Fritz Heider – My Academic Teacher and His Academic Teachers

Abstract

In the summer of 1958 at the University of Kansas, Heider offered a seminar based on the galley proofs of his forthcoming book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. Personal memories of the seminar are reported, and an attempt is made to reconstruct the European background of Heider’s work. It is argued that the warm reception of Heider’s book was partly the result of his revival of philosophical ideas that had served as starting points for psychology, but had since been abandoned. Especially with respect to the analysis of naive concepts, complex structures, and causal attributions, Heider owes an intellectual debt to his mentor Alexius Meinong at the University of Graz, and to Ernst Cassirer at the University of Hamburg. Commemorating the publication of Heider’s book can, therefore, also be regarded as an implicit tribute to the European philosophy of the late 19th and early 20th century.