Biographical Summary
On September 9, 1923,
Max Lüscher was born in the Swiss university town of Basel.
He attended school in Basel and in 1944 was awarded his AMatura@
there, a diploma which would allow him to pursue his studies at the university
level. He went on to study psychiatry
and earned a doctorate in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and the
philosophy of law. His dissertation
on AColor as a diagnostic tool in psychology@ was pronounced Asumma cum
laude@ by the professors of psychiatry, philosophy, and psychology.
He then embarked on a career as a psychotherapist
in Basel and, from 1961-1965, in Berlin. Since then, he has made his home in Lucerne,
where he is the head of the Institute for Medical Psychodiagnostics and
contributes to scientific work on Lüscher-Color-Diagnostics and therapy. The main emphasis of his activities is on training
seminars for physicians and guest lectures. The Lüscher-Color-Diagnostics are taught in seven languages, and
it is used at universities throughout the world, e.g. in Russia, Poland,
Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Denmark, Finland, Norway,
Austria, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, USA (Yale, Boston), Chile, Peru,
and Argentina.
At
an early age, he read the collected lectures and interpretations of dreams
by Sigmund Freud. Then he poured
through everything the university library had to offer on the subject
of physiognomy, from Aristotle to contemporary writers.
At 16 (in 1939), he devised a method which used the contraction
of individual facial muscles to define a person=s state of mind. This involved creating his own system for analyzing
character, based on two dimensions, the first Adirective-receptive@ and
the second Aconstant-variable, that remain part of his present-day regulation
psychology.
From
1938 to 1941, Max Lüscher also studied the graphological teachings of
Ludwig Klages and enriched his own theory of personality or character
by borrowing from that of Klages.
Psycho-Logic
He
noticed that after taking several wrong turns, he always stumbled upon
the right answer by abandoning the conventional approach of choosing categories
based on empirical findings and adopting the logical categories provided
by the thought processes instead. Although
he was not familiar with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant at that point,
he clearly recognized that without realizing it, we always apply categories
supplied to us by our thought processes in order to label and categorize
phenomena. That also made clear to him the corollary that
his first priority must be to identify and comprehend categories of thought
so that they could then be applied as a research tool. He realized that he should solve the problems
by resorting to these logical categories and the unbiased phenomenological
method. The process of searching
out the best possible precise psychological concepts for categories to
be used in his regulation psychology was to take several decades. He knew that, in a departure from conventional
psychoanalytical terminology, they could definitely not be defined in
terms of physical body parts (e.g. oral, phallic), space (e.g. introverted,
level), or time (e.g. archetype, phase).
Chance gives the go-ahead to colors
At
that time, even though he was only sixteen, he had already received special
permission to attend lectures and seminars on psychology and philosophy
at the University of Basel. At
eighteen, while still in high school, he learned about the famous test
developed by his fellow countryman Hermann Rorschach and developed a method
of using the test to assess logical thinking.
The psychologist at his school was Professor Probst, who taught
students at the university how to use the Rorschach test, and it was Professor
Probst who arranged for him to receive an excused leave of absence from
school to allow him to write down his new method. He also wanted Max Lüscher
to do additional research on the color diagnostics which he had developed
for the Rorschach test.
Even
at that early point, his main interest was focused not on the test, and
not on the colors, but on the primary goal of understanding the structure
of the human psyche. Initially,
he was interested in the psychology of color only as it related to the
Rorschach test. But because the answer to this problem eluded
him at first, he stuck with it till he managed, over the course of five
years from 1941 to 1946, to resolve the question in a sufficiently logical
and empirical manner.
Unlike
many others, he recognized that the sensory perception of color is objective
and universally shared by all, but that color preferences are subjective,
which is a distinction allowing subjective states to be objectively measured
by using test colors. Max Lüscher
was given unlimited access to patients and patient records by Professor
John Stähelin, the head of the psychiatry department, in 1941. That allowed him, right from the very start, to develop and conduct
research on his color diagnostics using patients and schoolchildren from
special observation classrooms over a period of six years.
By
a stroke of luck, Karl Miescher, the General Manager at Ciba, which was
at that time the largest chemical company in Basel, took a personal interest
in the psychology of colors, and he made a laboratory, materials, and
workers available to Lüscher while special test colors were being developed,
which took approximately five years.
Between 1941 and 1946, he was engaged in the attempt to sort through
4,500 different shades of color applied to many different materials (paper,
metal, wood, film, silk, wool) and find those which provided an exact
match for his psychological system.
While
he was a student, age 22 to 24 (1945-1947), as director of the Psychotechnical
Institute of Basel, he had sole charge of psychological diagnostics for
personnel evaluation. This job
brought him to the realization that color diagnostics were not only simpler
and faster, they also outperformed previously utilized tests in terms
of their ability to provide more differentiated and more essential results.
In
1947, when he was 23 years old, Max Lüscher spoke on his color diagnostics
in Lausanne, at the first world congress for psychology after World War
II. His color test became known in international
circles as a result, and its theoretical underpinnings were published
in the proceedings of the conference, a volume entitled ALa Diagnostic
du Charactčre@ (Presse Universitaire, Paris 1949).
This paved the way for Max Lüscher to teach classes on his color
diagnostics in Paris at the Sorbonne Department of Psychology and the
Paris Ministry of Labor in 1949 and 1950.
While still enrolled at the university (1947), Max Lüscher was
elected to the board of the Philosophical Society.
Activities
After
his doctorate (1949), he was elected to the Anthropological Institute
of Switzerland, which financed the living expenses of future university
professors of philosophy for three years as a stipend.
During these three years while receiving the stipend, he lectured
in the auditorium of the University Basel, which was always filled to
capacity, and worked in his own practice as a psychotherapist, where he
relied mainly on dream interpretation, a skill he had acquired in Paris.
A
Swiss periodical printed an article featuring his psychology of color,
which led in 1952 to a request by the largest German newspaper conglomerate
that he come work for them in Hamburg as a consultant.
There he signed consulting contracts of several years= duration
with, among others, the world=s largest advertising agency and, over periods
lasting several decades, with top German industrial companies. This gave him ample opportunity to intensify
demographic and cultural research expanding the color diagnostics based
on statistical studies using large samples.
Regulation psychology and the Lüscher cube
In
1953 he spent two weeks in a mountain hotel recuperating from kidney surgery.
While he was there he achieved the most important breakthrough
in his ideas on regulation psychology, taking what had till then been
a two-dimensional system and expanding it to four dimensions, with the
cube as a representative model (actually it was a sphere).
Teaching
In
1953, the Psychological Yearbook (AJahrbuch der Psychologie,@ Rascher-Verlag,
Zurich) published excerpts from a major post-doctoral work on APhilosophical
Anthropology, Psychology, and Culture@ written in order to satisfy the
eligibility requirements for the position of
professor. This work led
to his becoming, at the age of 33, a psychology professor in Amsterdam
in 1956.
The
8-color test in 1969 became a best-seller in the US for years on end,
and remained on the best-seller list in Germany for months in 1971. It was later translated into 29 languages.
Max
Lüscher lectured at numerous universities in both Western and Eastern
Europe, at Yale University=s school of medicine and psychology department
in the US in 1980, and later at universities in Rome, Santiago de Chile,
and Melbourne, Australia. He also
taught courses on the psychology of shapes and colors at the State Academy
of Design, i.e. the AHochschule für Gestaltung@ in Linz, Austria from
1978 to 1990.
Therapy
A
system of logically defined categories from regulation psychology serves
as the basis for the Lüscher color diagnostics, which by that token, is
a totally integrated system, enabling him for the first time to establish
a therapeutic strategy logically derived from the objectively structured
diagnosis. The therapeutic strategy could be applied to
psychological techniques and, with input from doctors in specialized medicine,
to methods with psycho-vegetative effects, in order to find the appropriate
psychopharmacological agent, for example.
In 1990, Lüscher discovered a way of pairing up homeopathic medicines
with color preferences. Drawing
on the expertise of the Swiss doctor Bruno Weber, M.D., it subsequently
became possible to outline the structure of the homeopathic medicines
in terms of a color code with 4- to 12-digit accuracy, and thus to obtain
a highly differentiated and direct indication of the most suitable medicine. In addition, the miasmas of Hahnemann, which
correspond exactly to the cube model of regulation psychology, were used
in 2000 to develop a logically-based systematization of homeopathic medicines.
Additional areas of regulation psychology
In
recent decades, Max Lüscher has expanded his regulation psychology beyond
the limits of color into applications in other emotional areas - to the
objective and universally valid definition of emotional symbols, such
as, for example, in dreams, formal and color representational forms, or
body movements; postures and gestural mouth functions; temporal concepts;
ideologies; color, formal, and ideational aspects of graphic design, architecture,
and advertising. Psychological explanations are found in the
tables of the Lüscher color diagnostics and in part in his central work,
The Law of Harmony within Us (ADas Harmoniegesetz in uns,@ 7th
edition, ECON-Verlag, Munich), first published in 1985.
A
number of his books are bestsellers, and have been reissued repeatedly
for thirty years, such as ASignale der Persönlichkeit,@ and ADer 4-Farben-Mensch@
(Personality Signals and The 4-Color Person).
His most recent book, ADie Farben der Liebe@ (The Colors of Love)
has already been translated into eleven languages.