Erich Rudolf Jaensch

Erich Rudolf Ferdinand Jaensch (26 February 1883 – 12 January 1940) was a German psychologist and philosopher.

Biography

Erich Rudolf Jaensch was born in Breslau, the son of physician Rudolf Jaensch and his wife Helene, daughter of Prussian military Maximilian von Witten. Jaensch studied at the University of Breslau under Hermann Ebbinghaus and at the University of Göttingen under Georg Elias Müller. With Ebbinghaus, he was particularly interested in experiments on the perception of time and motion. He was also interested in the phenomenon of tactile illusion, which explains his continuing interest in the psychology of the blind, since he himself conducted experiments with blind subjects during this time. Müller brought about a shift in Jaensch's thinking toward the direct psychological issues of perception. He received his doctorate in Göttingen with the thesis Zur Analyse der Gesichtswahrnehmung, in which he made further considerations on the Aubert-Förster phenomenon that the perceived size of an object does not coincide with its size of the image on the retina. Especially lateral vision received his attention in this paper. He was habilitated at the University of Strasbourg with the paper Über die Wahrnehmung des Raumes ("On the Perception of Space"). His theory of duplicity originated here. Jaensch assumed that periodic oscillations were picked up by the cochlea, while aperiodic ones were picked up by other parts of the ear. Vibrations that were both periodic and aperiodic would be perceived by both the cochlea and other organs. Already in this writing first considerations about cultural anthropology can be found: Thus Jaensch assumed that noise had been perceived rather than sound in the history of mankind. Similarly, rods had been more present in the development of mankind than conical shapes.

Jaensch was director of the Psychological Institute and the Philosophical Seminar, as well as full professor of philosophy at the University of Halle from 1912 to 1913. In 1913, Jaensch became a full professor at the University of Marburg. Jaensch's ordination caused quite an uproar in Marburg. As successor to Hermann Cohen, he ousted the latter's idealistic Neo-Kantianism from the Marburg faculty and substituted his own experimental psychological approach in its place. The confrontation became a traumatic experience for both Hermann Cohen's followers and the representatives of the experimental psychological direction around Erich Rudolf Jaensch.

In 1919, Jaensch was elected a member of the Leopoldina. He was the primary editor of several learned journals such as Studien zur psychologischen Ästhetik und Kunstpsychologie mit padagogischen Anwendungen (1929–1931), Abhandlungen und Monographien zur Philosophic des Wirklichen (1931–1939), Zeitschrift für padogogische Psychologie und Jugendkunde (1938–1940) and Arbeiten zur Pädagogik und Psychologischen Anthropologie (1940).

Erich Rudolf Jaensch died in Marburg as a result of an operation. His successor on the chair became the Kantian Julius Ebbinghaus, under whose father he had once studied experimental psychology. He was the brother of Walther Jaensch, the director of the Institute for "Constitutional Medicine" in Berlin.

Politics

Jaensch was a member of several National Socialist organizations. In 1932, he became a patron member of the SS. After the National Socialists ascent to power, he joined the NSDAP and the NS Teachers' Association in 1933. In March 1933, he signed the Declaration of 300 University Teachers for Adolf Hitler, and on November 11, 1933, the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State. According to the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Metzger, he developed into an "instigator of National Socialism."

In 1933, he founded the "Institute for Psychological Anthropology" in Marburg, which also became a carrier of National Socialist ideas. He wanted to make Marburg the center of National Socialist philosophy. From 1936 on, he was chairman of the German Society for Psychology. At the latest with his writing Der Gegentypus, published in the year of the Kristallnacht, his typology became a justification doctrine of the National Socialist racial ideology. According to Metzger — who was himself a member of the SA and NSDAP and made a career for himself at the time — this work served "to eliminate dissenters, especially Jewish experts". Thus he incited against his predecessor Hermann Cohen. Jaensch's writing Der Gegentypus also found its way into literary history through the biting criticism of the poet Gottfried Benn. In 1939, Jaensch was appointed rector of the University of Marburg.

Due to his politics, Jaensch's research has being almost entirely overlooked, only his Eidetik has received some attention after the war. Several of his works were put on the list of literature to be eliminated in the Soviet Occupation Zone in 1946.

Writings

With his psychological work, Jaensch was the most cited psychologist of his time in the 1920s. The focus of his studies was an independent doctrine of constitutional types as well as work on eidetics. Self-experiments with mescaline contributed significantly to his eidetic hypotheses.

In the period from his assumption of the professorship in Marburg until the middle of the 1920s, he developed his own eidetic. Jaensch continued the research discovered by the Viennese senior physician Viktor Urbantschitsch on the description of so-called visual images in the own interior. He assumed that these visual images were typical especially for children and adolescents. According to Maria Krudewig, six features are characteristic for Jaensch's eidetic:

• Perceptible descriptive contents (the appearances always remain the same)
• Pictoriality (visual images are usually two- in Graves' disease three-dimensional)
• Non-physicality (what is seen has no physical properties, e.g. weight)
• Localization place (the visual images are projected into the outside space)
• Color character (the background of the image determines the eidetic show)
• Definition of the visual image (What is the time until its creation?, What is its size?)

The research found application especially in the field of pedagogy.

In the 1920s, Jaensch took over as editor of the Zeitschrift für Psychologie, one of the best-known German-language psychological journals. Related to his work, this period also saw his previously purely experimental approach expand into a fully formed cultural anthropological blueprint.

In his paper On the Structure of the Perceptual World and the Foundations of Human Cognition (1924), Jaensch outlines, among other things, a eidogical model of the emergence of religion, based on Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and others. Jaensch's friendship with the Protestant theologian and religious scholar Rudolf Otto probably began at this time. It is certain that both authors influenced each other in their views. Furthermore, Jaensch himself developed his own approach to the psychology of religion in the late 1920s, based heavily on his typology. This typology was developed in the mid-1920s. It represents an extension of his Eidologie and also goes back in the core to perception-psychological considerations. According to it there are four forms of perception types.

The types would deal with their perception in an integrating or disintegrating way:

• J1: Draws its stimuli solely from the perception of the external world.
• J2: Lives out of one's own conceptions (ideas, ideals).
• J3: Is the ideal mixed character, formed out of both types of perception. He merges the positive of J1's external orientation with the idealism of J2.
• S1: Is a character who is not really oriented to any idea, internal or external. He is aimless and unsubstantial.

Jaensch shows himself related to the typology of Carl Gustav Jung, who separated into introverted and extraverted types.

The theme of the integration or disintegration of perception makes it clear that his research on perception is bound to the context of time. Jaensch was a central representative of the Marburg School, which represented its own form of holistic psychology. In contrast to the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology, holistic psychology held that a structuring of mental (perceptual) content by experience was simplified and integrated. At the beginning of the process of perception, however, what is perceived is itself diffuse and unstructured. The Marburg School, which is based on Jaensch, can be placed between the Gestalt psychology of the Berlin School and the second Leipzig School around Felix Krueger.

In the late 1930s, Jaensch emerged as a critic of standard intelligence tests, which he accused of disregarding constitutional differences.

See also

• Bruno Petermann

Works

• Zur Analyse der Gesichtswahrnehmungen (1909)
• Über die Wahrnehmung des Raumes (1911)
• Einige allgemeine Fragen der Psychologie und der Biologie des Denkens, erläutert an der Lehre vom Vergleich: mit Bemerkungen über die Krisis in der Philosophie der Gegenwart (1920)
• "Uber subjektive Anschauungsbilder". In: Berichte über den VII. Kongreß für experimentelle Psychologie in Marburg (1922), pp. 3–49.
• Die Eidetik und die typologische Forschungsmethode: in ihrer Bedeutung für die Jugendpsychologie und Pädagogik, für die allgemeine Psychologie und die Psychophysiologie der menschlichen Persönlichkeit ; mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der grundlegenden Fragen und der Untersuchungsmethodik (1927)
• Über den Aufbau der Wahrnehmungswelt (1927)
• "Zur Geschichte des Psychologischen Instituts". In: H. Hermelink & S. A. Kaehler, eds., Die Philipps-Universität zu Marburg 1527–1927 (1927), pp. 687–90.
• Das psychologische Institut in Marburg (1927)
• Grundformen menschlichen Seins: (mit Berücksichtigung ihrer Beziehungen zu Biologie und Medizin, zu Kulturphilosophie und Pädagogik) (1929)
• Über den Aufbau des Bewußtseins (1930)
• Vorfragen der Wirklichkeitsphilosophie (1931)
• Über die Grundlagen der menschlichen Erkenntnis (1931)
• Die Lage und die Aufgaben der Psychologie (1933)
• Die Wissenschaft und die deutsche völkische Bewegung. Elwert'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung (1933)
• Der Kampf der deutschen Psychologie (1934)
• Das Kulturziel im neuen Reich (1934)
• Eidetische Anlage und kindliches Seelenleben (1934)
• Zur Neugestaltung des deutschen Studententums und der Hochschule (1937)
• Die Psychologie und die Wandlungen im deutschen Idealismus (1937)
• Der Gegentypus: psychologisch-anthropologische Grundlagen deutscher Kulturphilosophie, ausgehend von dem was wir überwinden wollen (1938)
• "Nachwort". In: Karl Schwarze, Ernst Moritz Arndt und sein Kampf gegen den Geistesidealismus (1939)
• Mathematisches Denken und Seelenform (1939)
• Grundgesetze der Jugendentwicklung (1939; with Rudolf Hentze)
• Das Wahrheitsproblem bei der völkischen Neugestaltung von Wissenschaft und Erziehung (1939)
• Hellas und wir (1939)
• Der Hühnerhof als Forschungs- und Aufklärungsmittel in menschlichen Rassenfragen (1939)
• Mathematisches Denken und Seelenform: Vorfragen der Paedagogik und völkischen Neugestaltung des mathematischen Unterrichts (1939; with Fritz Althoff)
• Zur Eidetik und Integrationstypologie: Arbeiten aus dem Institut für psychologische Anthropologie an der Universität Marburg/Lahn (1941)

Translated into English

• Eidetic Imagery and Typological Methods of Investigation (1930; translated by Oscar Adolph Oeser; reprinted in 1999)

References

• Gert Heinz Fischer, "E. R. Jaensch zum Gedenken". In: Zeitschrift für Psychologie. 148. Barth, Leipzig (1940)
• Maria Krudewig, Die Lehren von der visuelien Wahrnehmung und Vorstellung bei Erich Rudolf Jaensch und seinen Schülern. Meisenheim am Glan: Hain (1953)
• Wolfgang Metzger, "Jaensch, Erich". In: Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB). 10. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot (1974), p. 287.
• Anne Christine Nagel, ed., Die Philipps-Universität Marburg im Nationalsozialismus. Dokumente zu ihrer Geschichte. Stuttgart: Steiner (2000)
• O. A. Oeser, "Jaensch, Erich." In: International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 8. New York: Macmillan, pp. 225–27.
• Léon Poliakov, Josef Wulf, Das Dritte Reich und seine Denker. Berlin (1959)
• Christian Tilitzki, Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten Reich. Berlin (2002)
• Ulrich Sieg, "Psychologie als „Wirklichkeitswissenschaft“. Erich Jaenschs Auseinandersetzung mit der „Marburger Schule“." In: Winfried Speitkamp, ed., Staat, Gesellschaft, Wissenschaft. Beiträge zur modernen hessischen Geschichte. Marburg: Elwert (1994), pp. 314–42.
• Robert I. Watson, Eminent Contributors to Psychology. 2. New York: Springer Publishing Company (1974)
• Albert Wellek, Ganzheitspsychologie und Strukturtheorie. Bern: Francke (1955)
• Wilhelm Wirth, "Erich Rudolf Jaensch," Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie. 106 (1940), pp. 4–40.

External links

• Works by Erich Rudolf Jaensch at German National Library
• Works by Erich Rudolf Jaensch at Gallica