Kurt Lewin’s Contribution to the Methodology of Psychology:From Past to Future Skipping the Present

Kurt Lewin was one of the major representatives of the pre-WWII German-Austrian psychology. Not surprisingly, Lewin explicitly followed most of the methodological principles described by Watson. This chapter discusses Lewin&s;s understanding of the methodological issues brought out by Watson and analyzes the present-day mainstream psychology in more detail elsewhere. It describes three additional methodological issues Lewin considered to be important, the principle of "contemporaneity," the necessity for definition of theoretical concepts, and the insufficiency of "phenotypical" observations without experimentation, without interference with the situation. Lewin&s;s understanding of the role of an individual case in research and theory building also differed substantially from the present-day mainstream psychology. The Lewinian kind of thinking is substantially more complex and potentially more productive in theory building than the thinking necessary for the study of relatively isolated decontextualized fragmented problems. Lewin&s;s research methodology, in modern terms, would be called qualitative rather than quantitative.