Lewin, Kurt | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Lewin, Kurt

1890–1947

GERMAN/AMERICAN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGIST, EDUCATOR, RESEARCHER

UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN, Ph.D., 1916

Brief Overview

At the time of Kurt Lewin's death in February 1947, he was widely regarded as one of the outstanding psychologists of his generation. Edward Tolman, the colleague who delivered a tribute to Lewin at a meeting of the American Psychological Association (APA) later that year, thought that Lewin could be compared to Freud himself.

Freud the clinician and Lewin the experimentalist—these are the two men whose names will stand before all others in the history of our psychological era. For it is their contrasting but complementary insights which first made psychology a science applicable to real human beings and to real human society.

One of many gifted scientists and teachers who fled Hitler's Germany for a new life in the United States, Lewin made significant contributions to so many different areas of psychology—child development, philosophy of science, psychology of prejudice, industrial psychology, organizational development, clinical psychology, personality structure, group process, leadership training, and others—that he has been called "the complete social scientist." As interested in applied psychology as he was in research, Lewin coined or popularized such terms and concepts as group dynamics, level of aspiration, sensitivity training, field theory, and action research.

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