Gestalt Reconsidered

A New Approach to Contact and Resistance

Gordon Wheeler

• Publisher: Gestalt Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134895090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicología aplicada

In this original and penetrating work, the origins of the Gestalt psychotherapy model are traced back to its roots in psychoanalysis and Gestalt cognitive and perceptual psychology. Drawing new implications for both Gestalt and psychotherapy in general from these origins - and with special emphasis on the neglected work of Lewis and Goldstein - Wheeler develops a revised model that is more fully "Gestalt" and at the same time more firmly grounded in the spectrum of tools and approaches available to the contemporary psychotherapist. Along the way, a number of new insights are offered, not just in Gestalt, but in the working of the psychoanalytic and cognitive/behavioral models. The result is an integrated approach giving a fresh perspective on the universal processes of contact and resistance, both in psychotherapy and in social systems in general. The practitioner is given these tools for "addressing problems at the intra- and interpersonal level and wider systematic levels at the same time, and in the same language."

Each chapter stands alone, and makes a fresh and significant contribution to its particular subject. Taken together, they constitute a remarkable excursion through the history of psychotherapy in this century, weaving powerfully through social psychology, behaviorism, and Gestalt itself, yielding a masterful new synthesis that will interest the practitioners of Gestalt and other schools alike.

	I
C H A P T E R

The Background in Gestalt Psychology

GESTALT AND THE ASSOCIATIONIST MODEL

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY was conceived, according to the legend, on a train somewhere between Hannover and Frankfurtam-Main, in 1910 (the exact date and hour could no doubt be reconstructed), when the psychologist Max Wertheimer fell to musing on the optical behavior of the lines and poles of the telegraph system running alongside the tracks (M. M. Wertheimer, 1964). Accordingly as the train sped up or slowed down, the poles would appear to be first of all what they were (i.e., separate poles, in series), then a single pole, looming forward and back in undulating motion, and then again a single pole frozen at a particular spot outside the window, while the wires themselves might take on the appearance of a stationary wire, only waving up and down. Still according to legend, Wertheimer left the train at Frankfurt, entered a toy shop, and purchased a child's stroboscopic device, the better to study these familiar yet peculiar effects, which did not seem at all well accounted for under the prevailing reflex or Associationist school of psychological thought. The result, two years later, was a paper, “Experimentelle Studien ueber das Sehen von Bewegungen” (“Experimental Studies in the Perception of Motion,” M. Wertheimer, 1912), in which he propounded the concept of a “Phi” factor, or integrative principle, by which the organism translated individual, serial sense impressions into a unified perception of continuous motion; thus the Gestalt school was born.

In reality, of course, development was much more gradual in both directions, forward and back, as is always the case with any theoretical breakthrough—more atomistic, or “associationist,” in contrast to this highly “gestalt” myth of a single moment of Newtonian insight. The problem of atomized versus continuous perception goes back at least to Zeno, in the fifth century B.C., with his famous paradox of the tortoise and the hare (since the tortoise always moves ahead, by however small an amount, during the same time it takes the hare to catch up to where the tortoise was before, therefore, logically speaking, it would seem that the hare can never actually pass the tortoise). The difficulty here is the seeming incommensurability of fragmented and continuous processes, no matter how small the fragments you break the perceptual phenomenon in question down to (as the Associationist model hoped to do). In mathematics, this problem was not resolved theoretically for another couple of thousand years, until Newton's and Leibniz's invention of the calculus—the mathematics of continuous functions. In psychology, the use of the term “gestalt” itself, in addressing these and other problems of the Associationist approach, goes back at least to Ehrenfels, in 1890 (it was also Ehrenfels who introduced the terms“figure” and “ground” to perceptual psychology; Koffka, 1935). Mach himself, generally regarded as the founder of modern psychology, was concerned not just with “pure associationist” or stimulus-reflex patterns in research, but also with the broader question of how it is that things appear to us as they do (Petermann, 1932, p. 3). Likewise, Schumann (1900), Mueller (1923), Krueger(1913, 1915), and especially Martius (1912) had all addressed themselves to the quality of “wholeness” in perception, variously criticizing the “atomistic” theory that perception is merely the sum of a set of individual stimuli, each of which presumably activates a particular brain cell or cells—using such unifying terms as “production,” “coherence theory,” “complex quality,” and even “gestalt quality.” Exner, writing in 1894 (the same year in which Freud first mentions the “defenses,” another “whole configuration” of functioning with which we will be much concerned in the chapters to follow), offers this: “The whole impression produced by a picture which flashes across the retina is made up of the excitations of innumerable and functionally dissimilar fibres. That we, in spite of this, form a unitary impression, in which the separate sensations remain unnoted, is due to what I would call the Principle of Central Confluence” (p. 201, author's translation). Exner's Central Confluence is certainly very close to Wertheimer's Phi factor, some twenty years later.

Under the terms of the “Wundt school,” or pure Associationist theory, dominant at the turn of the century, perception should proceed as follows: a particular, discrete stimulus in the environment—say, a particular frequency and intensity of light, given off by a certain object and measurable by physical devices—strikes the retina at a certain angle and energy level. This activates a further neurological sequence, step by step, ending in the stimulation of particular brain cells or patterns of cells, which then either “produce” or somehow themselves “are” the mental image (the model is a little fuzzy on this crucial point; see discussion in Koffka, 1935; also Kohler, 1947). Thus, the theory is “reductionist” in both directions: i.e., the mental event can be exactly reduced to the physical event “outside,” and vice versa. In theory at least, there should be an exact, one-to-one correspondence between external object and internal image (or at least between internal image and what the Associationists called the “proximate stimulus,” that is in this case the actual amount and quality of light striking the retinal surface—since obviously the “thing itself” may vary, as a stimulus, under differing conditions of lighting, distance, air quality, motion, and so forth).

To the question, how can a quite finite number of retinal cells account for such an astonishingly large array of mental imagery, the Associationist answer is, through recombination and permutation of independent elements—i.e., cells. The image here is like, let us say, the telephone network of a large city, where the recombination of as few as ten simple stimulus elements, in uniformly varying little chains of seven elements each, easily gives you all the phone connections in, say, New York City, with its millions upon millions of various possibilities, not to mention the potential for functional elaboration, conference calls, call forwarding, call waiting, even operator assistance, and other possibilities for relinking the chains themselves. Add three more elements and you get all of North America; another five or so will give you the world. Thus it is possible, so the Associationist argument would go, to build up constructs and complex memories, even abstract ideas and problem-solving patterns, out of a limited number of simple, unitary, discrete “building blocks” in complex recombination, without the introduction of vague and tautological “ghosts in the machine” to explain how the elements get organized.

Given these assumptions, it is natural that much of the lab research under this paradigm tended to focus on the phrenological: that is, where exactly in the brain could the pathways and particular cells be found in which particular sense impressions were “stored,” and how were these cells linked to others, in a stimulusresponse way (for a discussion of this type of metaphor as a research guide in Associationism, see Goldstein, 1939, 1940; also Koffka, 1935, especially chap. III). A great deal of this work, as Goldstein pointed out (1939), was actually not conducted in vivo at all, but had to do rather with reflex patterns of nervous tissue in vitro, or with the nerve reactions of decorticated—i.e., brain-dead—lab animals, which do indeed demonstrate the kind of pure “stimulus-bound” reaction patterns of the Associationist model, much as Goldstein was later to find in frontal-lobe cases of certain braindamaged war veterans. Thus, as always in science, the working paradigm tends to control the research approach—a phenomenon which is itself best explained by Gestalt psychology. The underlying assumptions of the model, often unexamined, will critically determine the conditions and procedures of research, and the kinds of questions asked—and thus the findings, which may then reinforce the model. That Gestalt research itself was not to be immune to this kind of unexamined assumption will become evident in the discussion below.

Now the trouble with this kind of “networking” or “wiring” model as an explanatory metaphor in Associationism is that for the analogy to be useful, the brain would have to be thought of as containing not just the telephone network alone, with its miles and miles of cable and all the various switching functions, but in a sense all the subscribers to the system as well; not just the wiring but the messages on the wires, the conversations, images, processes, interactions, all of which are also somehow “within” the brain, and seemingly in an organized and manipulable fashion. At this point the Associationist metaphor begins to break down, and one is tempted to ask how such a simplistic and seemingly naive view of mental life could ever have been expected to generate useful and complete explanations for complex, abstract mental functions, which seem to take place at quite a far remove, on some qualitatively different level, from any “proximate stimulus” at all.

In all fairness, and despite some of the excessive claims of latter-day behaviorists, the original model itself probably never had any such pretensions. Associationism, originally at any rate, was first of all an attempt to clear away some of the tautological or “mentalistic” deadwood which psychology had carried over with it from philosophy, of which it was still a branch, as recently as a century ago (chiefly Aristotelian constructs ascribing movements to motility, purpose to purposefulness, will to intentionality, and the like). Still, in their attempt to move away from the endless generation of explanations-in-a-circle, the Associationsts (as the above citations indicate) were themselves very much aware of some of the limitations of their own theory (see also Mandler & Mandler, 1964), and were constantly producing second- and third-order constructs of their own, such as learning, experience, interpretation, selective attention, and emotionality, to explain the apparent transformations of sense data after it “entered” the nervous system (Koffka, 1935). If the model continued to hold sway as long as it did (see Petermann, 1932, for perhaps the latest systematic defense), this was probably for two basic reasons. First is the plain fact that sensation and perception and thinking must obviously all be in some way connected with the world of “real” external stimuli, or else it is hard to see how the organism could ever interact successfully with the environment, even imperfectly. And second, the scientific/philosophical links between the Associationist model and Newtonian physics, which offered such a simple and satisfying reduction of the complex world of phenomena into a few underlying elementary forces and particles, along the same lines as the Associationist paradigm. In the Newtonian model, in theory at least, if ever you could once get through cataloguing the exact position and velocity of every last discrete particle of elementary “stuff in the universe,—why, then you would automatically know, potentially at least, not only everything that was “happening” anywhere in the universe at a given time, but also everything that ever had happened, and everything that ever would. Practically speaking, of course, you might never get all the coordinates plotted out. Still, there would be no theoretical obstacle to total knowledge, only one of time and resources. In short, the secrets of the universe had been unlocked, and man was rapidly stepping toward a position of omniscience with regard to the physical world. If the mental world could only be conquered as well, then the position would be godlike indeed.

The seductive power of this model of conquest and control is obvious; even today we can still feel it as an intoxicating if lost dream. Lost, because ironically the very physics which the early psychologists (and some not so early) took as their touchstone and their guide was even then on the verge of being swept away— first by general relativity theory, after the turn of the century, and then more devastatingly, in the twenties, by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which claimed to demonstrate that such absolute knowledge was unattainable, by its very nature.

Nonetheless, and whatever the inadequacies of the Associationist model against which the Gestalt school was about to react so strongly, it was still this paradigm which was directly responsible for the enormous productivity of the Behaviorist school, in all its various branches, including applications to psychotherapy in the second half of this century. A strong error (as Aquinas said, and Paul Goodman was fond of quoting, in works to be discussed in the chapters ahead) is always better than a weak truth; and nowhere is this more evident than in scientific research. The Gestalt school, by contrast, claimed to have laid hold of that third thing, a strong truth—with implications which will be discussed below.

THE GESTALT SCHOOL–EARLY WORK

Nevertheless, in retrospect Wertheimer's original 1912 paper did not depart all that far, if at all, from Associationist principles. True, he did identify a specific “unitary process’—the Phi factor— by which individual stimuli were translated, within the subject, into a continuous picture; and to this extent he may be said to have moved from the pure “stimulus-bound” position. But these “unitary processes” were themselves “constructed, in a particular fashion, on the foundation of single excitations” (M. Wertheimer, 1912, author's translation). In other words, Exner's Central Confluence again—a sort of melding (or “short-circuiting,” as Wertheimer put it) of individual receptor excitations. That is, the emphasis and the control in perception are still seen here as resting with the external stimuli and their corresponding one-to-one excitations, which then, at a certain level of energy, may themselves “jump track” and mix themselves up, so to speak, in the circuitry of the receptor subject. Again, as with the simpler models of Associationism, this is in many ways a commonsensical kind of view: what I see is obviously tied up, in some sort of fairly dependable fashion, with what is “out there” to be seen. Otherwise, how would my world work as well as it does, in a practical sense? I steer, for example, mostly by my eyes; and I rarely fall down, or drive into a tree. Therefore, my nervous system is somehow “taking in” and processing what is “there,” more or less—as the Associationists maintain. The question is not whether this is happening, but how is this happening. At this point, in 1912, Wertheimer had still not taken a very large step beyond the received Associationist explanation.

Nevertheless, there was a nuance of difference, and around this nuance of a somewhat more complex subject role, at least, in perceptual processes than the prevailing model allowed, a new school of thought and body of work quickly began to coalesce. The young psychologists Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka jointed forces with Wertheimer, first in Frankfurt and later in Berlin, and together with their students and followers they soon began to pour out a stream of papers, experiments, and argument, all designed to delineate the much greater activity of the “passive” perceiving subject than had previously been considered to be the case, and the subordination of all this activity to certain general principles of organization. Moving beyond the original treatment of perception of continuous motion and the Phi construct, their focus now shifted to the more general question of configuration itself: that is, how is it that we see “things” at all, in the discrete and demarcatedfashion that we normally do, out of the visual cacophony of light stimuli that impinge on us the moment we open our eyes? Particularly in marginal (and therefore, it was presumed, illustrative) cases, such as optical illusions, judgment of size and distance, or limited visibility and delineation, how is it that we get the whole impressions of things that we do get out of this bombardment of “elementary” stimuli? In an extremely fruitful paradigmatic shift, Wertheimer's answer was that this is not what happens. It is not, he argued, the “elementary” stimuli that are “taken in” by the perceiving organism at all, but rather the whole configurations themselves. That is, in terms of the perceiving organism, the “meaningful whole” is the stimulus (M. Wertheimer, 1959). Thus, the famous Gestalt dictum (Koffka, 1935), the whole precedes the parts. These whole configurations, or “figures” (to use Ehrenfels's terminology, which was adopted by the Gestalt school), can then be broken down, or analyzed, into subsidiary parts; but these parts themselves have the same characteristics of figure against ground —that is to say, of whole configuration: If they did not, we could not “see” them; this is what “seeing” means. If the whole configuration is broken, or interrupted, or otherwise missing, the subject will tend to see the whole anyway (Kohler, 1922; M. Wertheimer, 1925), or to make moves to supply the missing parts, or will experience measurable tension and subjective frustration. This is the way we are “wired” (to use a later cybernetic imagery); at no time, under normal circumstances, do isolated “elementary” stimuli evoke organized responses from subjects, above the level of the “pure reflex” or twitch (Goldstein, 1940); nor can the “higher,” more organized responses be “built up” out of the elementary twitches, all strung together “like beads on a string,” in the famous image of the Associationist model (Koffka, 1935). Organization, organized figure, is the elementary “building block” of perception, and of the subject's response to the perceptual stimulus. Therefore, it is to that organized figure—its analysis, its properties, its formation and structure and dissolution—that research attention should be directed.

Now it should be mentioned here that it is still left somewhat unclear, at this early point in Gestalt theory, whether the “organized wholes” we are talking about are to be found “in” nature, or “in” the perceiving organism, in the structure of the nervous system itself (or perhaps, as we might more likely say today, in the interaction of these two things). In other words, to anticipate the direction of subsequent Gestalt research (e.g., Lewin, 1926), is it the subject's own interest, or some other such subjective urgency, which organizes certain forms, certain figure-ground resolutions, out of a field which is in and of itself more or less infinitely malleable? Or are the perceptual structures themselves, the gestalten we are talking about here, more or less already given in the environment?

To some extent this is a question that Wertheimer himself remained on the fence about for the rest of his life (M. Wertheimer, 1961; Kohler, 1959). Certainly in this early phase in his own research, both Wertheimer and his colleagues tended to focus on the environmental side of this interaction. Thus a great deal of research energy was expended in the effort to delineate, and if possible quantify, the various characteristics and properties of the gestalt or figure-ground process itself. In the process, Wertheimer in particular generated a seemingly endless series of “laws” about the “behavior” of perceptual gestalten themselves. Law of Contiguity, Law of Good Continuation, Law of Internal Homogeneity, as well as principles of brightness, distinctness, unity, boundedness, segregation, even abstract categorization itself (which would seem to be a question for explanation here, and not itself an explanatory principle, after the fashion of the old “mentalistic” constructs discussed above)—all of these were posited at various times, and attempts were made to measure them (Kohler, 1920; Koffka, 1935), in an effort to arrive at quantifiable, predictable rules governing when a given set of “elementary” stimuli in the environment would “coalesce” into a perceptual gestalt, and when not. Subsuming all the other principles in Wertheimer's model (Kohler, 1920; Petermann, 1932) was the Law of Praegnanz (from the German, meaning full, developed, pregnant with meaning), which stated simply that the percept tends to take on an organized form, and that that organization will be as ...