Karl Duncker

Karl Duncker (1903 to 1940) was a German Gestalt psychologist born in Leipzig. He studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University, spent 1925 to 1926 at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he took a master's degree, and until 1935 worked as a student and assistant to the founders of Gestalt psychology in Berlin, Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka. Exiled by the Nazis in 1935, he held an assistantship at Cambridge under Frederic Bartlett and later moved to the United States, where he assisted Kohler again at Swarthmore College. He coined the term functional fixedness for the difficulty of seeing that an object with one fixed function can serve another, and he showed it with the candle problem. He died by suicide in 1940, aged 37.