ABSTRACT
Max Wertheimer, together with his colleagues Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler and their students, established Gestalt psychology as a major international movement in psychology by the 1920s. Max Wertheimer's friend and colleague Wolfgang Kohler kept Gestalt theory in the limelight with his research and writing until his own death in 1967, but by mid-century Gestalt psychology had already been characterized by some as an antiquated and largely moribund school of psychology. Soon after Wertheimer's arrival in America, several prominent scholars were promoting the value of Gestalt theory in sociological and anthropological investigations. Wertheimer's work on productive thinking and other cognitive processes is widely cited in the literature on problem solving and insight. Studies by Metcalfe and her colleagues provide an empirical, functional distinction between the processing of memory tasks and of problem-solving tasks, the same distinction that Wertheimer made between "reproductive" and "productive" thinking.
