Gestalt psychology
, school of
psychology
founded in the 20th century that provided the foundation for the modern study of
perception
.
Gestalt
theory emphasizes that the whole of anything is greater than its parts. That is, the attributes of the whole are not deducible from analysis of the parts in isolation. The word
Gestalt
is used in modern German to mean the way a thing has been “placed,” or “put together.” There is no exact equivalent in English. “Form” and “shape” are the usual translations; in psychology the word is often interpreted as “pattern” or “configuration.”
Gestalt theory originated in
Austria
and
Germany
as a reaction against the associationist and
structural
schools’ atomistic orientation (an approach which fragmented experience into distinct and unrelated elements). Gestalt studies made use instead of
phenomenology
. This method, with a tradition going back to
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
, involves nothing more than the description of direct psychological experience, with no restrictions on what is permissible in the description. Gestalt psychology was in part an attempt to add a
humanistic
dimension to what was considered a sterile approach to the scientific study of mental life. Gestalt psychology further sought to
encompass
the qualities of form, meaning, and value that prevailing psychologists had either ignored or presumed to fall outside the boundaries of
science
.
The publication of Czech-born psychologist
Max Wertheimer
’s “Experimentelle Studien uber das Sehen von Bewegung” (“Experimental Studies of the Perception of Movement”) in 1912 marks the founding of the Gestalt school. In it Wertheimer reported the result of a study on apparent movement conducted in
Frankfurt am Main
, Germany, with psychologists
Wolfgang Kohler
and
Kurt Koffka
. Together, these three formed the core of the Gestalt school for the next few decades. (By the mid-1930s all had become professors in the United States.)
The earliest Gestalt work concerned
perception
, with particular emphasis on
visual perceptual
organization as explained by the phenomenon of
illusion
. In 1912 Wertheimer discovered the
phi phenomenon
, an
optical illusion
in which stationary objects shown in rapid succession,
transcending
the
threshold
at which they can be perceived separately, appear to move. The explanation of this phenomenon?also known as persistence of vision and experienced when viewing
motion pictures
?provided strong support for Gestalt principles.
Under the old assumption that sensations of perceptual experience stand in one-to-one relation to physical
stimuli
, the effect of the phi phenomenon was apparently inexplicable. However, Wertheimer understood that the perceived motion is an emergent experience, not present in the stimuli in isolation but dependent upon the relational characteristics of the stimuli. As the motion is perceived, the observer’s
nervous system
and experience do not passively register the physical input in a piecemeal way. Rather, the neural organization as well as the perceptual experience springs immediately into existence as an entire field with
differentiated
parts. In later writings this principle was stated as the law of
Pragnanz
, meaning that the neural and perceptual organization of any set of stimuli will form as good a Gestalt, or whole, as the prevailing conditions will allow.
Major elaborations of the new formulation occurred within the next decades. Wertheimer, Kohler, Koffka, and their students extended the Gestalt approach to problems in other areas of perception,
problem solving
,
learning
, and
thinking
. The Gestalt principles were later applied to motivation,
social psychology
, and
personality
(particularly by
Kurt Lewin
) and to
aesthetics
and economic behaviour. Wertheimer demonstrated that
Gestalt
concepts could also be used to shed light on problems in
ethics
, political behaviour, and the nature of truth. Gestalt psychology’s traditions continued in the perceptual investigations undertaken by
Rudolf Arnheim
and
Hans Wallach in the
United States
.
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