Vienna School (Developmental Psychology)

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The Vienna School of Developmental Psychology was a center for child and adolescent psychological research that was carried out at the Vienna Psychological Institute with a wide range of topics and methodological diversity from 1922 to 1938.

history

With the appointment of Karl Bühler in 1922, the work began, to which his wife Charlotte Bühler , who had already qualified as a professor in Dresden, came the following year . A municipal facility was connected to the university institute, the experimental psychological laboratory, which was assigned to teacher training in the pedagogical institute in “red”, ie, Vienna, which was governed by social democracy . The school politician who promoted the work was Otto Glöckel . Charlotte Bühler, who was appointed associate professor in 1929, founded her own child psychology institute in 1935. Hitler's invasion of Austria in 1938 and Bühler's arrest ended the work due to the former left wing protection and anti-Semitism .

The transfer of animal psychological observation methods to monkeys from Wolfgang Köhler to children, who were observed and logged for 24 hours, was methodologically new . For this purpose, the municipal “child takeover point”, a quarantine station, and the central children 's home (today Charlotte-Bühler-Heim ) were used. Later, however, the analogies between animals and children were self-critically relativized. Observing and researching the behavior of children in everyday situations promoted practical research. As a result of the impoverishment after the First World War, youth problems in particular had increased significantly. Charlotte Bühler was in the USA for ten months in 1924/25 to study the observation methods of behaviorism , which were then imitated in Vienna. But the Vienna School stuck to the idea of ​​development, which was too speculative for the behaviorists who only worked strictly empirically. On the other hand, the school kept its distance from the Viennese psychoanalysis around Sigmund Freud (at the Medical Faculty), even if there at the same time the idea ( Anna Freud , Hermine Hug-Helmuth ) arose of scientifically evaluating children's records like diaries. Many Viennese students attended events in both directions and later attempted syntheses (Hans Leo Kreitler). Karl Raimund Popper did his doctorate at the institute, who strongly rejected psychoanalysis.

Assistants were Helmut Bo (c) ksch, from 1929 Egon Brunswik . Through Charlotte Bühler's contacts in the USA ( Arnold Gesell , Edward Tolman ), funding from the Rockefeller Foundation was achieved . Important researchers were Paul Lazarsfeld , Else Frenkel , Hildegard Hetzer , and Lotte Schenk-Danzinger . Developed z. B. Holistic school readiness tests . The previous tests of intelligence have been criticized as being too dependent on social, linguistic and also cultural requirements. Tests for children under the age of four were also developed in order to make prognoses based on the developmental age reached. They became known as the Bühler-Hetzer test , the use of which in later euthanasia constituted abuse. In the mid-1930s, research on entire life courses ( biography research ) came into focus, as to what a “fulfilled life” can mean. From here one path later led to humanistic psychology .

In 1929 the 11th Congress of the Society for Experimental Psychology took place in Vienna, where it was renamed the German Society for Psychology .

literature

  • Charlotte Bühler: Childhood and Adolescence . Genesis of Consciousness , Leipzig 1928
  • Ch. Bühler with Hetzer, H .: Toddler tests. Development tests for the first to sixth year of life. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1932
  • Ch. Bühler: The human life course as a psychological problem . Leipzig 1933
  • Lieselotte Ahnert (ed.): Charlotte Bühler and developmental psychology , V&R unipress, Vienna 2015 ISBN 978-3847104308 google online
  • Georg Eckardt: Core problems in the history of psychology , VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2010 google online
  • Helmut E. Lück / Rudolf Müller (eds.): Illustrated history of psychology , Beltz, 2nd edition Weinheim 1999 ISBN 3-621-27460-X

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ^ Lieselotte Ahnert: Charlotte Bühler and developmental psychology . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015, ISBN 978-3-8470-0430-1 ( google.de [accessed on May 29, 2020]).