Mitchell G. Ash. Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890–1967: Holism and theQuest for Objectivity.New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 513 pp. ISBN0-521-47540-6

In a commentary-essay written in 1993, Mitchell Ash reviewed the state of the field ofhistory of psychology and noted that it had “undergone a renaissance during the past tenyears.” Having begun by challenging “formerly unqueried textbook generalities,” a small cohort of scholars had worked on various fronts to establish an alternative, theoretically-sophisticated research program that aimed to bring the field more directly into the mainstream of historical studies of science, even as it did not wholly disregard a perceivedobligation to remain “relevant” to psychology proper.1

Perhaps no one in this cohort has been more activist and tireless than Ash himself. The paper trail of his conceptual contributions to the larger effort mark out an effort particu-larly to insist that the history of psychology is integrally tied to the making and unmaking ofinstitutions, to the history of the university, to questions about disciplinary formation, and tothe migration and trasmutation of ideas across national contexts. His new book,Gestalt Psy-chology in German Culture,is the seasoned contribution of a scholar who has infused hislong-standing interest and knowledge of a particular and important effort and moment in thehistory of psychology with a digested mix of these broader historiographic commitments.

The result is a book that not only is the most comprehensive and authoritative narrativehistory of Gestalt psychology we are apt to see, but also a study concerned with “recenter-ing” (to use a term coined by the Gestalt psychologists themselves) a number of our assump-tions about what this research effort was all about—an effect achieved by situating itsystematically in its various shaping, facilitating and constraining contexts: philosophical/in-tellectual; laboratory/practical, institutional; and political/cultural. As Ash puts it, “Scientistslive simultaneously in all of these social realms. Focusing on a single important group of sci-entists, such as the Gestalt theorists, is a way of showing how their multiple social identitiesand their discourses interact.”

What follows is a labor of scholarly love, steeped in the archival literature, enlivened byinterviews with survivors from those years, and grounded in exhaustive mastery of the pub-lished primary sources. The work is particularly impressive for the author’s dedication to in-tegrating attention to the “actual stuff” of Gestalt psychology itself—the studies, what theywere asking, how they were carried out—into a theoretically-sensitive, thickening andevolving narrative over more than a half-century of disciplinary formation, elaboration, andfinally partially disintegration.

Although Gestalt theory came of age in the late Wilhelminian and Weimar years in Ger-many, a late-curtain drama in Ash’s story involves, of course, the impact of the rise ofNazism on the people, institutions, and knowledge-claims associated with this movement.Here Ash aims, also, to make a contribution to the still-evolving literature on science andNational Socialism, particularly the revisionist school that is, in various ways, empiricallychallenging older arguments that the “irrationalist,” “antimodern” thrust of National Social-ism was systematically destructive to science. In fact, as Ash shows in tempered form in hisown study, certain forms of science could and did survive under the Nazis and even ad-vanced in productive ways (however we might judge the ethical costs of such productivity).

The “figure-ground” thrust of the larger argument made by this book is clear, even if itsometimes demands disciplined reading: Ash is teaching us to “see” Gestalt theory (the fig-

ment in one after another setting, or ground. The metaphor I use to describe Ash s approach here is not exact—the “grounds” in this analysis are certainly interactive with the“fi gure(s).” Nevertheless,images of “embedding” and “locating” and “setting” do dominateas a language of method. Given this,I was also intrigued by places in Ash’s book wherethose metaphors seem to have fallen short for him,and he was pulled to somewhat differentmetaphors of relationality—images of “encounter,” for example (in an important chapter onWeimar culture towards the end of the book),or references scattered throughout the book to“resonances.” As historians,how do we think about carving and isolating? How do we thinkabout connecting? It strikes me that we—all of us—struggle, in ways not that differentfrom the struggles of the Gestalt theorists themselves,with the challenges of grasping howright relationship defines the crucial differences between something we understand as a“whole” versus something we understand as a “sum of parts.” In our writing, we struggle tomake relationality among the pieces of our understanding anschaulich (self-evident),but thetask is no easier for us than it was for the Gestalt theorists, and our shifting metaphors ofstrategy function as an evocative paper trail of our efforts.

Because this is explicitly a study of Gestalt theory in its German context (including, ifbriefly, in the postwar years),we American readers learn relatively little about the role playedby Gestalt psychology in the history of American psychology—there are perhaps otherplaces to go for that kind of exploration. (Ash is,I believe, engaged in a major new projectthat is actually concerned with how emigration and immigration in the behavioral sciences inthe 1930s played itself out across all the relevant national contexts.) At the same time, Ashconcludes his book with some larger reflections that do begin to suggest ways in which therather thorough eclipse of the Gestalt theory research program after World War II owedmuch to the growing dominance of an essentially North American approach to knowledge-discovery in the behavioral sciences:one much less “aesthetic”and much more organizedaround “technological-sounding discourses of causation and control” (408).

In its final pages, the book’s tone is at once both a little wistful and rather more as-sertive: in our current moment of understanding, with a growing focus in the sciences onself-organizing systems and the ways in which ordered patterns emerge out of chaos,Ashthinks there is a place for discovering a renewed relevance in the corpus of work producedby the talented group of scientists who called themselves Gestalt theorists. He concludes:“Gestalt theory has been a worthy participant in two central intellectual trends of our time:the revolt against dualism in twentieth-century thought; and the ongoing struggle betweenscience as technological manipulation and control, and science as an attempt to understandand appreciate order in nature. Returning from their time to ours, it seems strange and sad,that such dichotomies persist. . . ” (411). In the end, we are rightly committed as scholars toembedding and locating the scientific efforts of the past in the settings of their own time andplace, but it may be that we then care about what we learn in this way because we see thatwe have not,after all,journeyed to a wholly foreign country.

NOTES

1. Mitchell G. Ash, “Rhetoric, Society, and the Historiography of Psychology,” Annals of Theoretical Psychology8 (1993):49–57.

Reviewed by ANNE HARRINGTON, professor of the history of science and co-director of theMind/Brain/Behavior Interfaculty Initiative at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138.

Needless to say, I am flattered to receive such a laudatory review from such an eminentscholar. Anne Harrington has fully grasped my intellectual intentions. She has also understoodmy attitude toward Gestalt psychology itself and the broader scientific and cultural issues itshistory raises. What more can anyone wish for? Of course I wish that she had summarized myargument a bit more extensively. I also would have been happier if she had noted that thebroad opposition between “aesthetic”and “technological” conceptions of science, which I seereflected in this history, is not only mentioned in the final chapter, but is actually a persistenttheme throughout the book (see the Introduction and especially the discussions of WolfgangKöhler’s anthropoid research in Chapter 10 and of his Die physischen Gestaltenin Chapter11). But these are only minor irritations due to ordinary vanity on my part.

One implicit criticism, which may not have been intended as such, is contained in thestatement—also made in the preface of my book—that, because I have concentrated on theGerman story, readers learn little about Gestalt psychology in America. I published an essay onthe subject some years ago.1 As Harrington writes,I am currently working on a comprehensivestudy of emigré psychologists—not only the Gestalt theorists—since 1933. An essary I pub-lished last year in a volume on emigré scientists indicates the direction this work is taking.2

A second implicit criticism emerges from Harrington’s perceptive remarks about theshifting imagery I employ to try to situate scientific ideas and practices in culture. Suchchanging metaphors do indeed reflect, as Harrington notes,a common dilemma shared bymany historians of science, and not only by historians of holism. Many of us are searchingfor ways of overcoming convenient and still widely accepted but questionable dualisms be-tween the supposedly external cultural, political, or social “context” and the “actual (intel-lectual) content”of science. The challenge is to find a language that captures the complexand interactive relationships involved in a consistent manner and thus make it possible to ac-knowledge that our subjects are not eitherscientists,servants of the state, or human beings,but live in all of these worlds at once.

NOTES

1. M. G. Ash, “Gestalt Psychology: Origins in Germany and Reception in the United States,” in C. Buxton,Ed.,Points of View in the Modern History of Psychology (San Diego, Orlando, New York: Academic Press,1985),295–344.2. M. G. Ash, “Emigré Psychologists after 1933:Migration, Science, and Practice,” in M. G. Ash and A. Söllner,

Eds.,Forced Migration and Scientific Change: Emigré German-Speaking Scientists after 1933(Cambridge & NewYork: Cambridge University Press,1996),117–138.