Narcissus Oh

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Narcissus Ah (1892)

Narcissus Kaspar Ach (born October 29, 1871 in Ermershausen , Lower Franconia , † July 25, 1946 in Munich ) was a German doctor and psychologist. As a university professor he worked in Königsberg i. Pr. And Göttingen.

Life

Narcissus Ach was born as a child of Margarete Burger , wife of a general practitioner. From 1890 to 1895 and 1898/99 he studied medicine and philosophy at the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg . As the third of his family, he became a member of Corps Moenania Würzburg in 1891 . In July 1895 he was promoted to Dr. med. PhD .

After going to sea as a ship's doctor in 1895/96, he went to the psychiatric clinic of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg . He worked in the psychological laboratory with Emil Kraepelin . In 1897 he took a trip to North America to investigate seasickness . This was followed by a position at the pharmacological institute of the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität Strasbourg . On November 22nd, 1899 he did his doctorate with Oswald Külpe at the Psychological Institute in Würzburg, also as a Dr. phil. He stayed there until 1901.

Initially employed as an assistant at the Philosophical Seminar of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen , he qualified as a professor for philosophy on July 31, 1902. In November 1904 he moved to the Philipps University of Marburg as a private lecturer . On September 6, 1906, he was appointed adjunct professor at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin . On October 13 of the same year he renounced the venia legendi and became an assistant at the Psychological Institute. The Albertus University of Königsberg appointed him in 1907 as full professor of philosophy and director of the philosophy seminar. In 1922 he returned to Göttingen as full professor for philosophy and psychology and director of the philosophy seminar. Ach retired on April 1, 1937 .

In 1911 Ach married Marie Mez, the granddaughter of the writer Wilhelm Jensen . They had 6 children together. He died at the age of 75.

From 1929 to 1936 Ach sat on the board of the German Society for Psychology . In 1938 he was elected a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina .

From 1930 he was a member of the board of the Association of German Practical Psychologists . He signed the confession of professors at German universities and colleges to Adolf Hitler in November 1933. A pathetic homage to Adolf Hitler and his ideas was his lecture The Determination and Its Significance for the Fuehrer Problem , which he gave in 1933 at the 13th Congress of the German Society held for psychology in Leipzig .

research

Oh was a student of Oswald Külpe . He came from the Würzburg School of Thinking Psychology and further developed the method of self- observation into “systematic experimental self-observation”, since he saw two problems in the experiments on will and thinking carried out at that time:

(1) Individual reactions and self-observations never result in a complete, reliable and impartial picture of the actual content of consciousness .

(2) directing the attention to certain thought processes with the presentation of experiences confounded .

Achs method of "systematic experimental self-observation" should offer a way out of these problems. With the method, experiences of the test subject caused by external experimental aids should be subjected to a complete description and analysis in the immediately following time. This should objectify the subjective method of self-observation. The experimental arrangement consisted of specifying meaningless syllables with a complex technical apparatus. The experiment was divided into three phases: pre-period (signal), main period (experience to be investigated experimentally) and the post-period (survey by the test director). For the analysis, the observations which were found in agreement with different test subjects were used. The introduction of an experimenter for introspection is new and characteristic of the Würzburg school.

effect

Oh is now recognized as fundamental to modern experimental research into the will. He developed a "combined procedure" to study willpower. Artificially created associations between meaningless syllables serve as resistance in this will-based method. The strength of the associations depended on the number of repetitions. It could therefore be varied as desired, so that the researchers were able to set any resistance. The stronger the resistance, the stronger the concentration of will must be to overcome this resistance. In this way Ah could indirectly evoke the act of will in any gradation.

At the end of the 1980s, Ach's works were cited in Julius Kuhl's Motivation, Conflict and Action Control and in Heckhausen's and Gollwitzer's Rubicon model of the phases of action (Heckhausen & Gollwitzer, 1987; Gollwitzer, 1993). The differentiation between phases of action was a central idea in Ach's monograph on the act of will and temperament . Ach also formulated the law of special determination, which says that what is wanted is implemented more quickly and more reliably if the purpose is more specific. This law is confirmed in modern research on "implementation intentions" (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006).

Ach went on to formulate the “law of difficulty”, which says that volitional processes become more important when the action becomes more difficult. This law is now being explored as the conflict monitoring hypothesis (Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter & Cohen, 2001) in cognitive psychology .

literature

  • Josef Dolch:  Oh, Narcissus Kasper. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 1, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1953, ISBN 3-428-00182-6 , p. 27 ( digitized version ).
  • About the will. N. Ach - Studies on Psychology and Philosophy, 1910
  • Motivation, conflict and action control. J Kuhl - 1983 - Springer-Verlag, Berlin; New York.
  • Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. PM Gollwitzer, P Sheeran - Advances in experimental social psychology, 2006 - Elsevier.
  • Goal achievement: The role of intentions. PM Gollwitzer - European review of social psychology, 1993

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1960, 141 , 558
personal data
SURNAME Oh, Narcissus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kaspar Oh, Narcissus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German psychologist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH October 29, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH Ermershausen
DATE OF DEATH July 25, 1946
Place of death Munich