Lewin was born in 1890 in what is now Poland but at the time was the Prussian province of Posen, in the village of Moglino and was the second of four children (Greathouse). His parents owned a general store, and a farm on the outskirts of the village. When Lewin was fifteen his family moved away from the small village, the farm and their store and went to Berlin.

It was in Germany was where Lewin began his formal education, but like most people he was unsure of what he really wanted to study at first. In 1909 Lewin began attending the University of Frieberg where he started to study medicine. This did not interest him so he transferred to the University of Munich where he tried to study Biology. Again Lewin decided that this was not for him so he transferred for the last time, this time to the University of Berlin where his study of Philosophy and Psychology began (Frostburg). Lewin was said to have "found many of (the school's) department's courses in

Lewin's most celebrated impact on the world of psychology was the development of his field theory. Field Theory "proposes that behavior is a function of the person interacting with the environment (Gazzaniga pg.414)" The importance of this was that it challenged the idea that all human actions are based on internal impulses. Lewin argued that our behavior is based on much more complicated factors like our environment and a person's characteristics(Jones). However obvious or simple this idea may seem to us almost seventy years later this was truly a revolutionary idea for its time.

Lewin was married twice in his life, the first time in 1917 to a schoolteacher named Maria Landsberg with whom he had the first two of his four children, but in 1927 they divorced. In 1929 he remarried to Gertrud Weiss who he had his third and fourth child with (Frostburg). But before Lewin actually received his degree, he served in the German Army during World War I. While in the service Lewin rose from the rank of private to Lieutenant and was wounded in battle (Jones). These experiences may have had a significant effect on his later research on group psychology.

After the war in 1921 Lewin began work at the Psychological Institute at the University of Berlin, where he had the opportunity to work with Wolfgang Kohler and Wertheimer the developers of Gestalt Psychology . The emphasis that these men put on looking at the whole picture rather than the sum of its parts in regards to their research had a palpable impact on Lewin's work for the rest of his life. In 1932, after several years of work with Wertheimer and Kohler in Germany, Lewin was invited to be a visiting professor at Stanford University (Patnoe pf.3). He stayed in the United States for six months and then moved back to Germany just as Hitler was coming to power. Being a Jew Lewin wanted to get out of the country as fast as possible. Luckily he was able to do this because of

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