Kurt Lewin: An Overview
By Shea Stevens
Overview of Lewin and His Contributions to Psychology
Kurt Lewin was a Jewish man born in 1890 in an area of the German Empire that is modern day Poland. He worked with the gestalt psychologists in Berlin and he also associated with the Frankfurt School. He differed from others working in the area of gestalt psychology in the way he applied the gestalt model to people’s life experiences.
He answered the question of how the gestalt is formed out of the field: his thesis was that the need organizes the perception of the field and the acting in the field. Lewin and his assistant Bluma Zeigarnik formulated the gestalt concept of unfinished business, and Lewin is also known for his equation for behavior: B = ƒ(P, E), behavior (B) is a function (f) of personal characteristics (P), and environmental characteristics (E). (See Lewin quotes below).
Today, Lewin’s name is associated with that equation and he is remembered in gestalt therapy for how he applied Field Theory to the study of human behavior.
Field Theory: Cornerstone of Gestalt Therapy
Gestalt therapy, founded by Fritz and Laura Perls and developed by many others over time, echoes Kurt Lewin’s field theory perspective and shares common roots in gestalt psychology with Lewin. However, Lewin himself was not one of the founders of gestalt therapy or closely connected to its founding. His name and work with the gestalt psychologists was known to the Perls while they were in Germany, but Lewin moved to the United States in 1933 where he continued to formulate his field theory ideas, while the Perls did not move to the US until 1946, a year before he died. I am unsure of the extent to which the Perls and others in the gestalt therapy theoretical tradition were directly in contact with Lewin and his written work after he went to America.
Regardless, in gestalt therapy today there is widespread familiarity with the name Kurt Lewin and there is a strong association between his name and Field Theory in gestalt. Gary Yontef has said that field theory is one of the three cornerstones of gestalt therapy, along with phenomenology and dialogic existentialism. Yontef’s paper, “Introduction to Field Theory,” makes numerous references to Lewin. My blog post on Field Theory is here.
Lewin was a brilliant and prolific writer, who touched on many subjects in his life’s work before his passing in 1947 at the age of 56: philosophy, physics, social psychology, topology, and he lived out a balanced appreciation for both theory and research. In this post I will only be able to reference a small portion of his written works, ones which seem especially relevant to gestalt theory:
A Dynamic Theory of Personality
Lewin published a collection of selected papers titled “A Dynamic Theory of Personality” in 1935 in the United States, the papers translated into English. In this collected works, Lewin explores a “psychology of the person and of the environment.”
The book is divided into eight chapters: 1) The Conflict Between Aristotelian and Galileian Modes of Thought in Contemporary Psychology, 2) On the Structure of the Mind, 3) Environmental Forces in Child Behavior and Development, 4) The Psychological Situations of Reward and Punishment, 5) Education for Reality, 6) Substitute Activity and Substitute Value, 7) A Dynamic Theory of the Feeble-Minded, and 8) Survey of the Experimental Investigations.
Those interested in Lewin’s writing as it relates to gestalt and field theory may want to read selections from chapters one through three, and reading directly from these and other works of his is recommended. His writing is difficult to break up into short quotations. Following are quotes from these chapters to just provide a sample:
“…psychical energies, that is, tense psychical systems which derive, as a rule, from the pressure of will or of a need, are always the necessary condition of the occurance…of the psychical event.” Ch 2, p. 44
“…in order that…a process occur…energy capable of doing work must be set free. One must therefore inquire of every psychical event whence the causal energies come.” Ch. 2, pp. 45-46
“The presence or absence of this sort of reservoir of energy, that is, of certain needs or need-like tensions, makes itself noticeable again and again in various forms in the whole field of psychology of will and impulse.” Ch. 2, p. 50
“…each single everyday experience of the past may somehow influence the present psychic life. But this influence is in most cases to be evaluated in just the same way as the influence of some specific changes in a fixed star upon the physical processes in my study: it is not that an influence exists but that the influence is extremely small, approximately zero.” Ch. 2, p. 53
“It is necessary always to determine where we have to deal with wholes and where not.” Ch. 2, p. 58
“The psychical processes may often, by the use of certain points of view, be deduced from the tendency to equilibrium…” Ch. 2, p. 58
“The calculation of an average (e.g., of “the one-year-old child”) is designed to eliminate the “accidents” of the environment; the determination of the “average situation” (e.g., of the average effect of the situation of being an only child) is to exclude individual variations. But the very relation that is decisive for the investigation of dynamics— namely, that of the position of the actual individual child in the actual, concrete, total situation— is thereby abstracted. An inference from the average to the concrete particular case is hence impossible. The concepts of the average child and of the average situation are abstractions that have no utility whatever for the investigation of dynamics.” Ch 3, p. 68
Behavior and Development as a Function of the Total Situation
This paper was published in 1946 in the United States as a chapter in the Manual of Child Psychology. It was later included in the 1976 publication of collected works by Lewin, titled Field Theory in Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers, which is where the quotes below come from.
The book, Field Theory in Social Science, is divided into these ten chapters: 1) Formalization and Progress in Psychology, 2) Constructs in Field Theory, 3) Defining the “Field at a Given Time,” 4) Field Theory and Learning, 5) Regression, Retrogression, and Development, 6) Field Theory and Experiment in Social Psychology, 7) Problems of Research in Social Psychology, 8) Psychological Ecology, 9) Frontiers in Group Dynamics, and 10) Behavior and Development as a Function of the Total Situation.
Following are some quotes from Behavior and Development in Ch. 10, which is recommended reading for those interested in Lewin from a gestalt theory perspective. This paper is where you can find the equation B = F (P, E) = F (LSp) mentioned:
“In summary, one can say that behavior and development depend upon the state of the person and his environment, B = F (P, E). In this equation the person (P) and his environment (E) have to be viewed as variables which are mutually dependent upon each other. In other words, to understand or to predict behavior, the person and his environment have to be considered as one constellation of inter-dependent factors. We call the totality of these factors the life space (LSp) of that individual, and write B = F (P, E) = F (LSp). The life space, therefore, includes both the person and his psychological environment.” pp. 239-240
“A totality of coexisting facts which are conceived of as mutually inter-dependent is called a field. Psychology has to view the life space, including the person and his environment, as one field.” p. 240
“A prerequisite for properly guiding a child or for the theoretical understanding of his behavior is the distinction between that situation which the teacher, the parents, or the experimenter sees and that situation which exists for the child as his life space. Objectivity in psychology demands representing the field correctly as it exists for the individual in question in that particular time. For this field the child’s friendships, conscious and ‘unconscious’ goals, dreams, ideals, and fears are at least as essential as any physical setting.” p. 240
“How needs arise in the long-range history of a person and in momentary situations is one of the basic problems of child psychology.” (Lewin spends pages examining the topic of needs, how they shift, and distinguishing “induced needs” vs “own needs.”)
“It can be expected that all problems of individual differences will be linked more and more with the general psychological laws of behavior and development and that in this way a deeper understanding of both the individual differences and the general laws will be possible.” p. 297 (The concluding sentence of the paper.)
References:
Lewin, Kurt. A Dynamic Theory of Personality (1935)
Lewin, Kurt. “Behavior and development as a function of the total situation.” Carmichael, Leonard (Ed). (1946). Manual of child psychology , (pp. 791-844). Hoboken, NJ, US: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., viii, 1068 pp.
Lewin, Kurt. Field Theory in Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers. (1976).
Yontef, Gary. Awareness, Dialogue & Process: Essays on Gestalt Therapy, Chapter 10: “Introduction to Field Theory” (essay from 1991).
Other Related Articles:
Lindorfer, Bernadette. “Personality Theory in Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy: Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory and his Theory of Systems in Tension Revisited” (2020) in Gestalt Theory, Vol. 43, No. 1, 29-46