There are many individuals and events in this century that can lay claim to the beginnings of the scientific investigation of achievement motivation. We begin with a little known drama of relatively recent origin.

the players: Professor Kurt Lewin and his laboratory assistant, Ferdinand Hoppe

the time: 1930–1931

the place: A small laboratory at the University of Berlin

Ironically, Professor Lewin's laboratory was only a 5-minute tram ride from another better-remembered laboratory whose mission threatened to send the world, in Winston Churchill's (1940) words, “into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of a perverted science.” In the early 1930s Nazi physicists were hard at work there on the development of the world's first atomic device. These were the twilight years of a golden age of science that had witnessed a revolution in the concept of energy in the fields of physics, chemistry, and biology, capped off by Sigmund Freud's sweeping proposal of a previously overlooked energy source – psychic energy. In Freud's schema psychic energy activates a dynamic system responsible for psychological work – the progenitor of all human thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Professor Lewin's laboratory was crowded with the research paraphernalia of his time, including an odd convey or-belt contraption that allowed a series of pegs to move on circular rollers at a uniform rate of speed, much like a row of ducks in a shooting gallery.