Wolfgang Köhler

Born Jan. 21, 1887, in Tallinn; died June 11, 1967, in Enfield, New Hampshire. German psychologist, with M. Wertheimer and K. Koffka, one of the founders of gestalt psychology.

Köhler became a professor of psychology and philosophy at the universities of Göttingen and Berlin in 1922 and director of the Psychology Institute at the latter. In 1935 he moved to the USA, where he became a professor at Swarthmore College.

Köhler’s work at the zoological station on the island of Tenerife between 1913 and 1940 investigating the intellect of anthropoid apes attained wide renown. He came to the conclusions that (1) the rational behavior of the chimpanzee is of the same type as that of man, the difference lying only in the degree of complexity of the forms or structure of the behavior; (2) the structure of behavior consists in a certain integrated structure of action, or gestalt, that arises in connection with the visual perception of a situation; and (3) the nature of that perception is that of an integrated and simultaneous “grasp” of relationships (insight), irreducible to separate elements. Köhler’s rejection of the differences in principle between the intellects of man and anthropoids has since been subjected to criticism by psychologists.

Köhler’s work from the 1940’s through the 1960’s was devoted to an attempt to establish the structural identity of physical and psychic phenomena. Proceeding from an erroneous naturalistic point of view, he attempted to demonstrate the principle of the isomorphism of the brain’s physicophysiological structures and its psychic processes, in particular, by trying to infer psychic laws (the concept being approached in a gestalt sense) from an analysis of the brain’s electrical activity.