Wolfgang Metzger

Wolfgang Metzger ( born July 22, 1899 in Heidelberg, † 20 December 1979 Bebenhausen ) was a German psychologist. He is considered one of the most important representatives of the second generation of Gestalt theory of the Berlin School in Germany - along with Edwin noise and Kurt Gottschaldt.

Life

Metzger studied with the founders of Gestalt psychology, Wolfgang Köhler and Max Wertheimer. He tried, after they have been forced by the rise to power of the Nazis to emigrate to the United States to obtain the creative theoretical tradition in Germany and after the Second World War, the most influential representatives of Gestalt psychology school in Germany. His major works have been translated into numerous languages. Especially close were his connections to be designed theoretically oriented researchers and academics in Japan and Italy, where his works were highly appreciated and influenced especially the perception research strong. The relevance of his wahrnehmungspychologischen research demonstrated not least by the fact that his perceptual psychology major work was translated into English in 2006 Laws of seeing ( ' Laws of Seeing ').

Wolfgang Metzger has made deserves the empirical- experimental testing of hypotheses of depth psychology and psychoanalysis. An overview to give contributions in his Selected Works, by Michael Stadler (former assistant butcher, a professor at the University of Bremen ) and Heinrich Crabus were issued.

During the Nazi era was Metzger Member of NSDAP and SA. In 1942 he took a professorship at the University of Münster (Department of Psychology and Education ) and built a psychological institute on. Until his retirement in 1968 he was professor of psychology at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster.

He was the first chairman of the German Society of Psychology (1962-1964) and since 1970 its honorary member. He was co- founder in 1962 and first chairman of Alfred Adler Society (later the German Society for Individual Psychology ) and Honorary President of the Society for Gestalt Theory and its Applications (GTA ). The latter writes every two years internationally from a named after Wolfgang Metzger scientific price.

From 1972, he wrote numerous explanatory prefaces to the published in the Fischer -Taschenbuch -Verlag works of Alfred Adler.

Works

As his main works are:

  • Psychology - development of their basic assumptions, since the introduction of the experiment, first edition 1941; 6th Edition Publisher Krammer, Vienna 2001
  • Laws of seeing, first edition 1936; 2nd expanded edition Publisher Waldemar Kramer, Frankfurt 1953; 3 again extended edition Publisher Waldemar Kramer, Frankfurt, 1975; 4 unchanged edition Publisher Klotz, Eschborn 2008, ISBN 978-3-88074-492-9; English translation of the 2nd edition: Laws of Seeing, MIT Press, Cambridge (USA) 2006
  • Creative freedom, Kramer Verlag, Frankfurt 1962
  • Wolfgang Metzger, Gestalt psychology. Selected works from the years 1950-1982, Verlag Waldemar Kramer, Frankfurt 1999, 2nd edition
  • " Psychology between the natural sciences and the humanities " by Wolfgang Metzger. In: Henry Balmer ( eds.), The psychology of the 20th century, Volume 1, Kindler Verlag, Zurich 1976, p.27 - 40th
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