Obituary for Michael Wertheimer

Abstract

Wertheimer, the visionary psychologist who led the development of Gestalt psychology, and Anni Caro Wertheimer. He came to the United States in 1933 as his Jewish family fled the Holocaust, from which not even his father's international reputation could protect them.Although we may consider 1951 to be the start of Professor Wertheimer's career as a teacher-scholar-the year he published his first peer-reviewed articles (Garner & Wertheimer, 1951;Wertheimer, 1951)-his interactions with the teaching of psychology started much earlier. Even as a child, Michael Wertheimer contributed to psychological theory and application, albeit unintentionally. For example, he and his older brother Val were the players in the "Two Boys Play Badminton" chapter in Productive Thinking (Wertheimer, 1982), one of the chapters in this foundational book that depicted Gestalt Principles in everyday events. Val, who was two years older, kept decisively beating Michael, who was as distressed as a younger sibling would be (Personal communication, 1995). Although Productive Thinking described the changes as coming from the boys, it was their father who productively reorganized the game so that instead of trying to score points against each other they attempted to keep the birdie aloft as long as possible (cf. footbag or hacky sack; Wertheimer, 2020). Professor Wertheimer also described his growing understanding, as a 16-year-old, that his father was internationally prominent. Visitors to the Wertheimer home in New Rochelle, New York included Solomon Asch, Rudolph Arnheim, and Abraham S. Luchins, among many other luminaries in psychology, and the Wertheimer children were always encouraged to join in dinner conversation, even with prestigious guests (Wertheimer, 2020).Professor Wertheimer's interactions with prominent psychologists expanded after he left home. He took his first college psychology class from Wolfgang Köhler at Swarthmore, and in his graduate programs at Johns Hopkins and Harvard he studied with Fred, Gary, and Smitty (i.e., B. F. Skinner, Edwin Garrigues Boring, and S. S. Stevens), among others (Wertheimer, 2020). He earned his doctoral degree in experimental psychology from Harvard in 1951, and he worked at Wesleyan University until he moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1955, where he remained for the rest of his career.