ABSTRACT
For many years the study of mental retardation was a largely atheoretical enterprise heavily emphasizing a single issue: whether the grossly observable condition of low intelligence was a product of genetic inheritance or of environment. The “either-or” form that much of the nature-nurture debate took suffered from a sterility later bemoaned by a number of writers (Anastasi, 1958; Overton, 1973). A significant exception to this state of affairs in the pre-World War II period was the sweeping theoretical contribution of Kurt Lewin (1936) and Jacob Kounin (1939, 1941a, b, 1948). The Lewin-Kounin formulation used exotic constructs (e.g., “psychical systems” “cognitive regions,” and it generated flamboyant, sometimes hard-to-assimilate hypotheses, as stated by Lewin (1936): “the major dynamic difference between a feeble-minded and a normal child of the same degree of differentiation [consists of] a smaller capacity for dynamic rearrangement in the psychical systems of the former [p. 210].” Yet, thanks largely to Kounin, the terms and postulates of the theory were carefully operationalized and thus testable. When tests began to cast doubt on the validity of the Lewin-Kounin position, its prominence in the field gradually declined. Now, years later, the position, and the controversy and research it evoked (reviewed by Zigler & Balla, chapter 5), occasionally evoke smug sniggers from critics who have the advantages of hindsight—as indeed many of our own efforts may in years to come. Yet, the fact remains that the study of mental retardation was significantly enriched, heuristically and empirically, by its association with this major psychological theory.
