Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory: a review and Re-evaluation

The influence of gestalt psychology

Lewin’s field theory argues that behaviour is derived from the totality of coexisting and interdependent forces that impinge on a person or group and make up the life space in which the behaviour takes place (Lewin 1942). In developing field theory, Lewin was greatly influenced by gestalt psychology, which emerged in Germany in the early part of the 20th century (Köhler 1967). For psychologists, a gestalt is a perceptual pattern or configuration that is the con- struct of the individual mind. It is a coherent whole that has specific properties that can neither be derived from the individual elements nor be consid- ered merely as the sum of them (Kadar and Shaw 2000). As French and Bell (1990, p. 140) observed, ‘gestalt therapy is based on the belief that persons function as whole, total organisms’.

Gestalt psychology strongly challenged the then dominant structuralist and behaviourist theories of psychology, which maintained that human beings are simply the sum of their parts, and that the individual parts can be identified and the causes of behaviour related to individual external stimuli (Deutsch 1968; Lewin 1939b; Martin 2003). Indeed, the prevailing view among psychologists at that time was that sub- jective experience, like perception, played no part in behaviour and was an ‘improper subject for scientific inquiry’ (Rock and Palmer 1990, p. 61). The notion was that discrete stimuli bring about discrete responses that are not affected by the individual’s perception of these. Behaviourists and structuralists claimed that only discrete events that can be observed mattered, and that these ‘observables’ could be counted and analysed and mathematical relation- ships between them determined (Rummel 1975).
Gestalt psychologists take a very different view. First, they maintain that the individual as a whole person is different from the sum of their parts, and that the individual parts are interdependent and inter- act in a dynamic fashion. Therefore, looking at indi- vidual elements separately from each other and separate from the person’s perceptual or psychologi- cal environment produces a misleading view of the causes of human behaviour and how it can be changed. Second, they argue that individuals’ behav- iour is the product of their current environment and how individuals perceive the environment (Köhler 1967; Martin 2003). From the gestalt perspective, behaviour is not just a product of external stimuli; rather, it arises from how the individual perceives these stimuli. That is to say, how a person behaves is not just dependent on the forces that impinge on them, but also on their subjective perception of these forces. Consequently, two people may see or experi- ence a phenomenon, but perceive it in very different ways (Rock and Palmer 1990; Rummel 1975). For gestalt psychologists, behavioural change is a learn- ing process, which involves gaining or changing per- ceptions, insights, outlooks, expectations or thought patterns (French and Bell 1990). In explaining an individual’s behaviour, gestaltists take into account not only a person’s actions and the responses these elicit, but also the interpretation the individual places on these. Consequently, in organizational terms, gestalt psychologists seek to help individuals and groups to change their perception of themselves and the situation in question, which, in turn, they believe will lead to changes in behaviour (Smith et al. 1982). Lewin became interested in gestalt psychology when, on being demobilized from the German army after World War I, he went to work at the Psycho- logical Institute in the University of Berlin. It was there he met and worked with two of the founders of gestalt psychology, Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler (Köhler 1967; Marrow 1969). It was the holistic nature of gestaltism that attracted Lewin. He maintained that piecemeal analysis of individual stimuli and actions could not give a true or accurate picture of the reasons why a person behaved as they did. Instead, he felt that gestalt psychology, by seeking to understand the totality of a person’s situ- ation, seemed much nearer to the way in which an individual actually experienced life. Like Lewin, Köhler and Wertheimer moved to the USA to escape the rise of Nazism, but Lewin’s work began to diverge from theirs. Köhler and Wertheimer contin- ued to pursue their laboratory-based experiments. Lewin, in contrast, had become more preoccupied with real-world issues and the need to understand and change human behaviour (Arnheim 1986; Bargal 1998; Köhler 1967; Marrow 1969). This put Lewin at odds with Köhler, who found Lewin’s later work too ‘heretical’ for his taste (Marrow 1969, p. 159). Nev- ertheless, Lewin made a valuable contribution to the early development of gestalt psychology and, as the following section shows, it clearly underpins the principles on which his field theory was built (Lewin 1939b).