APA CENTENNIAL FEATURE

William L. Stem, 1871-1938: A Neglected Founder

of Developmental Psychology
Kurt Kreppner

Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education

Berlin, Germany
William Stern was born in 1871 in Berlin, Germany, and died in 1938 in Durham, North Carolina.
Educated at Berlin University, he developed very early a theoretical view to overcome the fundamental split in the academic psychology of his time, that between elementarism and wholism on
the one hand and environmentalism and nativism on the other. Besides inventing such well-known
concepts as IQ, differential psychology, and the nomothetic-idiographic approach, Stern put much
effort into developing a personalistic psychology that emphasized both the individual's active role
and the importance of context in development. This article focuses on Stern's main contributions to
developmental psychology: the activity-reactivity tension in the developing individual; the concept of proximal space, Stern's idea of the location of exchange between the person and the environment; and an alternative conception of children's egocentrism. Parallels to today's concepts
are drawn.

William Stern is practically unknown in modern American

psychology. No school of thinking is associated with his name,
and his works are not cited in today's textbooks. Yet I will argue
that this largely unknown person ought to be considered one of
the founders of modern developmental psychology.
William Stern will be remembered by some students of psychology as the inventor of the IQ (presented in a paper delivered
in 1912 at the Fifth Conference of the Society of Experimental
Psychology in Berlin), the index of an individual's degree of
intelligence. Fewer may recall that Stern introduced the notion
of "differential psychology" (Stern, 1900,1911) and did exciting experiments on the perception of pitch and tone (Stern,
1896,1898,1903). Among students of language development,
William Stern and his wife Clara are known as authors of a
comprehensive description of language use in infancy and
childhood (C. Stern & Stern, 1907). However, unlike other early
practitioners of our discipline, such as Baldwin, Piaget, Lewin,
and Karl and Charlotte Biihler, William Stern has not found a
place in American psychology's "hall of fame."
Although his main opus, General Psychology From the Personalistic Standpoint, which was published in its German version in Holland in 1935, also appeared in an English version in
the United States in February 1938, about one month before his

I am grateful for the many helpful suggestions made by the two

reviewers.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kurt
Kreppner, Center for Psychology and Human Development, Max
Planck Institute for Human Development and Education, Lentzeallee
94, D-W-1000 Berlin 33, Germany.

death, his pioneering ideas never attained a high level of visibility outside of European academic circles. In 1938, one of his
former students, Gordon W Allport, wrote Stern's obituary in
the American Journal ofPsychology. During the following years
and decades, however, the person as well his work were forgotten not only in the United States but also in Germany.
In this article I first trace the major outlines of Stern's career
and depict the forces that might have contributed to his pioneering creative thinking. Second, I introduce basic concepts of his
that have relevance to developmental psychology, some of
which appear to have been "rediscovered" during the 1970s and
1980s. Third, I elaborate on some crucial concepts of his that I
believe were revolutionary for their time but were poorly understood by most of his colleagues and were subsequently forgotten.
Bound to diverse contemporary philosophical traditions located in opposite camps (such as empiristic vs. nativistic or
elementaristic-experimental vs. understanding-wholistic positions), Stern put much effort into explicating his vision of a
new psychology and into overcoming common templates of
either-or thinking. Aside from being a formative figure as a
great initiator in thefieldof applied psychology and as an organizer of creative research in various domains of our science,
Stern should also be considered one of the persons who gave the
discipline of psychology momentum by opening new windows
on innovative perspectives. His intention was to transform psychology by giving it a new foundation. For Stern, this new psychology had its focus in a new unit, the person as the "unitas
multiplex." In addition, Stern was also active in the field of
experimental psychology. Finally, he was an active disseminator

Developmental Psychology, 1992, Vol. 28, No. 4, 539-547

Copyright 1992 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. OOI2-1649/92/$3.00

539

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KURT KREPPNER

of knowledge from different branches of psychology to other

fields including industry, psychiatry, law, and education.1
The Person and His Career
William Stern was a rising star in European psychology during the early years of this century, between 1900 and 1915. From
1916 to 1933, he institutionalized research programs as the director of the Hamburg Institute. He was at the zenith of his
career during the late 1920s and the early 1930s, when he initiated intense collaborations with those in other disciplines such
as biology, law, and education. However, he was abruptly barred
from his institute by the Nazis in April of 1933 and expelled
from Germany in the same year. After a year's stay in The
Netherlands, he moved to the United States in 1934. He died on
March 27,1938.
Born in Berlin on April 29th, 1871, he was the only child of
the retailer Sigismund Stern and his wife Rosa. He began to
study philosophy and psychology at the University in his native
city in 1888. At that time, a department of psychology did not
exist at Berlin University, and two different schools in psychology werefightingeach other: a mechanistic, elementaristic psychology oriented toward the natural sciences, on the one hand,
and a wholistic, explanatorily oriented psychology on the other.
This conflict was later vividly documented in Dilthey's (1894/
1924) essay, "Ideas About a Descriptive and Dissecting Psychology" It also reverberated in the discussion between Dilthey, the
"understanding" philosopher and wholistic psychologist, and
Ebbinghaus, the experiment-guided associationist and elementarist.
This fundamental division between elementaristic and wholistic viewpoints characterized the first academic years of William Stern. His teachers included Friedrich Paulsen, the wholist; Moritz Lazarus, a somewhat moderate, nonexperimental
associationist and elementarist; and Hermann Ebbinghaus, a
hard-core elementarist who conducted mnemonic experiments
by letting subjects memorize endless strings of meaningless syllables. It was here that Stern developed his intension to reconcile what seemed to be irreconcilable. In 1893 he finished his
dissertation under Ebbinghaus on The Analogy in Folk Thinking. He followed Ebbinghaus to the University of Breslau in
1897, where he completed his habilitation on the Psychology of
the Perception ofChange in the same year (however, it was published in 1898). He became a Privatdozent (outside lecturer) for
psychology. What followed was perhaps the most creative and
fruitful period in Stern's career, from 1897 until 1907 (Eckardt,
1989). These were the years in which he worked on a new foundation of psychology that emphasized a personalistic perspective and invented the IQ and differential psychology. In 1904
("Psychology of the Child as a Theoretical Science") and 1907
("Basic Questions of Psychogenesis") he published two articles
in which he presented his ideas about developmental psychology and emphasized the role of both biological and environmental components in human ontogeny. Most of Stern's work from
this phase, which encompassed developmental, intelligence,
and differential aspects as well as his foundation of a new, person-oriented psychology, was published later in a series of articles and books between 1908 and 1918. These publications included "Facts and Causes of Psychological Development"

(1908), Differential Psychology (1911), "Methods for Testing Intelligence" (1912), Psychology of Early Childhood (1914), Psychology and Personalism (1917), and Person and Thing (1918b).
It is interesting (for the family researcher) that the creative period between 1897 and 1907 is also the time when Stern
founded his family: His three children were born in 1900
(Hilde), 1902 (Giinter), and 1904 (Eva). During this period, he
and his wife Clara conducted intense observations of their children, focusing on both cognitive and language development.
An outcome of this joint venture was the publication of Children's Speech (C. Stern & Stern, 1907).
In 1906, together with Otto Lipmann, Stern founded the Institute for Applied Psychology in Berlin, a center for applied research, and coedited the journal Zeitschrift fur angewandte
Psychologie [Journal for Applied Psychology]. Although he lamented a bit over his philosophical isolation in Breslau (Stern,
1927, p. 140), these years seem to have been crucial for his
career. In 1907 he became an associate professor at the University of Breslau and the director of the psychology department.
In 1909, he was honored by Clark University with a doctoral
degree. At this time, Stern was 38 years old. The following
quote (which appeared in The Worcester Telegram of September
11th, 1909) may illuminate the reputation Stern had at that
time:
William Stern, ausserordentlicher professor of philosophy in the
University of Breslau; pioneer in the study of individual psychology; a leader among European students of child life; known and
honored wherever psychology itself is honored, doctor of laws,
(cited by Hardesty, 1976, p. 31)
Moreover, Stern was also strongly committed to promoting
the dissemination of psychological knowledge in the established worlds of industry, law, and education. During these
years, for example, he created the "Projekt Jugendkunde" (Dudeck, 1989), a project to foster a new and culture-oriented mode
of instruction and a new knowledge about adolescence, which
was aimed, in part, at helping teachers better understand their
students. In order to pursue his idea, Stern fought against conservatism, psychoanalysis, and wholism, three different schools
in education, to clear the ground for his vision of a new psychology.
After Meumann's death in 1915, Stern applied for a position
at the Hamburg Kolonialinstitut und Allgemeines Vorlesungswe' I would like to add a technical note here concerning Stern's writings. Stern's works in their original German versions are difficult to
read for today's students of psychology; Stern's German conies from an
earlier time in which different words and terms were "alive." Thus, for
a contemporary reader, the language may appear somewhat dusty and
bound to discussions referring to forgotten concepts or authors. Because this article is written for an American readership, I decided not
to quote the original German texts themselves but tried to translate
them into English. However, a problem emerged: To capture Stern's
German would require a psychological vocabulary similar to that of
his contemporaries such as William James or James Mark Baldwin. By
using modern terminology, rather than the terms used by his contemporaries, I hope to better illuminate Stern's ideas. Furthermore, I also
decided not to use SpoerFs translation of Stern's (1938) last book, General -Psychology From the Personalistic Standpoint, but rather attempted to translate from the German original (Stern, 1935).

APA CENTENNIAL: WILLIAM L. STERN, 1871-1938

541

sen [Institute for Colonial Studies], an institution that combined a mainly municipal program of general lectures offering
various subjects in social and political sciences and the humanities with an institution founded in 1908 that dealt with colonial
matters. There were plans to transform this institution into a
new university. The position was attractive for Stern because
Meumann, when he had accepted the position in Hamburg in
1911, had established a new department of philosophy, including a psychological laboratory. In Hamburg teachers had a traditional right to participate in making appointments to this
institution. One of the effects of Stern's involvement in the Projekt Jugendkunde was that the Hamburg teachers all voted for
him when the vacancy for a professor of philosophy had to be
filled. Thus, he was appointed in 1916. After the end of the
First World War, in 1918, Stern pressed the faculty council to
resurrect the old plans to form a university to meet the needs of
the returning veterans. From January 1st, 1919, private university courses were offered. During the first years, two assistants,
Heinz Werner and Martha Muchow, contributed considerably
to the forming of what became the Psychological Institute in
Hamburg. In this institute, many divergent branches and practical applications of psychology were fostered under Stern's directorship. The diversity and openness to new approaches created a climate for which the institute was famous. As a result,
psychology acquired a new status and high visibility among
other disciplines and in the many public sectors such as law,
industry, and, last but not least, education.

industry. His ability to convey to the public theoretical and

empirical knowledge that had accumulated in the discipline
helped the Hamburg Institute gain a strong reputation in Germany. During the 1920s, the reputation of the Hamburg Institute was comparable to that of the well-known Vienna Institute
associated with the names of Charlotte and Karl Buhler and
Hildegard Hetzer. In its years of "full swing" (Hardesty, 1976),
1929 through 1933, the environmental approach of the Hamburg Institute was supported by courses that were cosponsored
by von Uexkuell's Institute for Environmental Research (Umweltforschung) and by departments of the university's schools
of medicine and law, which made the Hamburg Institute famous as a hub for divergent lines of thought in theoretical,
methodological, and practical developments in psychology.
This ended abruptly when Stern, at the age of 62, was barred
from his own institute in April of 1933 by the Nazis and had to
leave Germany later in the same year. After a year of waiting in
Holland, where Kohnstamm unsuccessfully tried to get a position for him, Stern arrived in 1934 in the United States, where
hefinallygot a position with the help of William McDougall at
Duke University in Durham (Hardesty, 1976). In addition to his
permanent position at Duke, Stern gave lectures at various
American universities such as Brown, Columbia, and Harvard.
He died on March 27th, 1938, at the age of nearly 67.

New windows were opened with challenging empirical research such as Stern's studies dealing with adolescence (Stern,
1922,1923,1924,1925) and Martha Muchow's pioneering efforts in the field of environmental psychology (see Schoggen,
1985; Siegel, 1985; Wapner, 1985; Wohlwill, 1985). Stern initiated and supported the series of environmental studies, which
mark a turning point in developmental psychology. These were
thefirstinvestigations that systematically took into account the
objective environmental structures in which children grow up;
for example, studies examined the effects of urban areas with
certain subcultural characteristics (Muchow, 1935) and the influences of ecological change such as summer camp at the seaside on children's development (Muchow, 1926). Another representative of new directions in developmental psychology was
Heinz Werner, who came as a young postdoctoral research associate from Vienna and did his habilitation in 1920, the very
first in Hamburg, to become a Privatdozent. He was one of
Stern's closest colleagues and helped effectively to push forward
the organismic view. For three years, Fritz Heider, who later
became a famous social psychologist, worked at the Hamburg
Institute. Though not working at the Hamburg Institute, another young scientist who was strongly influenced by Stern's
thinking and associated with Stern's and Lippmann's Institute
for Applied Psychology was Kurt Lewin. Stern supported him,
for example, by publishing his very first article, "Kriegslandschaft" ("War-landscape") in a journal he edited (Lewin, 1917)
and by presenting his studies of expressive movements in children in the 1927 edition of Stern's famous Psychology of Early
Childhood.
Furthermore, Stern organized a well-equipped, full-fledged
laboratory for conducting experiments, helped establish a
teachers' college, and promoted extensive collaboration with

Stern's interest in reconciling divergent theoretical positions

may also account for his roles as an instigator of interdisciplinary research and as a promoter of applications of psychological
knowledge in public areas. He recognized the detrimental effects on the entire discipline of the many publicfightsbetween
opposite camps in psychology. His political and enlightenmentdriven impetus to serve the public may help explain his search
for a synthetic view that would keep the two diverging psychologies together (Eckardt, 1989): On the one hand, Stern
sought to overcome the schism between the empirical approach of natural science and the philosophical approach. On
the other hand, he aimed to create a unified mainstream psychology that would have multiple branches and be of practical
value in solving the problems of his time. He was convinced
that only a unified psychology could consolidate the new discipline among the other well-established disciplines in academia
and gain public recognition as a science. The elementarists'
fruitless and frustrating attempts under Ebbinghaus, as well as
the exaggerated claims of Dilthey's school of "understanding"
psychology, were negative examples that led him to conceptualize a theory that could reconcile both viewpoints.
However, Stern's personalistic psychology was interpreted by
many of his contemporaries as being too idealistic (e.g., his concept of society as a hierarchy of personalities). Stern clearly
dissociated himself from the elementarists, whom he saw as
adding elements mechanically to form a sum. He also criticized
their theorizing that psychological elements are carriers of psychological forces. He was convinced that this model deviated
too far from reality, and he offered an alternative in which he
underlined his belief that, for example, a person's actions are
defined not by single elements but by the entire structure of
environment, person, and person-environment interaction.

Major Concepts in Stern's Thinking

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KURT KREPPNER

Thus, a wholistic view was one of the fundamental bases from

which Stern constructed his person-oriented theoretical framework. However, Stern's conception was not identical with what
later became the core of wholistic psychology, or Ganzheitspsychology. Instead, the central idea is the "embeddedness" of a
person's actions in the environment.
Although one could elaborate on many areas in which Stern
offered new concepts or experimental designs, the following
samples of his contributions are selected from the domain of
developmental psychology. They are examples of his basic person- and environment-oriented approach manifest in the
theory of convergence and in the model of the active-reactive
personality. Some of the concepts he created to grasp the process of development are presented in more detail, such as his
ideas about activity-passivity, proximal space, and egocentrism.
Theory of Convergence
The idea of conflict and convergence grew out of Stern's intention to create an overarching concept in which both nativism and environmentalism could be accepted as two aspects
of the same processnamely, individuation. Thus Stern focused on the interplay between the individual's endowment, or
"dispositions," on the one hand and the environmental conditions influencing individual development on the other. Although Stern's approach may appear somewhat similar to Piaget's concepts of assimilation and accommodation, it places
more emphasis on the process of exchange between the individual's evolving propensities and talents and the environment's
hindering or supporting conditions. The two aspects, endowment and environment, converge in the process of development. While explicating the theory of convergence, Stern also
highlighted the goal-directedness of the individual's actions:
The active person is striving to achieve his or her goals and vital
needs, and social values and norms provide guidelines for the
realization of development.
Within this framework, Stern's concept of the individual's
endowment, disposition, is to be understood as always linked to
the environment; it is viewed as a goal-directed but flexible
entity. Disposition, according to Stern, is a "causality with a
leeway." Within this scope, the same disposition may have quite
different outcomes depending on the specific environmental
conditions. Thus, very early, Stern developed the idea of plasticity and malleability as essential characteristics of the person:

plex, which is neither entirely determined by disposition nor by

environment. This key concept is essential for the understanding of Stern's idea of a person as an active, gestalt-shaping individual whose behavior is dependent both on the diversity of
dispositions and on the conditions of the environment. From
this perspective, not only are a person's actions defined by a
multitude of personal and contextual factors but they also possess a high degree of freedom. Thus the sorting out of single
behaviors or functions within the person seems to be of only
limited value.
The philosophy of personalism and the key construct of unitas multiplex as an overarching concept grew out of Stern's intention to lay ground for a new psychology that could overcome
the old controversy between mind and matter or, as William
James called it, between mind and stuff. Stern introduced a
new dualism, person versus matter. Reintroducing the person
as a fundamental unit, he turned against the mainstream elementaristic psychology dominant at the end of the 19th century
in which concepts such as self, ego, and volition were given up
in favor of the search for "elements" of the mind (Cassirer,
1950). However, by underlining the role of context and the dynamics resulting from tensions between environmental conditions and a person's intentions and goals, Stern provided a
rather modern model of the person-context relationship.
Stern's Process-Oriented Understanding of Development
The two concepts just presented illustrate highlights of
Stern's more general theoretical groundwork; they indicate his
transactional and contextual orientation, which, after 70 years,
appears amazingly modern (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Sameroff,
1975). In the following section, three developmental concepts
are presented to illustrate Stern's process orientation: active development, proximal space, and egocentrism.
Stern's Dialectic View and His Theory of Active
Development

The individual's course of development is regulated by two

different features: the tendency to maintain an extant state and
to avoid changes, that is, preservation of the self, versus the
tendency to reach out for new goals to promote development,
that is, the unfolding of the self. By introducing this dialectical
approach to understanding continuity and change, Stern
stressed the importance of the process character. These concepts show certain parallels to Baldwin's and Piaget's ideas of
This is the fact of personal plasticity or malleability, a domain of
assimilation and accommodation. The individual is seen, as in
intentional education or unintentional influences of the milieu.
Piaget's theory, not only as a subject of cognitive development
This domain is narrower than many empiricists might be aware
of. For the person is not only a passive recipient ofthe environmen- but also as a person with an active self who shapes his or her
tal forces impinging on him, but he is also reacting to these forces. own developmental course. However, whereas Piaget's main inThe way he shapes and keeps a kind of plasticity is not only a
symptom of the conflict between activity and passivity, it is also a terests lay more in the evolution of cognitive functions, Stern's
tool for overcoming it: It is a mirror which is a weapon at the same concern was more directed toward the interplay between the
active person and his or her environment. Stern seemed to purtime. (Stern, 1918a, pp. 50-51, translated by K. K.)
sue a line of thought that was later reactivated at the beginning
of the 1980s (Lerner, 1982), one in which development was
Unitas Multiplex
interpreted as a process of integrating the individual's activities
resulting from growing abilities with selective effects generated
The linking of genetic disposition and environment in the
by environmental conditions. The merging of the two tendentheory of convergence leads to the rich conceptualization of
personality, of the individual as a complex unit, a unitas multi- cies of preservation and unfolding creates a state of tension in

APA CENTENNIAL: WILLIAM L. STERN, 1871-1938

the developing individual that Stern described in the following
statement:
All organismic events are constituted by the tendency of self-preservation and self-unfolding. Self-preservation strives to affirm
one's own existence and to maintain the characteristics that have
been acquired. Self-unfolding strives to increase one's own existence, it attempts to go beyond the achieved characteristics and
reaches out for new contents, tasks, and achievements, thus increasingly opening the access to the objective world of values. . .
All living manifests its inner goal orientation by the merging of
self-preservation and self-unfolding in the process of development. (Stern, 1927, pp. 28-29, translated by K. K.)
Many reflections that are presented by Stern in his Psychology of Early Childhood point both implicitly and explicitly to
Werner's ideas about the parallels between phylogenetic and
ontogenetic developmental processes. The well-known orthogenetic principlethat is, the processes of differentiation, specification, and hierarchical organizationelaborated later by
Werner (1957), is evident in Stern's theory describing the developing personality. The following citation may give an impression:
Increasing structuring and also "exclusion or destructuration" is
the transition from a diffuse, unclarified general condition to a
more and more structured condition in which boundaries, parts,
separations and connections are manifest more and more. Every
separation is at the same time an increased differentiation and
centrification: What is blurred and contourless in the beginning is
separated. However, at the same time a misty unshapedness is
substituted by a higher super- or subordination of the single parts
in an encompassing whole which contains center and subparts.
(Stern, 1927, p. 31, translated by K. K.)
Stern also discussed the role of conflicts and crises in progressions during development and emphasized the possibility of
different functions being asynchronous in developmental
speed, an issue that was elaborated on later by Riegel (1975).
Although explicitly referring to Piaget's concept of stages during development, Stern elaborated more than Piaget on the
aspect of tensions and on the sequences of metamorphoses during the process of development. Tensions were seen as starting
points for increased activities that push the individual through
a sequence of metamorphoses that may occur in synchrony or
asynchrony with other developmental processes.

The Role of Context: The Concept of Proximal Space

Stern denned a person's proximal space as the place of realization, as where the person was affected by his or her environment and where the person was shaping this environment according to his or her needs and abilities. In his time, Stern was
one of the few who tried to further differentiate the environment-individual duality, which consisted of subjective experience inside the individual on the one hand and of objective
events in the environment on the other. Stern created a location
where the mutual exchange between individual and environment could take place. It could be neither the larger "environment" nor the "inner" subject. The larger environment was too
far from and not accessible to the individual, whereas the inner
subject was too far away from the objective world. Thus, the
concept of the proximal space of the person, as Stern called it
("personaler Nahraum"), was introduced. It was here that the

543

interplay between individual and environment was to be studied. Stern not only emphasized the constructive aspect of this
exchange process (similarly to Piaget) but also underlined the
individual's receptivity to external conditions, the selection of
environmental bids, and the generation of meaning from the
specifics of environmental living conditions:
Experiencing is partial, but this partiality is neither incidental nor
meaningless, it rather fits into the means-end embeddedness of
the personal life. . . onefindsan effective selection which directs
the assessment of life events according to personal relevance [italics added], tensions and pathologies. (Stern, 1935, pp. 106-107,
translated by K. K.)
Moreover, Stern also took into account the relativity of the
environmental influence on individual development; he was
convinced that a general and unspecified concept of environment could not capture what he assumed to be the essential site
of exchange, the location where an action of the individual does
affect the environment and where, conversely, a change in the
environment really modifies the individual's behavior. The mutuality between person and environment and the interactive
perspective in the person's proximal space seem well documented in the following citation:
By the permanent exchange between person and world not only
the person is being shaped, but also her or his world. The "environment" of an individual does not consist just of that part of the
objective world which is accidentally surrounding this individual
and therefore affects him or her. Environment is rather that portion of the world that the individual actively brings close to him or
her as he or she is both receptive and sensitive to this portion. At
the same time, the individual tries to shape this piece of world
which is fitting his personality. (Stern, 1935, p. 125, translated by
K. K.)
By creating an arena for exchange, Stern defined what in
more modern terminology is called the ecological niche of a
person and what he called "biosphere" or "personal world."
This arena of exchange was taken by Stern as essentially influencing a person's formation of cognitions about the world,
such as the generation of beliefs about being able or unable to
exert control. A person's biosphere or arena of exchange is exactly that part of the wider environment that is relevant for him
or her; it is identical neither to the person's set of experiences
and inner representations nor to the "objective" environment.
For Stern, a third location between experiencing (subjective
side) and a physical description of environmental conditions
(objective side) was the necessary condition for characterizing
the person's activities in an environment. He introduced the
concept of "gelebte Welt" (the world a person is living in), which
is different from both "erlebte Welt" (experience) and "objektive
Welt" (the objective world) and is a new facet of the environment. Thus, Stern challenged the ongoing nature-nurture discussion by this three-pronged approach. He put the focus on
the process of "interaction" between person and environment,
in which the person, by his or her actions in the proximal space,
reconciles the incongruities between expectancy sets and the
results of actions, which, in turn, create new experience and
new sets of expectancies.
The personal world is not identical to that set of experiences we
call "world view." This experienced "world" is but a segment of
the world in which the individual really exists or "lives" (gelebte

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KURT KREPPNER

Welt). Objective events can only become part of an individual's

experience by the fact that they fit into the world in which he or
she exists. The relationship we have to explore, therefore, is not
two-pronged (objective world, subjective experience) but threepronged (transpersonal objective world, world of individual's existence, experienced subjective world). Between the physical stimulus and the experience of perception lies the integral situation of
stimulation in which the individual exists. Between the sociological unit "family" and the experience of one's family lies the individual's vital and introceptive connectedness with the family.
(Stern, 1935, p. 124, translated by K. K.)

Applying his person-oriented approach, Stern also developed

ideas about the processes leading to the person's inner representation of cultural norms, values, and rules. They are encountered in the "Erlebnisraum" (experiential space) and then represented in the individual's own cultural, social, moral, or religious values that he or she carries along and passes on to the
next generation; they are transmitted from the environment to
the person by the process ofintroception, a process described by
Stern as a permanent fight between the individual's own vital
needs and wishes and the culture's and society's formats. For
Stern, the process ofintroception causes tensions and frictions
and promotes developmental shifts as it contributes to the
awakening and differentiation of conscience. In turn, the values and norms are incorporated into the person's action system.
In this sense, introception appears to be a process akin to
Freud's idea about the development of the superego, but for
Stern the process was more cognitive and transactional than
that of Freud.

The Concept of Egocentrism

Stern (1927) criticized Piaget's concept ofegocentrism, particularly his opinion concerning the timing of the emergence of
social competence in small children. In reading Stern's references to observations he conducted with his own three children, one is sometimes reminded of statements made by human ethologists during the 1970s when they reported about
their observational studies of interactions in mother-child
dyads (Shaffer & Dunn, 1979; Trevarthen & Hubley, 1978).
Stern claimed that the development of sociocentric thinking in
the child starts earlier than Piaget suggested and furthermore,
that the development of social competence depends also on the
social conditions of children's life conditions:

claimed that mutuality is attained much earlier than the 3rd

year:
This thesis of a late beginning (of mutual understanding) may
come from the fact that Piaget focuses on children's behavior
when dealing with one another. When talking to adults, particularly with the mother, this stage is reached by intelligent children
much earlier. (Stern, 1927, p. 148, footnote 1, translated by K. K.)
Discussing the onset of language use and communication,
Stern asked how children who do not use language properly can
communicate with each other. Again he referred to Piaget, who
tried to explain mutual understanding by pointing to the fact
that language is only one aspect of understanding. Stern elaborated on this interpretation by embedding it into his and
Werner's conception of development. He defined children's
communication as a period of transition in which more global
and nonverbal tools are applied for the exchange of messages.
Under a differential-developmental perspective, communication instruments other than language, such as gestures or actions, are judged to possess a status equivalent to language during this period, but they become less important later.
Gestures, mimics, actions are the main instruments that mediate
mutuality among playing children; expressive movements are immediately understood, actions are mirrored or even continued,
the spoken words have more the character of accompanying decoration than that of the core medium of communication.
We find here a very illustrative example for the slowly moving
differentiation or separation of children's functions: Originally,
spoken language (for adults identical with language in general)
does not exist as a separate reality; it is rather differentiated slowly,
step by step, from the diffuse body language [italics added] to
become later the isolated medium for thinking and transmission
of thoughts. (Stern, 1927, p. 148, translated by K. K.)

These reflections not only suggest that Stern was an excellent

and precise observer of his children but also show him as a
scientist who, as early as 1927, had developed a concept of children's social competence and language development that took
into account contextual relativity; it was, at least in some points,
more differentiated than Piaget's egocentristic approach and
closer to an interactionistic position. Moreover, by placing language use and language development into the framework of
differentiation, specification, and hierarchical organization,
Stern's concept exhibits amazing similarities with the theoretical approaches proposed much later by Bruner (1977) and Bates
(1979) that finally opened the windows to a broader understanding of infant speech. However, these approaches are norThe social structure of the child's environment plays an important mally traced back not to Stern but to Vygotsky (1962) and his
role. Martha Muchow (1926) found out in her study with five-yearcontext-oriented "inner speech" concept.
old kindergarteners from Hamburg that only one third of their
speech was egocentric. She concludes that these kids in the kindergarten are living in closer, family-like units which cause a
Conclusion
stronger social attitude. This may be rather different from the
Geneva daycare home of Piaget (similar to Montessori daycare
Without doubt, had Stern's work on developmental psycholhomes), where children exhibit only looser ties to one another
when handled individually. (Stern, 1927, p. 147, footnote 2, trans- ogy been present during the late 1960s and early 1970s in British
and American textbooks, he and his ideas would have had a
lated by K. K.)
major revival in current discussions. Though still acknowledged as late as 1960 by a very few, such as Wolman in his
Moreover, Stern was sensitive to situation-specific variations:
Contemporary Theories and Systems in Psychology, Stern's very
He stated that strong forms of egocentrism as described by
modern blueprint of the person was largely forgotten. Wolman
Piaget predominantly occur when children are together with
described Stern's vision of a person as "a living whole, individpeers, whereas children reach mutual understanding much earual, unique, striving toward goals, self-contained and yet open
lier when together with adults. By the same token, he also

APA CENTENNIAL: WILLIAM L. STERN, 1871-1938

to the world around him; he is capable of having experience"

(Wolman, 1960, p. 413). At a time when mechanistic elementarism still stood against vague wholism in psychology, Stern's idea
of the unity of the person went far beyond the common models
and descriptions of his contemporaries; he courageously explored new roads to find a comprehensive framework in which
both a differentiated perspective on the environment and a humanistic view on the individual could dwell under one theoretical roof. By creating personalism as a new focus in psychology,
he drew the elementarists' attention to the human (and perhaps
humanistic) aspects of behaviors in their subjects, which they
had ignored. At the same time, he tried to attract the wholists'
attention to the situationalflexibilityand plasticity of individuals' behaviors. Stern never stopped in his attempts to convince
the antagonists. He emphasized not only his new, unifying personalistic psychology but also his openness to nomothetic and
idiographic approaches on the one hand and to experimental
and hermeneutic methodology on the other. Stern is viewed by
many of those looking back at the history of psychology as a
practitioner whose major merits lay in the dissemination of
psychology to the public. Furthermore, he is characterized as a
person who, like G. Stanley Hall in American psychology, advanced psychology as a science by restlessly expanding laboratories and founding new journals. This is true, but it is not his
only claim to a permanent place in the history of psychology.
His theoretical framework was evident in most of his publications, and his last work, General Psychology From the Personalistic Standpoint (Stern, 1938), is afineexample of his continuing quest for a more integrated approach to psychology.
The concepts selected for presentation in this article are samples of Stern's pioneering thinking in the area of developmental
psychology; they may help us to acknowledge his role and stature in the light of contemporary paradigms such as contextualism and transactionalism. One is tempted to speculate on why
Stern, who pioneered these modern conceptions, did not play a
more prominent role in our history and on why his thinking did
not become established as a school or provide guidelines for
research. Perhaps Stern's death came too suddenly and his stay
in the United States was too short after his expulsion from Germany to gain wide recognition on the American academic
scene. His way of thinking did not fit into the mainstream
philosophy of American psychology during the 1930s. For example, one of his closest colleagues, Heinz Werner, who also
was forced to emigrate to America during the 1930s, was not
recognized for many years for his views on development (e.g.,
comparative psychology, Werner, 1948; a general theory of perception, Werner & Wapner, 1952; or the orthogenetic principle,
Werner, 1957).
For Stern, however, aside from the time factor, there could be
deeper reasons: Perhaps it was his fate to belong to those of a
first generation who try to break down barriers in extant world
views and build new frameworks but who still lack a new terminology to convey their message. Those in the generation who
came after himfor example, Lewin (1931, 1936, 1939)
could successfully transform some of Stern's basic ideas into a
new terminology, such as field theory or topological psychology, and find new ways to explore both context and persons
under the perspective of dynamic exchange. The new paradigm, Lewin's dynamic field, presented the concept of the per-

545

son's proximal space in a purified and, in a way, depersonalized

version that won attention and acceptance during the 1940s and
1950s. Another version of Stern's concept of proximal space
that achieved considerable recognition was Vygotsky's (1978)
conception of the "zone of proximal development." As can be
concluded, for example, from citations in his Foundations of
Pedology (Vygotsky, 1935), Vygotsky referred explicitly to
Stern's three-pronged approach to describe the arena of exchange between the individual and the environment; and he
stressed the importance of the concrete situation in relation to
the passivity or activity of the person, pointing to the "right
moment" when shaping the child's environment to initiate
learning processes, particularly with regard to the development
of ability and skills. In short, Vygotsky recognized the relevance
of a person's proximal space. The interplay between cultural
values and norms on the one hand and the child's own activity
on the other, which creates tensions that thus promote development, well-known in Stern's framework, is one of the essential
concepts in Vygotsky's "zone of proximal development."
It is a matter of speculation why Vygotsky's version of the
child-context exchange, and not Stern's, won such attention in
the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, when Vygotsky's
work was extensively translated and cited. As Valsiner (1988, pp.
120-123) suggested, Vygotsky had his roots in the European
tradition and was influenced, aside from Stern, by Buehler,
Hetzer, Werner, and Ach. His ideas, which stood against the
Russian school of reflexological reductionism, fostered the idea
of an actively developing individual who was either encouraged
or restricted by the context. Vygotsky developed an extension of
the stimulus-response theory by pointing to the active child on
the one hand but maintaining a pragmatic and empiristic view
of the individual's learning process within a given context on
the other. During the late 1960s and the early 1970s, when language development and cognition became major issues in
American developmental psychology, Vygotsky was perhaps
the more appropriate person to be cited, for example, by
Bruner (Bruner, Olver, & Greenfield, 1966) or Berlyne (1965) in
reference to the ongoing Piaget-Vygotsky controversy concerning language and thought development. The complexity of
Stern's three-level approach and his intended universalism concerning the individual-context exchange possibly limited his
reception by American scholars, whereas the more pragmatic
and teaching-oriented approach of Vygotskyfitbetter with contemporary thinking.
Stern influenced the work of his contemporaries in other
ways as well. With his pioneering studies in child development,
he most likely had an impact on Piaget. This claim is supported
by numerous citations of Stern in Piaget's early works, such as in
La Construction du Reel chez I'Enfant (Piaget, 1937), in which
Stern's Psychology of Early Childhood alone is mentioned six
times, mostly when space perception and subject-object groupings are discussed. It seems as if Stern's meticulous observations
of his own children at 4 to 9 months of age had stimulated
Piaget to focus on phenomena (space bucale) that Stern brought
to his attention. As to language development, Piaget (1962) discussed extensively Stern's alternative concept of egocentrism in
his he Langage et la Pensee chez I'Enfant. The work of Stern's
colleague Martha Muchow with Hamburg kindergarten children is reviewed in this book in great length as well.

546

KURT KREPPNER

Stern's dynamic and process-oriented approach to development was also acknowledged by Charlotte BUhler. When she
argued against Watson's behavioristic position by pointing to
the spontaneous emergence of behaviors during development,
she referred explicitly to Stern and his conceptual framework
describing endowment-environment tensions as a factor in
promoting developmental shifts (Buhler, 1927).
The obviously high stature Stern had in European psychology was neither recognized nor acknowledged in American psychology. For example, one of Stern's most impressive creations,
the contextual and transactional view for understanding developmental processes, could not be transferred to American psychology during the 1930s. It was nearly four decades before a
dialectical and transactional view of human development was
presented to American developmental audiences (Riegel, 1975;
Sameroff, 1975). It is noteworthy that Klaus Riegel, who formulated an explicit dialectical perspective on developmental
processes, was influenced not only by Vygotsky but also indirectly by Stern, because Riegel was a student of Curt Bondy in
Hamburg, who was in turn an earlier student of William Stern
(see Stern, 1921).
By comparing Stern's ideas with current theories about the
endowment-environment relationship, one can find fascinating parallels between, for example, the conceptions of convergence and proximal space and the concept of ecological niches
(Plomin, 1986; Scarr & McCartney, 1983) or the conception of
siblings in the same family actively developing in different directions (Dunn & Plomin, 1990; Plomin & Daniels, 1987).
In sum, Stern presented a modern, process-oriented description of the child's growing abilities and competences during
development; he developed and promoted concepts across the
entire area of psychology that were in part more innovative
than many others that were produced during the 1940s, 1950s,
and even 1960s. I would like to close this homage to the philosopher, humanist, and psychologist William Stern with a citation
of Frank Hardesty's (1976) description of the Hamburg years:

In H. R. Schaffer (Ed.), Studies in mother-infant interaction (pp. 271

289). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
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Dilthey, W (1924). Ideen iiber eine beschreibende und zergliedemde
Psychologie [Ideas about a descriptive and dissecting psychology].
In W Dilthey (Ed.), Gesammelte Schriften (Vol. 5, pp. 139-240).
Leipzig, Germany: Teubner. (Original work published 1894)
Dudeck, P. (1989). William Stern und das Projekt "Jugendkunde"
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Dunn, J., & Plomin, R. (1990). Separate lives. Why siblings are so different. New York: Basic Books.
Eckardt, G. (1989). William SternAspekte seines wissenschaftlichen
Lebenswerkes. Zum 50. Todestag am 27. Marz 1988 [William Stern
Aspects of his scientific work. For the 50th anniversary of his
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Hardesty, F. P. (1976). Louis William Stern: A new view of the Hamburg years. Annals ofthe New York Academy ofSciences, 270,31 -44.
Lerner, R. M. (1982). Children and adolescents as producers of their
own development. Developmental Review, 2, 342-370.
Lewin, K. (1917). Kriegslandschaft [War landscape]. Zeitschrift fiir
angewandte Psychologie, 12, 440-447.
Lewin, K. (1927). Kindliche Ausdrucksbewegungen [Expressive movements of the child ]. In W Stern (Ed.), Psychologie der frtihen Kindheit (4th ed., pp. 503-511). Leipzig, Germany: Quelle & Meyer.
Lewin, K. (1931). Environmental forces in child behavior and development. In C. Murchison (Ed.), Handbook of child psychology (pp.
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Lewin, K. (1936). Principles of topological psychology. New York:
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Lewin, K. (1939). Field theory and experiment in social psychology:
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Stern emerges as a totally committed individualin today's terms
Muchow, M. (1926). Psychologische Untersuchungen iiber die Wira humanistwho, with a mode of synthesis characteristic of him
kung des Seeklimas auf Schul kinder [Psychological studies on the
throughout his career, sought a fusion of theory and practice, ateffect of sea climate on school children]. Zeitschrift fiir
tempting to apply the best to both. His work, especially that assopddagogische Psychologie, 27,18-31.
ciated with his years in Hamburg, attests not only to his belief that
Muchow, M. (19 3 5). Der Lebensraum des Grofistadtkindes [The ecology
a basic unity underlies all facets of thefieldin psychology but to
of the urban child]. Hamburg, Germany: Reigel. (Reprinted 1978 in
his complete faith in psychology as essentially a tool for the enPad Extra, Bensheim, Germany)
lightenment of man and for providing a basis for social reform.
Piaget, J. (1937). La construction du reel chez I'enfant [The construction
For Stern, psychology as an institution existed not as a unit in the
fraternity of sciences but as an instrument for confronting and
of reality in the child]. Neuchatel, Switzerland: Delachaux et Niescontributing to the solution of the social problems of his day.
tle.
(p. 40)
Piaget, J. (1962). Le langage el la pensee chez I'enfant [Language and
thought of the child ]. Neuchatel, Switzerland: Delachaux et Niestle.
Plomin, R. (1986). Development, genetics, and psychology. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
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