Klaus Holzkamp

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Klaus Holzkamp (1988?)

Klaus Holzenkamp (* the 30th November 1927 in Berlin ; † 1. November 1995 ) was a German psychologist at the Psychological Institute of the Free University of Berlin in the time known as Division I . His life's work was the foundation of critical psychology , which he developed in collaboration with other teachers and students in West Berlin from the late 1960s.

academic career

Holzkamp worked at the Psychological Institute of the FU since the summer semester of 1949, initially on theoretical and experimental studies on the understanding of expression (dissertation 1956). After completing a research project on national prejudice in the mid-1950s , he turned to the study of processes of social perception ( social cognition ).

Already at this time he was expressing his discomfort with certain "vagueness" in conventional psychology; H. the lack of informative value of psychological experiments . In 1964 his habilitation theory and experiment in psychology appeared , in which he criticized the lack of agreement between psychological theory and experimental arrangement based on constructivism . He proposed a catalog of criteria, which should be followed to reduce the randomness of psychological experiment arrangements and increase the informative value of the individual experiments.

Private life

His first marriage was to Christine Holzkamp and his second marriage to Ute Osterkamp .

A teacher learns

The Critical psychology owes its existence to the socially critical impulses of particularly active in Berlin student movement. The university political disputes, which later condensed into the student movement , began at the Free University of Berlin as early as 1965 when a protest by the publicist Erich Kuby was banned by the Free University Rector. The student protests that followed were initially primarily committed to freedom of speech and democracy . However, they were united as early as 1966 with protests against the Vietnam War and culminated in a socialist-tinged radical criticism of West German society.

This social criticism goes hand in hand with a scientific criticism that strongly shaped Holzkamp and his work: According to the liberal understanding of psychology prevailing at the time, psychology did not know any value judgments . These stand outside of the scientific process, which knows knowledge but no social goals. The students turned against this supposedly neutral and apolitical understanding of science - its exclusion of all sociality means that the scientific knowledge could be misused at any time for social control or state oppression. Such an instrumental understanding of science is therefore more dangerous than a “politicized” science that can take social criticism into account.

These arguments, borrowed from critical theory and the positivism controversy in sociology, strengthened Holzkamp's own criticism of traditional psychology. In contrast to his colleagues, who treated the students with bans and condemnations, he responded to the students' criticism, took part in student discussions and used the results for his research. Holzkamp now turned away from his earlier attempts to specify traditional psychology and attempted a fundamental, critical re-foundation of psychology on the basis of a Marxist social theory .

University political disputes

The discussions about the position of critical psychology as a Marxist theory led to a violent campaign by the Springer press and other bourgeois media in Berlin as the “front city of the Cold War” , which put Holzkamp and his followers under great pressure in the years 1967–1971 . The allegations focused primarily on the student-run “Kinderladen Rote Freiheit”, a project for which Holzkamp had nominally taken over the management. As a result of these disputes, the disputes within the Psychological Institute increased in severity.

After the statutes of the institute were democratized at the beginning of 1969 with the consent of students, academic staff and professors, all three groups had equal say in the institute (third parity). It soon became clear that Holzkamp and the students and staff sympathizing with the Critical Psychology project had a majority on the Institute Council. Despite the willingness to cooperate with the group of liberal professors, after a while they refused to work and advocated the establishment of their own institute. Against the fierce resistance of the students, the split took place in 1970. From now on there was the critical-psychological "Psychological Institute (PI)" and the "Institute for Psychology", which was dedicated to traditional bourgeois psychology. This split was unpleasant, but opened up the possibility of an undisturbed elaboration of the theory, which culminated in 1983 in Holzkamp's major work, Fundamentals of Psychology .

The Marxist Holzkamp joined SEW around the mid-1970s as a non-open member , which was strongly represented at the "PI". This made it much easier for him to coordinate with the great psychologists of the USSR and also to contact psychologists from the GDR. However, he also kept his distance from psychology there, the mainstream of which he regarded as too similar to the subject in the West. When an opposition movement, Die Klarheit, formed in the SEW , Klaus Holzkamp indirectly positioned himself on it when, in a contribution devoted to organizational issues at Wolfgang Fritz Haug 's 1980 “Volksuni”, he opposed the formation of “informal opposition groups” within “progressive Organizations ”argued.

Holzkamp's work and its aftermath

The basics of critical psychology according to Holzkamp can be found in the entry Critical Psychology . After completing his main work, The Basics of Psychology, Holzkamp himself devoted himself to educational psychology and wrote Learning , in which he developed a subject-scientific learning theory that is now particularly popular in adult education .

With the merging of the competing institutes in 1994, the critical "Psychological Institute" was practically wound up. The establishment of a professorship for critical psychology at the FU, which had already been initiated, was never carried out, so that critical psychology lost its institutional center. Nevertheless, it is still taught by individual representatives in Germany and internationally and is received by students. The journal "Forum Kritische Psychologie" still exists, offering space for scientific discussions in and around critical psychology. Wilhelm Kempf (Chair of Methodology at the University of Konstanz), for example, has been working on the development of concrete methods for psychological research in the sense of an empirical subject science since the 1980s. Since 1997 the Berlin Institute for Critical Theory has published the Klaus Holzkamp edition of the work in Argument Verlag . A total of seven volumes are to be produced, with the sixth published in 2015. The editors at the institute include Ute Osterkamp , who was married to Klaus Holzkamp, ​​as well as Wolfgang Maiers and Frigga Haug .

Fonts (selection)

  • 1964 theory and experiment in psychology. de Gruyter, Berlin; 2nd edition, expanded to include an afterword, 1981, again in: Schriften Bd. 2 Argument, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-88619-398-5 .
  • 1968 science as action. de Gruyter, Berlin; again in Schriften Vol. 3, Argument, Hamburg 2006 ISBN 3-88619-399-3 .
  • 1971 The theoretical prerequisites of critical-emancipatory psychology. Working Texts Publishing House, Hamburg
  • 1972 Critical Psychology. Fischer, Frankfurt.
  • 1973 For the introduction to AN Leontjew's "Problems of the Development of the Psychic." (with Volker Schurig ). Athenäum-Verlag, Frankfurt 1973, ISBN 3-8072-4018-7 , pp. XI – LII.
  • 1973 Sensual knowledge. Athenaeum, Frankfurt, ISBN 3-8072-4100-0 ; several other editions; again in Schriften Vol. 4, Argument, Hamburg 2006 ISBN 978-3-88619-405-6 .
  • 1983 Foundation of psychology. 2nd edition Campus, Frankfurt 2003
  • 1993 Learning - Subject-Scientific Foundation. Campus, Frankfurt
  • 1996 Psychology: Self-understanding about the reasons for action in everyday life. In: Forum Critical Psychology. Issue 36, ISBN 3-88619-774-3 .
  • since 1997 writings (Ed. Frigga Haug et al.) Commissioned by the Institute for Critical Theory. Volume I-VI. Argument Verlag , Hamburg 1997–2015
    • I: normalization, exclusion, resistance. 1997, ISBN 3-88619-397-7 .
    • II: Theory and Experiment in Psychology. 2005.
    • III: science as action. 2006.
    • IV: Sensual knowledge - historical origin and social function of perception. 2006.
    • V: Continuity and Break - Essays 1970–1972 , 2008, ISBN 978-3-88619-406-3 .
    • VI: Critical Psychology as Subject Science. 2015, ISBN 978-3-88619-407-0 .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Klaus Holzkamp: Social cognition . In. Gottschaldt, Lersch, Sander, Thomae, (Ed.): Handbuch der Psychologie . Vol. 7, 2nd half volume, Göttingen 1972.
  2. ↑ Hans Albert provides a critique of the philosophy of science on which it is based: Constructivism or Realism? Remarks on Holzkamp's dialectical overcoming of modern science. In: Journal of Social Psychology. 2, 1971, pp. 5-23.
  3. ↑ Critical Psychologist
  4. ↑ Critical Psychologist

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Holzkamp, ​​Klaus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German university professor, founder of critical psychology
DATE OF BIRTH November 30, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH November 1, 1995
Place of death Berlin