Max Wertheimer (Wertheimer, 1880-1943) — German and American psychologist, founder of Gestalt psychology.
Professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main (since 1929), and after emigration — in New York (since 1933) at the School of Social Research. In 1921, together with the German psychologists K. Koffka and W. Köhler, he founded the journal Psychologische Forschungen, which published the work of Gestalt psychologists.
In his first experimental work devoted to the study of motion perception (1912), Wertheimer established that the features of the structure of perception observed by the researcher cannot be explained by the nature of the individual elements of the perceived situation, but require consideration of the connection of these elements, the integrity of the situation. The focus on the study of the integral structure (Gestalt) of the perceived image was the main principle of Gestalt psychology. Wertheimer extended the principles of Gestalt psychology from the field of perception to other mental processes, in particular to thinking, which he understood as a process of successive change of gestalts, different types of vision of a situation under the influence of a naturally occurring or specially set task. The solution of the problem, according to Wertheimer, occurs when the structure of the vision of the situation coincides with the objective structure of the situation itself. In accordance with this, Wertheimer saw the mechanisms of thinking not in associations, but in actions to structure and restructure the image of the situation in accordance with the task being solved. These views of Wertheimer, most fully expounded in the work «Productive Thinking», which is considered a classic, constituted an era in the psychological study of thinking. As the subsequent development of psychology showed, one of the most vulnerable points of Wertheimer’s concept was the fact that the explanation of the mechanisms of thinking was given in it without taking into account the socio-historical nature of mental activity.
Wertheimer is also known for his work in the field of musical perception, the psychology of «primitive peoples», the development of a psychological «lie detector», etc.