In 1917, Kurt Lewin
married a schoolteacher Maria Landsberg. They had two children, daughter Agnes and son
Fritz. The marriage lasted 10 years. During this period he was deeply involved in writing
articles, research papers in journals. His work and academic thoughts drew attention from
all over.
Lewin was engrossed in applied or industrial psychology. He wrote two papers on the subject in 1919 and 1920. He contended that a person produces to live and not vice versa. Lewin argued that the worker’s well-being is enhanced, not merely by reducing his man-hours on the job, but through the improvement of his psychological components (tangible and intangible benefits), the important factor being the enhancement of the inner value (motivation) afforded by working.
In 1922, he began to crystallize his philosophy of science. This was evident from his publication Der Begriff der Genese in Physik, Biologie and Entwicklungsgeschichte. – (In English titled : The concept of Genesis in Physics, Biology and Evolutionary History, 1922). This concept later led Lewin to his Dynamic theory and the Field approach in psychology. According to him, psychology had arrived at a Galileian turning point. He also pointed out that the psychologist must no longer think in Aristotelian terms of absolute contrasting pairs such as black and white but in terms of dynamic sequences, as per Galileo concepts of continuum in a unified field. From Lewin’s writings about field theory and field approach in psychology, we can assume that from 1922 to 1931, Lewin worked more under the influence of "Galileian Physics."
In 1927, he was promoted to the position of Ausserordentilicher professor in University of Berlin. At the psychological institute, Lewin established associations with Kohlar and Max Wertheimer. Both were in the institution establishing formulations for the new gestalt psychology, that Lewin found appealing. He was deeply interested in Gestalt phenomena and its explanations of actual experience, and he became a vital factor in the development of Gestalt’s school of thought. Lewin was enthusiastic and easy to approach, which attracted students into close-knit discussion groups around him. He oversaw many experimental investigations, while in Berlin. Girls also participated freely in both college debates and conducted research in Lewin’s charmed circle. It was Lewin who encouraged girl studentsto participate in group discussion as well as in
experimental investigations. This was when women were still being excluded from
Titchener’s Society of Experimental Psychologists in America. |
In 1929, his first trip to America was to attend a meeting of the
International Congress of Psychologists at Yale University. Before the meeting of I.C.P.,
Lewin’s works were reviewed by Professor J. F. Brown (one of the former American
Students of Lewin, in Berlin). Brown’s paper was published in The Psychological
Review, which had evaluated Lewin’s overall contribution to psychology for the
benefit of English language psychologists, for the first time in America. Here, Lewin
presented a film of a young child. He wanted to show the participants of the conference as
to how a young child learns to sit on a stone depicting the barriers and field forces at
play. Gordon Allport, one of the eminent psychologists of America, who saw the film said,
the film and Lewin were a hit at the Yale conference.
