Related Terms • Gestalt • psychology

Name:
Konrad Lorenz
Konrad Zacharias Lorenz

Dates:
Born: November 7, 1903 in Vienna, Austria
Died: 1989
Published On Aggression: 1963
Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine: 1973

Biography:
Konrad Lorenz, a medical doctor in the German army who spent four years in a Russian prisoner of war camp, became famous for his work in the field of ethology. For a time he headed the Institute of Comparative Ethology at Altenberg, but he went on to establish a comparative ethology department in the Max Planck Institute, becoming its co-director in 1954.

Lorenz based much of his work on the principle of gestalt perception. According to Lorenz, this way of looking at the world transcends what can be accomplished through just "rational thought" and the emphasis on quantification and reduction which typically characterizes scientific research.

Most of his studies were focused on innate animal behavior, especially that of imprinting in birds. Lorenz argued that much behavior in animals could be described simply as patterns of instinctual actions, not guided by insight or conscious reflection.

In his famous work On Aggression, he argued that aggressive tendencies were innate in animals, even humans, but that while it remains simply instinctual for most creatures, humans should be able to work to control it. Despite this latter qualification, Lorenz' book was harshly criticized by psychologists, sociologists, and others who believed that the idea of humans having innate behaviors could be used to defend the status quo in which certain people would "naturally" come out ahead of others. This, however, is easily refuted by what Lorenz himself wrote:

We have good reason to consider intra-specific aggression in the present cultural and technological situation of mankind as the greatest of dangers. However, we shall not improve our chances to deal with it if we accept it as something metaphysical and unavoidable. However, we may succeed if we can unravel the causal chain of its natural causes. Whenever man attained the power to direct natural phenomena into a particular direction, he was able to do so because of his understanding of the underlying causes. The study of normal, species-preserving life processes, called physiology, provides the pre-requisite basis for the study of pathology.

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