Walter Blumenfeld

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Walter Blumenfeld (around 1940)

Walter Blumenfeld (born July 2, 1882 in Neuruppin ; died June 23, 1967 in Lima ( Peru )) was a German-Peruvian psychologist . He was best known for his description of the Blumenfeld effect, named after him, in work organization.

Life

Walter Blumenfeld was born the son of the businessman Hermann Blumenfeld and his wife Cäcilie (née Meyer), attended the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Neuruppin and graduated from high school in 1900. He then began studying electrical engineering at the Technical University of Charlottenburg , after graduating in 1906, he worked as an electrical engineer at AEG until 1908 . This was followed by further studies of philosophy and psychology at the University of Berlin , which he completed in 1912 with a doctorate under Carl Stumpf on investigations into the apparent size of the visual space . After the First World War , which he experienced as a radio telegraph operator, he began his habilitation on the critical foundation of psychology , which he submitted to the TH Dresden in 1920 . In 1923 he received an extraordinary professorship at this university and founded the psychotechnical institute there . In 1926 he was employed as a lecturer at the Pedagogical Institute.

On February 26, 1934, he was forced to retire due to his Jewish origins. In 1935 he emigrated with his family to Switzerland and then to Peru, where he was appointed professor of psychology and education at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos .

He set up a psychological institute in Lima and is considered one of the co-founders of Peruvian psychology. In 1949 he was also a visiting professor at the University of San Miguel de Tucumán in Argentina . In 1960 he retired.

Services

Blumenfeld worked in experimental psychology , especially in visual perception , as well as applied psychology , especially psychotechnology , aptitude diagnostics, work organization and advertising psychology. His study judgment and appraisal concludes that the fractionation of labor acts, i. H. the breakdown into individual, for the individual known and manageable partial actions (partial steps), on motivation and concentration has a demonstrably positive effect (the later named Blumenfeld effect ).

In his work Sense and Nonsense (Spanish Sentido y sinsentido ) he takes a position on epistemological questions, influenced in the sense of Neo-Kantianism , on how the relationship between sense and nonsense should be understood. Based on the five types of meaning that he identifies (semantic meaning, purpose, gestalt, motivation, and reasoning), he clarifies the understanding of how meaning generation are active processes that depend on the respective context.

In his Spanish-language work, topics of developmental psychology in adolescence, intelligence measurement and experimental psychological topics are dealt with.

Selected Works

  • Judgment and judgment . Leipzig, 1931.
  • Sense and nonsense . Munich, 1933.
  • Youth as a conflict situation . Berlin, 1936 (reprinted by Universitätsverlag, Passau 1988).
  • Introducción a la Psicología Experimental . Lima, 1946 (several editions until 1954).
  • Sentido y sinsentido . Buenos Aires, Editorial Losada, 1949 (Spanish edition of the Munich original from 1933).
  • La antropología filosófica de Martin Buber y la Filosofía antropológica . Lima, Sociedad Peruana de Filosofía.
  • with V. Tapia: Investigaciones sobre ciertos rasgos caracterológicos . Lima, Editorial San Marcos, 1959.
  • Valor y valoración . Lima, 1959 (extended Spanish edition of his study at the TH Dresden from 1931).
  • Psicología del Aprendizaje. Un libro para maestros y estudiantes . Lima, 1957 (several further and improved editions until 1967).
  • La juventud como situación conflictiva . Lima, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1963 (expanded edition of the original from 1936, published in German in 1988 based on its handwritten last copy).
  • Contribuciones críticas y constructivas a la problemática de la ética . Lima, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1966.
  • Moral Consciousness Bouvier, Bonn 1968.

From 1935 on, Blumenfeld published numerous specialist articles in Peru.

literature

  • Blumenfeld, Walter In: Uwe Wolfradt, Elfriede Billmann-Mahecha, Armin Stock (eds.): German-speaking psychologists 1933–1945. Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden 2015, ISBN 978-3-658-01480-3 .

Web links