Kurt Lewin and Field Theory

Can the surrounding environment influence an individual’s perception of society and, consequently, their behaviour in the “here and now”? In the first decades of the twentieth century, a period dominated by what would later be defined as “Aristotelian thinking”, the prevailing psychological approaches identified ways of relating to the surrounding environment that were markedly different from those examined later. Among the most relevant perspectives were the behaviourism of Watson, Pavlov and Skinner and Sigmund Freud’s studies on psychoanalysis. According to the former school of thought, the only valid unit of analysis is what is manifest and observable, as it can be immediately detected. In his famous 1913 article, Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It, published in Psychological Review, John Watson emphasises that what can be detected and observed in an individual’s actions is the direct result of environmental stimuli; consequently, people respond to these external stimuli with specific reactions, without subjective perception substantially altering the outcome. At the same time, from 1902 onwards, Freud began gathering a small group of Viennese physicians at his home, initially including Wilhelm Stekel, Alfred Adler, Max Kahane and Rudolf Reitler, thus laying the foundations for what would later become the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Jung and Abraham would subsequently join the group, while Ernest Jones would become a member at a later stage. The main objective was to demonstrate how the unconscious influences human thought and, above all, behaviour: an unconscious mind in which both causative processes, such as drives and desires, and defensive processes, including the repression of anything that disrupts the individual’s equilibrium, take place. People would therefore respond to internal stimuli arising from past experiences, traumas and satisfactions, ultimately shaping external reality through interactions within groups. Until that point, psychology had therefore been dominated by models that reduced human behaviour to single and static causes.

This theoretical framework began to show its limitations with the emergence of Gestalt theory, which also developed through the so-called Berlin School. In 1921, the journal Psychologische Forschung was founded, with its first volume published in 1922, and went on to become one of the main publication outlets for Gestalt psychology. This movement marked a radical departure from the paradigms of the time, asserting the importance of the overall structure over the analysis of individual parts. This perceptual harmony found its full development in the studies of Kurt Lewin, regarded as a father of social psychology, who in 1936, with his monograph Principles of Topological Psychology, defined the concept of “life space”, from which one of his most influential ideas would emerge: field theory, at the basis of his topological psychology. The aim of this approach is to analyse human behaviour within the exact situational context in which it occurs. Unlike Freud, Lewin argued that, in order to understand how people relate to society, there is no need to delve into the past, but rather to focus on the “here and now”, establishing a direct relationship between the individual and their environment.

To understand why Lewin became interested in this dynamic approach, however, it is necessary to place his work within its historical context. He was born in Prussia in 1890 and later trained in Berlin: following the rise of Nazism, as a person of Jewish origin, he was forced to emigrate to the United States, where he continued his research. During the Second World War, the United States faced a growing need to modify certain eating habits due to the conditions imposed by the conflict and the rationing of some foods. However, people were reluctant to purchase certain products because they were regarded as scraps and therefore unsuitable for the eating habits of American families.

Lewin’s objective, therefore, was to understand why people adopted certain eating habits and to investigate which methods could encourage changes in those habits. It was through this research, conducted within the framework of the National Research Council’s Committee on Food Habits and at Iowa State University, that Lewin also examined resistance to the consumption of sweetbreads, an English term used to refer to certain types of offal, and compared different methods for changing eating habits. These included informational lectures and group discussions, with the latter proving much more effective in encouraging changes in eating habits. The findings were reported in the 1943 report Forces Behind Food Habits and Methods of Change, included in the volume The Problem of Changing Food Habits, published by the National Research Council.

Through this study, the psychologist showed how behaviour could be understood in relation to the dynamic forces present within an individual’s psychological field, also defined as their “life space”. Behaviour is described as a function of the interaction between the person and their psychological environment, summarised in the famous equation C = f(P,A), highlighting how individuals who share a group take others’ thoughts into account and adopt certain behaviours based on mutual influence in decision-making processes. This occurs because the psychological field surrounding each individual includes all events and sensations that exist for that person, while excluding what has no relevance to them. The so-called “inner personal region”, as opposed to the “perceptual-motor region”, is governed by the dynamic properties of the “life space”, namely attractions and barriers, which vary according to how the individual perceives particular experiences. This creates a reciprocal influence between the “psychological field” and the “external space” (the physical world), in which the former becomes a dynamic map of the forces that will subsequently act upon the individual: if a region appears “attractive”, with desirable goals and positive valence, the individual will tend to move towards it; conversely, when faced with an environment characterised by barriers and negative valence, a conflict will arise, prompting the individual to move away from it in an attempt to restore the initial balance.

Kurt Lewin’s legacy therefore lies in having shown that human beings are not merely executors of mechanical patterns or hidden drives, but active subjects constantly immersed in a living system of forces. Recognising that the psychological environment and the “here and now” shape every choice means acknowledging the complexity of human relationships. Field theory thus remains a remarkably modern perspective: to understand the essence of an individual and why they act in a certain way, we can never isolate them from the world around them, but must learn to read the invisible map that connects them to others.

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