Psychological Lifespace

1935

Martha Muchow (1892–1933)

German psychologist Martha Muchow was among the first to fully explore the total environment of a child’s development. Her posthumously published book, The Lifespace of the Urban Child (1935), examined the importance of a child’s perception of the immediate environment which guides the child’s behavior, indicating what must be done in order for the child to feel at home or in control of the environment.

Muchow’s personal and professional story is remarkable. She became a schoolteacher in 1913, her educational philosophy having been shaped by Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the Kindergarten movement, and Maria Montessori. In 1916, she began to assist psychologist William Stern with his psychological studies of talented children. Muchow formally entered Hamburg University in 1919 as a doctoral student of Stern’s and earned her doctorate summa cum laude in 1923. From this early period, Muchow worked with children and youth, seeking to understand and address problems they faced in urban environments, such as tuberculosis.

She began to develop her theory of lifespace (in German, Lebensraum) during the 1920s. Muchow was influenced by biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s publications on lifespace, by which he meant the behavior of animals in a particular environment. Muchow extended the concept to include the social and cultural influences on psychological development. In her work, she argued that the child’s experiential environment may well be different from the physical environment.

Muchow chose to study children who were growing up in urban environments. How did they gain a sense of mastery and belonging in such complex spaces? She combined surveys, interviews, map making, time samples, and close physical observations in multiple settings in order to obtain a more complete data set. Together, she argued, these methods allowed the researcher to understand the lifespace of each child.

The conceptual and empirical research conducted by Muchow opened new avenues of psychological research. Following her suicide after being dismissed by the Nazis, other psychologists began to borrow from her work. Such key figures as Kurt Lewin, Roger Barker, and Beatrice Wright founded what became ecological psychology, which is a vibrant specialization today.

SEE ALSO Gestalt Psychology (1912), [B = f(P, E)] = The Lifespace (1936), Ecological Systems Theory (1979)

A photograph of boys playing stickball in the streets of old Havana, Cuba, 1999. Psychologist Martha Muchow was among the first to carefully study the impact of a child’s “experiential” environment—especially in urban spaces such as this—on his or her development.