Wolfgang Köhler

Wolfgang Koehler was born on 21 January 1887 in Reval (now Tallinn) in the Russian Empire, into a Baltic German family that moved to Germany shortly after his birth. He studied at the universities of Tuebingen (1905-06), Bonn (1906-07), and Berlin (1907-09), where he worked with Max Planck in physics and Carl Stumpf in psychology, an unusual joint formation that would later let him propose Gestalt structures as physical field analogues in the brain. He took his PhD at Berlin in 1909 with a psychoacoustic dissertation titled Akustische Untersuchungen, written under Stumpf.

In 1910 he became an assistant at the Psychological Institute in Frankfurt, where he met Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka. He and Koffka served as subjects in Wertheimer's celebrated studies of the phi phenomenon, or apparent movement, and from this collaboration Gestalt psychology was born. Some of its themes are indebted to Stumpf and to Christian von Ehrenfels, whose lectures Wertheimer had attended in Prague. In 1913 the Prussian Academy of Sciences sent Koehler to Tenerife in the Canary Islands as director of its anthropoid research station. World War I trapped him on the island, and he stayed six years (1913-1920), with research particularly concentrated in the first half of 1914 with his collaborator Mr. Teuber. His 1917 book The Mentality of Apes (republished in English in 1925) documented animals stacking crates as makeshift ladders to reach bananas and using sticks to lengthen the reach of their arms. He argued that the solutions were not produced by Edward Thorndike's trial and error but by insight — at the moment the animal grasps the answer, the action proceeds, in Koehler's words, unwaveringly purposeful. This is a turning point of the psychology of thinking, and Koehler wrote that the correlation between intelligence and brain development was thus confirmed.

Back in Germany in 1920, Koehler became Stumpf's successor as director of the Psychological Institute at the University of Berlin, where he led the Berlin School for fifteen years until 1935. The institute attracted Kurt Lewin, Karl Duncker, von Lauenstein, and Hedwig von Restorff, and Koehler co-founded the journal Psychologische Forschung. His Gestalt Psychology (1929), written for an American audience, contains his most famous and most misquoted claim. He insisted that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts — a stronger thesis than the popular paraphrase the whole is greater than the sum of its parts allows. In the same period he attacked the introspectionists for taking subjective self-reports as data without replicating them, and the behaviorists for dismissing direct experience as outside the scope of measurement.

When the Nazi party rose to power in January 1933 it began dismissing Jewish professors from German universities. Koehler, a non-Jewish academic, did not back down. On 28 April 1933 he published Gespraeche in Deutschland in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, attacking the regime openly — the last such article legally published under Nazi rule. He expected arrest, but the Nazis did not arrest him, and reprints circulated for four months as Jews and non-Jews alike wrote letters of gratitude. When professors were required to begin lectures with the Nazi salute in November 1933, he told his students he could not do this; the announcement was met with applause from rebels and even some sympathizers. After repeated unannounced inspections of his seminars he requested retirement in May 1934 and resigned in 1935, emigrating to the United States. Swarthmore College offered him a professorship, where he taught for twenty years and continued his research. In 1956 he became a research professor at Dartmouth College and president of the American Psychological Association, which awarded him its Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. He made yearly visits to the Free University of Berlin, advising the faculty and keeping them in touch with American psychology. The APA planned to give him its gold medal in 1967, but he died before it could be presented. He died on 11 June 1967 in Enfield, New Hampshire.

Koehler's posthumous legacy spans three continents and two disciplines. The Wolfgang Koehler Primate Research Center at Leipzig Zoo, run by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and directed by Michael Tomasello and Josep Call, continues the insight learning research he began on Tenerife. His 1933 anti-Nazi article is now studied not only in the history of psychology but in moral philosophy and political science as a documented case of professional courage under totalitarianism. He had been a non-Jewish German with every reason to keep his Berlin chair, and chose instead to publish, refuse the salute, and resign. A 2002 Review of General Psychology survey ranked him the 50th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, but the citation rank understates his influence: every textbook discussion of insight learning, every undergraduate lecture on Gestalt principles, and every contemporary primate cognition study at Leipzig owes part of its lineage to his six years on a Spanish island during World War I and to the fifteen years he led the Berlin school until the regime made it impossible to continue.