3: Is the ideal mixed character that is formed from both types of perception. He fuses the positive of the external orientation of J1 with the idealism of J2.
• S1: Is a character who is not really oriented towards any idea, be it inside or outside. He is aimless and unstable.

During this time, Jaensch was related to the typology of Carl Gustav Jung , who divided into introverted and extroverted types.

On the subject of the integration or disintegration of perception it becomes clear that his research on perception is tied to the context of time. Jaensch was the central representative of the Marburg School, which represented its own form of holistic psychology . In contrast to the Berlin School of Gestalt Psychology, holistic psychology took the view that the structuring of psychological (perceptual) content through experience shows simplified and integrated. At the beginning of the perception process, however, what is perceived is itself diffuse and not structured. The Marburg School, based on Jaensch, is to be located between the Gestalt psychology of the Berlin School and the second Leipzig School around Felix Krueger .

In the late 30s, Jaensch emerged as a critic of the current intelligence tests, which he accused of disregarding constitutional differences.

aftermath

Because of his involvement in the Nazi regime alone, Jaensch's research is now quite discredited. Only his eidetic received a certain amount of attention after the war. Several of his works were placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone in 1946 .

Fonts

• About the perception of space , 1911
• Some general questions of psychology and the biology of thought, explained using the doctrine of comparison: with remarks on the crisis in contemporary philosophy . Barth, Leipzig 1920.
• Eidetics and the typological research method: their importance for youth psychology and pedagogy, for general psychology and the psychophysiology of the human personality; with special consideration of the fundamental questions and the research methodology . 2nd edition Quelle & Meyer, Leipzig 1927.
• About the structure of the world of perception . Barth, Leipzig 1927.
• On the history of the psychological institute . In: H. Hermelink & SA Kaehler (ed.): The Philipps University of Marburg 1527–1927 (pp. 687–690). Elwert, Marburg 1927 (unchanged reprint 1977).
• The psychological institute in Marburg . Elwert, Marburg 1927
• Basic forms of human existence: (taking into account their relationships to biology and medicine, to cultural philosophy and pedagogy) . Elsner, Berlin 1929
• About building consciousness . 1930
• Preliminary questions of the philosophy of reality . 1931
• About the basics of human knowledge . Joh. Ambr. Barth, Leipzig 1931
• The situation and the tasks of psychology . Barth, Leipzig 1933
• Science and the German national movement . Elwert'sche Verlagbuchhandlung, Marburg 1933
• The struggle of German psychology . J. Beltz, Langensalza 1934.
• The cultural goal in the new empire . Diesterweg, Frankfurt / Main 1934
• Eidetic disposition and childlike soul life . Barth, Leipzig 1934
• To reorganize the German student body and the university . Barth, Leipzig 1937
• Psychology and the changes in German idealism . Fischer, Jena 1937
• The opposite type: psychological-anthropological foundations of German cultural philosophy, based on what we want to overcome . Barth, Leipzig 1938
• Epilogue. In: Karl Schwarze : Ernst Moritz Arndt and his fight against intellectual idealism . Barth, Leipzig 1939
• Mathematical thinking and soul shape . Barth, Leipzig 1939
• ER Jaensch and Rudolf Hentze : Basic laws of youth development . Barth, Leipzig 1939
• The problem of truth in the völkisch reorganization of science and education . Beyer, Langensalza 1939.
• Hellas and us . Pyrsoy, Athens 1939
• The chicken yard as a research and educational tool in human race issues . Parey, Berlin 1939
• Jaensch, Erich R. & Althoff, Fritz: Mathematical thinking and soul form: Preliminary questions in pedagogy and national redesign of mathematical teaching . Barth, Leipzig 1939
• On eidetics and integration typology: Work from the Institute for Psychological Anthropology at the University of Marburg / Lahn . Barth, Leipzig 1941

literature

• Gert Heinz Fischer: ER Jaensch in memory. In: Journal of Psychology. 148. Barth, Leipzig 1940 (with bibliography by Erich R. Jaensch and his colleagues).
• Léon Poliakov , Josef Wulf : The Third Reich and its thinkers. Berlin 1959.
• Wolfgang Metzger:  Jaensch, Erich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 10, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-428-00191-5 , p. 287 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Ulrich Sieg : Psychology as a "science of reality". Erich Jaensch's examination of the “Marburg School” . In: Winfried Speitkamp (Ed.): State, Society, Science. Contributions to modern Hessian history. Elwert, Marburg 1994, pp. 314-342.
• Anne Christine Nagel u. a. (ed.): The Philipps University of Marburg under National Socialism. Documents on their history , Steiner, Stuttgart 2000
• Christian Tilitzki : The German University Philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich , Berlin 2002

Web links

• Literature by and about Erich Rudolf Jaensch in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on Erich Rudolf Jaensch in the Catalogus Professorum Halensis

Individual evidence

1. ↑ see Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg (HStAMR), Best. 915 No. 5757, p. 93 ( digitized version ).
2. ↑ Published in the Zeitschrift für Psychologie 1909, supplementary volume 4.
3. ↑ Published in the Zeitschrift für Psychologie 1911, supplementary volume 6.
4. ↑ ^{a b c d} Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 281.
5. ↑ Norbert Kapferer : The Nazification of Philosophy at the University of Breslau 1933-1945. LIT Verlag, Münster / Hamburg / Berlin / London 2002, ISBN 978-3-8258-5451-5 .
6. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-i.html
7. ↑ Johannes Hoffmeister : Dictionary of Philosophical Terms. Meiner, Hamburg 1955, p. 509.