Kurt Goldstein

Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) was a German-born neurologist and psychiatrist whose holistic view of the organism shaped both the clinical treatment of brain injury and later psychology. Trained in medicine after a period of philosophical study, he drew on neo-Kantian thought and brought a broad, unified perspective to his work on the nervous system.

Born into a large Jewish family in Upper Silesia, Goldstein studied under Carl Wernicke and Ludwig Edinger in Breslau and later in Frankfurt. During the First World War he treated many soldiers with brain injuries and helped found an institute in Frankfurt devoted to the consequences of such damage, working closely with the Gestalt psychologist Adhémar Gelb. His major book, The Organism, was written in Amsterdam after the Nazis forced him out of Germany in 1933, and in 1935 he settled in the United States, where he remained until his death.