Robert Heiss (philosopher)

Robert Heiss (born January 22, 1903 in Munich , † February 21, 1974 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German philosopher and psychologist .

Life

Robert Heiss was born in Munich as the son of the postal worker Robert Heiss and his wife Eugenie Heiss. From 1922 to 1926 he studied philosophy, psychology and sociology, 1926, he was with his dissertation The philosophy of logic and the negation Dr. phil. PhD in Göttingen . In 1928 he completed his habilitation as a non-regular assistant at the University of Cologne with the work Logic of Contradiction . There he belonged to the circle around Nicolai Hartmann . Since 1936 he was a non-civil servant associate professor for philosophy in Cologne, since 1938 head of the Institute for Experimental Psychology and since 1939 a civil servant adjunct professor.

Robert Heiss 1903–1974 philosopher and psychologist

Like many psychologists of his generation, he had to work as a personnel expert from 1939 to 1942, initially as an army psychologist, and from 1940 to 1942 as an air force psychologist, until air force psychology was dissolved. In 1942 he was offered the chair of philosophy and psychology at the University of Freiburg, which he initially represented and took in 1943. In 1944, he founded the Institute for Psychology and Characterology there . In view of contradicting sources, it remains very questionable whether he had actually been a member of the NSDAP since October 1, 1940, as an index card in the Federal Archives suggests. In the Federal Archives (Document Center) the application for membership, the reference to the handing over of the party ID and receipts for contribution payments are missing. The information from Ernst Klee The personal lexicon of the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Edition Kramer. Frankfurt am Main, (2010), von Leaman, Tilitzki and other authors are wrong, at least with regard to the alleged year of entry. In the officially requested personnel questionnaire dated January 9, 1943, Heiss denied membership in a party. In a statement dated June 17, 1946, he reported that in October 1943 he had been wrongly designated as a party member. Confusion with a professor of medicine Robert Heiss, who was also born in Munich, cannot be ruled out. The statements of the Nazi lecturers' leaders received in the personnel files show that he encountered strong political concerns on various occasions and was considered politically unreliable.

After the war, he was confirmed in office by the French military government in November 1945 and, as “politically unaffected”, he was dean of the philosophy faculty in 1946.

plant

Robert Heiss belonged to the generation of professors of psychology who had been recognized as philosophers through their studies and their first publications. In the academic psychology of that time, he was more of an outsider, as he came neither from an experimental psychological nor from a phenomenological or emphatically humanistic tradition of psychology. Hot was largely influenced by Sigmund Freud , but also by Erich Rothacker and Ludwig Klages as well as by Ernst Kretschmer and his medical psychology. He belonged to the circle around the philosopher Nicolai Hartmann . He was particularly drawn to the great dialecticians Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Marx . He wrote about them, and his own thinking about the “dialectics and dynamics” of the person is to be understood under this influence. He developed this perspective in his doctrine of character (1936/1949) and the programmatic writing Person als Prozess (1948). His approach of "diagnostic psychology" was based on the existing diagnostic tools and on the practical tasks, i. H. Advice, neurosis psychological diagnostics, forensic reports.

In his character studies Robert Heiss had developed a view of personality that was unusual for that time. He expanded the notion, which is customary in the tradition of “characterology”, of the property, which is viewed as relatively constant, by emphasizing the ongoing development of personality properties. It was not the structure or the construction of the personality that was essential to him, but the "solidification process" in which these characteristics develop. Properties are therefore ambiguous, and knowledge of their solidification process is necessary in order to assess them. He based his interpretations on motivational and especially depth psychological arguments and referred to drive and inhibition, to the crises and upheavals of the personality, to developments with regression, destruction and restructuring of the personality as well as to borderline forms such as compulsive behavior. These processes are to be described by process properties in which inner drive shapes appear. Conversely, a psychological diagnosis of such process characteristics can be used to record the underlying drive forms and dynamic changes in terms of labilization, stabilization and solidification. The solidification process cannot be explained by a learning process alone, because the theoretical assumptions are much broader than the learning-theoretical conceptions of behavioral science. Hot thought of self-regulation, social and situational influences, dynamic-unconscious drives and the willful and intelligent control of experiences and affects. The psychological interpretation of these dynamic processes led to a new understanding of the person as a process and to the methodology of process analysis.

The unusual name of his institute should do justice to the two traditions, the experimental psychological and the character-based one. In Freiburg hot led projective tests , intelligence tests , graphology and psychology of expression and together with his team emerged over the years - with highlights between 1950 and 1970 - a training focus like no other Psychological Institute in Germany. He was editor of the handbook Diagnostic Psychology and editor or co-editor of the journal for diagnostic psychology and personality research (later Diagnostica ), the psychological research and the journal for human studies .

The test psychological methods used and the graphology on which this psychological process research was based are now regarded as very problematic methods and have therefore become largely uncommon in institutes and in training. Thus the approach of diagnostic psychology advocated by Heiss had largely lost its empirical basis. The basic requirement for process research remains, however. This basically applies to his theoretical concept and also to many of the methodological rules of psychological interpretation .

Fonts

• Logic of contradiction: an inquiry into the method of philosophy and the validity of formal logic . Verlag de Gruyter, Berlin 1932.
• The doctrine of character. Verlag de Gruyter, Berlin 1936. (2nd edition 1949)
• The interpretation of the handwriting . Claassen, Hamburg 1943. (3rd edition 1966 with Inge Strauch).
• Person as a process . In: Johannes von Allesch, W. Jacobsen, G. Munsch, Max Simoneit (eds.). Congress report of the Professional Association of German Psychologists, Bonn, August 29 to September 2, 1947. Nölke, Hamburg 1948, pp. 11-25. (Reprinted in Karl-Josef Groffmann, Karl-Herrmann Wewetzer (eds.). Person as trial. Festschrift for the 65th birthday of Prof. Dr. phil. Robert Heiss. Huber, Bern 1968, pp. 17–37).
• The course of the mind . Bern, Francke 1948.
• The diagnostic procedures in psychology . Psychologische Rundschau, Vol. 1, 1949, pp. 266-275; Vol. 2, 1950, pp. 9-19, 63-75, 128-136.
• Psychologism, Psychology and Hermeneutics. In: C. Astrada et al. (Ed.): Martin Heidegger's influence on the sciences. On the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Bern: Francke, Bern 1949, pp. 22–36.
• with Hildegard Hiltmann (Ed.): The color pyramid test according to Max Pfister . Huber, Bern 1951.
• Nicolai Hartmann. In: Heinz Heimsoeth, Robert Heiß (ed.). The thinker and his work. Fifteen papers with a bibliography. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1952, pp. 15–28.
• General depth psychology . Huber, Bern 1956.
• Nature and Forms of Dialectics . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1959.
• The great dialecticians of the 19th century: Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1963.
• (with Karl-Josef Groffmann, Lothar Michel). (Ed.). Handbook of Psychology . Volume 6. Psychological Diagnostics. Hogrefe, Göttingen 1971.
• Utopia and revolution . Piper, Munich 1973. ISBN 3-492-00352-4 .

literature

• Ulfried Geuter: data on the history of German psychology. Volume 1. Verlag für Psychologie Hogrefe, Göttingen, 1986. ISBN 3-8017-0225-1 .
• Robert Heiss: General Psychology. Lecture in the summer semester of 1937 at the University of Cologne (with a biographical appendix and catalog raisonné, edited by Jochen Fahrenberg). Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg: Psychological Institute 1990.
• Hildegard Hiltmann, Franz Vonessen (ed.): Dialectics and dynamics of the person. Festschrift for Robert Heiss for his 60th birthday . Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 1963.
• Karl-Josef Groffmann, Karl-Herrmann Wewetzer (eds.). Person as process. Festschrift for the 65th birthday of Prof. Dr. phil. Robert Heiss. Huber, Bern 1968.
• Jochen Fahrenberg: Psychological Interpretation. Biographies, texts, tests. Verlag Hans Huber, Bern, 2002. ISBN 3-456-83897-2 .
• Jochen Fahrenberg, Reiner Stegie: Relationships between philosophy and psychology at the Freiburg University: On the history of the psychological laboratory / institute . In: Jürgen Jahnke, Jochen Fahrenberg, Reiner Stegie, Eberhard Bauer (eds.). History of Psychology - Relationships with Philosophy and Frontier Areas. Munich: Profil-Verlag, Munich 1989, pp. 251-266. ISBN 3-89019-461-3
• Eckhard Wirbelauer (ed.). The Freiburg Philosophical Faculty 1920 - 1960. Freiburg contributions to the history of science and universities. Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg 2006, pp. 468–476. ISBN 3-495-49604-1
• Jochen Fahrenberg : Robert Heiss. In: Fred Ludwig Sepainter (Ed.): Baden-Württembergische Biographien. Volume V. On behalf of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies Baden-Württemberg. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-17-024863-2 , pp. 154–157.

Web links

• Literature by and about Robert Heiss in the catalog of the German National Library
• History of the Institute for Psychology at the University of Freiburg

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Ulried Geuter: Data on the history of German psychology . Volume 1. Verlag für Psychologie Hogrefe. Göttingen 1986, page 173
2. ↑ Newsletter of the German Science and Technology, organ of the Reich Research Council (Hrsg.): Research and progress . Staff news. Appointments. tape 19, 23/24 , 1943, pp. 252 .
3. ↑ Freiburg University Archives, UAF B24 / 1249–50, B254 / 36
4. ↑ Freiburg University Archives, UAF B24 / 1249–50, B254 / 36.