Wertheimer, Max | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Wertheimer, Max

1880–1943

GERMAN-AMERICAN PROFESSOR, LECTURER UNIVERSITY OF PRAGUE, PHILOSOPHY, 1902; UNIVERSITY OF WÜRZBURG, PhD IN PHILOSOPHY, 1904

Brief Overview

Science is rooted in the will to truth. With the will to truth it stands or falls. Lower the standard even slightly and science becomes diseased to the core. Not only science, but also man. The will to truth, pure and unadulterated, is among the essential conditions of his existence; if the standard is compromised, he easily becomes a tragic caricature of himself.

—Max Wertheimer, "On Truth," published in Social Research in 1934.

For Max Wertheimer and the Gestalt therapy for which he became best known, truth began with a train trip and a simple child's toy. When 30-year-old Wertheimer left Vienna, Austria for a vacation in Germany's Rhineland in 1910, he had no idea that his holiday would never come to be. Equally he had no idea that his idle thoughts on that train trip would lead to a discovery that would irrevocably alter not only his own life, but produce profound changes in psychology-related disciplines all over the world. Gestalt, the notion that the whole is not only greater than its components, but also different from those components; was little more than a lone, obscure, and struggling concept that summer day in 1910 as Wertheimer rode the train.

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