Important Psychologist Kurt Lewin and His Work

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).

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 present -- first, an environment that encourages introspection. For instance, it is well-known that Hitler wanted to be an artist, and having lost his mother at a young age and having been left with a stern father, the conditions were there for a young Hitler to become introspective.

However, he also had the personality trait necessary to express himself through art, to want to examine the world and depict it in drawings for others in order to please. So there is a personality that wants to please by way of a creative force -- it is the energy that Lewin describes, and the obstacles that block the goal and the forces that drive one to achieve it (Haggbloom et al., 2002).

Another instance could be that of the young Beethoven, who was similarly without a mother and who also had a very stern father who would lock the young child in his room and thus compel him to spend hours playing the piano. Again, the exterior environment (nurture) was there for the introverted nature to fully manifest itself and develop so that the trait of the child could be cemented/solidified.

Thus, in these two instances, one can see that one specific childhood event that can help to determine a lifetime in art is the loss of someone special to the child -- in the case of Hitler and Beethoven, it is the mother. This accompanied by a less than gentle father pushes the child into a world of art and creativity as an expression of something beautiful and true that the child might otherwise not have or be engaged with.

Mathematically speaking, Lewin describes these developments in terms of spatiality and planes, forces and vectors. That is, he views the mechanism of development as being related to parts in the world and in the individual, those parts in the environment interacting with those parts present in the individual, impacting one another the way that weather impacts a rock or the way that a rock/mountain impacts the weather. In terms of developing a lifetime in art, the parts interact in such a way that facilitate a development of.