Gestalt Psychology

Gestalt Psychology

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gestalt theory, a major school of psychology during the first half of the twentieth century, was an influential counterpoint to the other mostly atomistic psychological systems of the time: structuralism, functionalism, and behaviorism. While its controversies with these other systems during the “age of schools” in psychology have receded into history, its major tenets once again became salient toward the end of the twentieth century in such fields as social psychology, cognition, personality psychology, and visual neuroscience.

Gestalt psychology proposed a radical revision of the atomistic view that had prevailed for centuries in Western science and social science. Natural wholes, according to the Gestalt view, are not simply the sum total of their constituent parts. Rather, characteristics of the whole determine the nature of its parts, prescribing the place, role, and function of each part in the unified whole. The Gestalt principle of Prägnanz, furthermore, asserts that the organization of any whole will be as “good” (i.e., balanced, simple, integrated) as the prevailing conditions allow. This insistence on holistic processes applies equally to all integrated wholes, from physical systems such as electrical fields, magnetic fields, and soap films to psychological systems such as cognitive processes, the organization of perception, personality, and social phenomena.

The Gestalt movement is generally viewed (Ash 1995; King and Wertheimer 2005) as having been launched by a series of experiments by Max Wertheimer (1880–1943) on apparent movement published in 1912, although clear indications of a Gestalt perspective were already evident in two earlier publications of Wertheimer on musical structures (1910) and on aboriginal thinking about numerical issues (1912). Two of Wertheimer’s colleagues who served as observers in these experiments, Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967) and Kurt Koffka (1886–1941), became his collaborators during the next decades in promulgating the new Gestalt approach (Köhler 1929; Koffka 1935). A typical experiment in Wertheimer’s series involved, for example, exposure of a short vertical line in the visual field, followed after a brief interval by exposure of a second similar vertical line a short distance away from where the first one had been exposed. If the time and distance relations are appropriate, observers see a single line moving from one location to the other. The experience is indistinguishable from watching an actual short vertical line move from one location to the other; in both cases, the perception of motion is immediate and compelling. The prevailing alternate theoretical orientations, maintaining that percepts always correspond with their correlated physical stimuli, could not explain the perceived motion when the actual stimuli are two stationary lines successively exposed. The whole, the experience of motion as a Gestalt, cannot be derived from a combination of the “component sensations” of the two stationary stimuli.

The Gestalt school became prominent in European and American psychology. Its principles of perceptual organization have been summarized in almost every introductory psychology textbook; Wertheimer’s book Productive Thinking. (1945) challenged the computer models of the late twentieth century to try to account for the ubiquitous cognitive processes of insight and understanding.

SEE ALSO Gestalt Therapy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ash, Mitchell G. 1995. Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890–1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

King, D. Brett, and Michael Wertheimer. 2005. Max Wertheimer and Gestalt Theory. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Koffka, Kurt. 1935. Principles of Gestalt Psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

Köhler, Wolfgang. 1929. Gestalt Psychology. New York: Liveright.

Wertheimer, Max. 1910. Musik der Wedda [Music of the Veddas]. Sammelbände der internationalen Musikgesellschaft 11: 300–309.

Wertheimer, Max. 1912. Experimentelle Studien über das Sehen von Bewegung [Experimental studies of the seeing of motion]. Zeitschrift für Psychologie 61: 161–265.

Wertheimer, Max. 1912. Über das Denken der Naturvölker, I. Zahlen und Zahlgebilde [On the thinking of aboriginal people, I: Numbers and number structures]. Zeitschrift für Psychologie 60: 321–378.

Wertheimer, Max. 1945, 1959, 1971, 1982. Productive Thinking New York: Harper; University of Chicago Press.

Michael Wertheimer