Important Psychologist Kurt Lewin and His Work Essay

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Lewin and the Personality

Kurt Lewin was a Jewish psychologist from Prussia, who immigrated to America following Hitler's rise to power in Germany. There Lewin developed what later became known as "sensitivity training" in America (Lasch-Quinn, 2001). This area of expertise allowed Lewin to focus his attention on subjects with extra attention and care and it was this insightulness into how personalities are shaped that helped him to realize that humans are shaped by a complex interaction of both nature and nurture and not simply one over the other. What Lewin realized was that humans are born with natural predispositions (personalities) but that those predispositions are also affected and influenced by the environment in which one is born and raised. So there is an interplay between the two.

This idea of Lewin's originate in, and is what also gave him the ability to write, A Dynamic Theory of Personality, which utilized empirical evidence in order to suggest theories for the development of the human personality from childhood onward (Lewin, 1935). But even prior to this, Lewin showed great interest in the displays of personality development in children. For example in his scientific film "The child and the field forces" (1925), Lewin photographed children at play and noted the various forces at work. For instance, he described one boy as showing "simultaneous attraction and repulsion (a positive and a negative valence)" for the sea, which "in the same place leads in this case to oscillation of the actions" (Lewin, 1925).

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The boy would run to get his sailboat and run to the shore before a wave reached him. It was the perfect oscillation, back and forth every time, the sea both signaling and luring the boy and also frightening him and scaring him away.

In this manner, Lewin's psychological insights, such as field theory, have given students better access into the development of the mind. What field theory holds is that "behavior is a function of the field that exists at the time the behavior occurs" (Hall, 1988, p. 397). But this was not Lewin's only theory: he produced several others that built on the field of psychoanalysis and developed similarly to other psychologists. As Hall (1988) points out, Lewin's position on personality development may be accurately described as "trait theory," because it recognizes personality traits in individuals from an early age and suggests how these traits might assist in directing the life path of the individual (p. 314). In his structure of personality, Lewin focuses on the "life space," differentiation, "connections between regions" and the number of them, and the individual person who is in the environment (because they have their own traits as does the environment around them); and in his dynamics of personality, Lewin focuses on energy, tension, need, valence, force/vector, locomotion, and action (Hall, 1988).

With regard to childhood events that could lead to the child developing a lifetime in art, there might be a combination of factors….....

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