After the digital archive of Professor Armin Schulte has been made available, members can now access all Wilhelm Salber articles - except the anders-columns - access. Here you can read a text by Dr. Daniel Salber, who presents this compilation of his father's work.

On the way to morphology - Wilhelm Salbers essays from 1953 to 2004

by Daniel Salber

The best access to psychological morphology is provided by the scientific essays Wilhelm Salbers from 1953 to 2004, which are the "On the Road" of morphology: Whatever W.Salber encountered on his path of life and thought - vampire films, clothing, children's drawings, even Thomas v. Aquin - he took as opportunities to formulate his own psychology. He collected his essays in seven so-called "Varia volumes", which he had compiled and bound for his own use. The "Varia" are invaluable for both non-morphologists and experts, as they show the development and meaning of this psychology step by step.

Readers of "Varia" can accompany Salber on the path of his thinking. In doing so, they will discover that "the" morphology is not a doctrine set in stone, but that it found and finds itself, like the life of the soul, in education and transformation. If it is ONE single thought that a thinker pursues throughout his life, then with Salber it is the thought that something can only remain the same by changing. Transformation is not change, but the condition of existence of identity. It is precisely this paradox that allows us to understand the becoming of the One morphology in the manifold "Varia".

Already the "comparative phenomenological consideration" of "Urteil, Entschluss und Entscheidung" (1953) fights against the rigid division of life into "will and thinking" by describing the becoming of orientation and direction in the execution of existence. While Husserl and Rothacker are still godfathers here, Salber's own direction becomes clearer in 1959: "Are Holistic Things Practical? This question does not introduce a dry theory, but a productive examination of Vance Packard's market research, which was sensational at the time. Wholeness - and not form - was a basic experience and a guide for Salber's psychology.

The "Qualitative Method(s) of Personality Research" (1960) appear like a fortification of one's own terrain before Salber sets off in the following years to "morphology". In "Der Blick" (1960) he develops a "morphology" of the gaze in the style of Sartre and Adler (Varia I, p. 185). The discovery of the "complex development" can be found in the essay "Zur Psychologie des Filmerlebens" (1960). A few years later the concept of the "unity of action" appears for the first time (1966), and a little later the ontological principle of morphology: "to exist" as "to be formed" (1969). These basic ideas are, as I said, not formulated in abstract terms, but are vividly developed in the press, schools, university reform, literature - and since the 1970s in art.

Whoever follows Salber's way into the "Varia" no longer stumbles over sentences like "Media soul is transformation" ("Was wirkt", 1994). From the perspective of this view of human beings, the criticism of our culture becomes understandable, which Salber practiced in an interview in 1999: "The disengaged culture" has got stuck in a "carousel of arbitrariness". In this world-less world, classical psychoanalysis loses its footing. Salber understood his "Intensive Analytical Consulting" (IB) as a contemporary continuation. After decades of testing, he presented the "IB" 2001 together with N. Endres in an essay that is also understandable for psychologists of other directions. In 2004, "The Crazy Whole" then crowns the experiences of the "Morphology of the Unconscious Soul Operation" presented in the "Varia".

The collection of essays now available online bears witness to a way of thinking that remains connected to the "object" - the human condition - precisely in its freedom. Thinking morphologically means thinking further morphology.

Note: Members of the Wilhelm Salber Society (WSG) can register under "Members Area" (menu "Society") and access the VARIA volumes in the "Archive" area.