You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Productive thinking by Dr. Max Wertheimer is devoted primarily to the gestalt interpretation of thinking. The formal traditional logic is found very unsatisfactory. To describe the processes of genuine thinking, the vital, forceful creativeness in it seems somehow to evaporate in the formulation. The reason this occurs in the formal approach is that the structure of the situation or problem is never fully seen. There is a striking difference between sensible understanding of the subject matter and the solving by external procedures or formula. Traditional logicians, in order to get at the elements of thinking, cut to pieces living, thinking processes. They deal with these processes blind to structure, assuming that the process is the aggregate sum of those elements. In other words, they follow formula instead of inner relatedness.
Dr. Wertheimer makes many interesting observations. Foremost is the awareness of the inner relatedness of various factors in a particular problem. For instance, to know the blind connection between the switch and the light is very different from realizing the inner relatedness between the means and the end. The difference is important in this context precisely with regard to the coming into existence of sensible, productive processes. To realize any relations even if they are correct is not decisive. What is decisive is that they must be the relations structurally required. In short, the role of past experience is of high importance but what matters is what one has gained from the experience. Is it blindly understood connections or insight into the structural inner relatedness? What matters is how and what one recalls. How one applies what is recalled, whether blindly in a piecemeal way or in accordance with structural requirements of the whole situation.
Problems of the personality and the personality structure, structural features of the interaction between the individual and his field, are basically involved in dealing with problem situat