Kurt Lewin

Born Sept. 9, 1890, in Poznań; died Feb. 12, 1947, in Newton, Mass. German-American psychologist.

Lewin was a professor at the University of Berlin from 1926 to 1933. From 1932 to 1944 he was a professor at Stanford and Cornell Universities and at the University of Iowa. He was an organizer and director of the Research Center for Group Dynamics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1945 to 1947.

During the 1920’s, Lewin was a representative of the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology, engaged in the experimental study of will and affect. Subsequently he developed a concept of personality whose basis was the concept of “field.” The term was borrowed from physics and characterizes the psychological unity of personality and surroundings—the totality of interconnected factors (the field of events that are possible for a given individual; the field of forces that predetermine which of the possibilities will be realized in the behavior of the individual). The behavior of the individual is the external expression of events occurring in the psychological field; these events consist either of a shift from one region of the field to another or of a change in the structure of the field itself, described by Lewin by means of the concept of topology.

The concept of field is an example of Lewin’s characteristic interest in restructuring psychology on the model of the exact sciences (primarily physics). Thus, motivation, which, in contrast to the approach of Gestalt psychology, became one of Lewin’s fundamental concepts, was in Lewin’s view abstracted from the object-meaning content (social and historical, in the final analysis) of the situation in which the motivational dynamics is realized. Numerous experimental works performed by Lewin and his students (problems of memorizing and resuming interrupted actions, psychological substitution, frustration, the “aspiration level” of personality) laid the foundations of the present-day experimental study of motivation. Lewin was one of the pioneers of experimental research in group psychology, or group dynamics. He became part of the scientific group led by N. Wiener, which developed the basic principles of cybernetics.