The Gestalts of Mind and Text

Chanita Goodblatt, Joseph Glicksohn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032268316
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000588873
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Psychology

The Gestalts of Mind and Text bridges literary studies and cognitive psychology to provide a unique contribution to the field of Cognitive Literary Studies. The book presents an investigation of metaphor in poetic texts, adopting and developing empirical methods used by Gestalt Psychology, while integrating concepts informed by Gestalt Psychology.

The title indicates an intellectual tradition, to be termed the Gestalt of the Mind, that begins with the Würzburg School of Psychology and its subsequent development into Gestalt Psychology, which provides a rich heritage for the field of Cognitive Literary Studies. The title further indicates an intellectual and creative tradition, to be termed the Gestalt of the Text, applied to various literary schools (Medieval, Early Modern, Modernist). Finally, the Gestalt-Interaction Theory of Metaphor delineates the potentialities for different types of readings of poetic metaphor. This book further makes three significant contributions: the first is the focus on the empirical investigation of metaphor in poetic texts; the second is the integration of the aspects of problem-solving, bidirectionality of metaphor, embodied cognition and the grotesque, in analyzing poetic texts and verbal protocols; and the third is the focus on various literary traditions, spanning languages and periods.

The goal of this book is to present an interdisciplinary study of the Gestalts of Mind and Text. This will be of interest to a varied audience, including cognitive psychologists, literary scholars, researchers in aesthetics, scholars of metaphor and those with an interest in intellectual history.

1 Gestalt Psychology and Cognitive Literary Studies

DOI: 10.4324/9780429329531-1

Between Two Universities

It is a long way between Cambridge University in the 1920s and 1930s, and Clark University in the 1950s. Yet an intellectual tradition, which acknowledges the centrality of Gestalt Psychology to the study of the Arts, spans these spatial and temporal distances. This is a tradition engaged with the concept of a gestalt, or form, as an “integrated, articulated whole” (Michael Wertheimer 2010: 50)—a whole that, according to the First Law of Gestalt, “is something else than the sum of its parts” (Koffka 1935: 176). The Second Law of Gestalt refines the First Law, by stating that a gestalt is “characterized by transposibility, which means the parts of a gestalt can all change in different senses…while the gestalt nevertheless survives and remains recognizable” (Kreitler and Kreitler 1972: 82–83). Indeed, this gestalt—as the German philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels proposes in his classic discussion of “Gestalt Qualities” (“Gestalt-qualitäten”)—serves “as the basis of aesthetic effects and poetic creations” (1988c.1890: 101).

It is thus natural that Gestalt psychologists applied their research to the Arts. Two representative studies are: an early work by Max Wertheimer on music, in which he discusses the structure “of definite forms with definite structural laws” (“bestimmte Formen mit bestimmten Strukturgesetzen”; Max Wertheimer 1910: 306. Translation cited from Ash 1995: 108); and a later work on visual art by Kurt Koffka, in which he writes that “a work of art is a strongly coherent whole, a powerful gestalt” (1940: 246). Wertheimer and Koffka had been trained in the Würzburg School of Psychology (Ash 1995; Bugental et al. 1966: 193), which existed between 1901 and 1908 (Humphrey 1951). Together with Wolfgang Köhler, they subsequently established the Berlin School of Gestalt Psychology (1912–1933), which had a focal interest in the Laws and Principles of perceptual organization (Max Wertheimer 1923; for an abridged translation of this article into English, see: Max Wertheimer 1958). Wertheimer promoted the study of both perceptual organization and problem-solving (1938a, 1938b, 1959).

In terms of contemporaneous literary scholarship, one can point to the Russian Formalists (1915–1930) and the Prague Linguistic School (1928–1939). The former, known as Opojaz (the Russian acronym for the Petrograd “Society for the Study of Poetic Language”), focused on the “notions of ‘system’ and of ‘dominanta’ [the dominant or organizing property]” (Erlich 1980c.1965: 63, 212, 277). On its part, the Prague Linguistic School focused on the concept of “esthetic ‘structure’” (Erlich 1980c.1965: 277). Indeed, the literary scholar Victor Erlich writes in a letter (dated 6 May 1991; sent to Chanita Goodblatt):

While writing Russian Formalism, I was struck by the affinity between the Koehler-Koffka concept of Gestalt, i.e., an “organized whole,” and the Formalist-Structuralist notion of the literary work as a “complex structure, integrated by the unity of esthetic purpose,” as well as between positing rhythm as a “dominanta,” or organizing principle, and “gestaltqualitat.” Then, when I spoke of the Formalist attempt at a “Gestalt scheme of literary creation,” I was using an intellectual metaphor. In other words, I was suggesting that Gestalt-psychology and the Formalist-Structuralist theory of literature were parts of the same intellectual Zeitgeist rather than assuming a direct connection between the two. I am convinced that Roman Jakobson, who was very much attuned both to the cross connections and to methods/logical affinities between different fields, was keenly aware, and highly appreciative of, the work of Koffka and Köhler.

The concept of gestalt subsequently becomes the foundation for the scholarship of literary scholars and art historians (Gombrich 1960; Iser 1978; Perry 1979; Smith 1968; Verstegen 2004, 2018), and for psychologists studying the Arts (Arnheim 1974; Franklin 1994; Kreitler and Kreitler 1972; Meyer 1956; Spehar and van Tonder 2017).

It is highly fruitful to turn to the Heinz Werner Library at Clark University, which preserves the books and papers of the Gestalt psychologist Heinz Werner, to focus on the study of gestalt in literature (see Figure 1.1).¹ Werner was not affiliated with the Berlin School of Gestalt Psychology; rather he was affiliated with the Hamburg School of Gestalt Psychology (1916–1933) that was identified with William (Wilhelm) Stern (Hardesty 1976: 35). As the psychologists Sybil Barten and Margery Franklin write in the Introduction to their edited volumes of Werner's writings: “His organismic-developmental approach distinguished him from the Berlin Gestaltists with whom he shared an opposition to elementaristic psychology” (1978: 1). In other words, Werner was more interested in the process of development, including the development of gestalten, than was the Berlin School of Gestalt Psychology. Indeed, on one of the shelves of this Library is to be found a copy of the book Practical Criticism (1930c.1929), written by the literary scholar I.A. Richards while he was a Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge (1922–1939).

Figure 1.1 The Heinz Werner Library at Clark University.

Photograph by Joseph Glicksohn.

Werner has cryptically entered two marginal notes in his copy of Practical Criticism. Taken together, they indicate points of contact between Richards's work and his own. One note relates to the field of Psychology (Practical Criticism 1930c1929: 322):²

Richards. Part 4. Chapter 2. Section 11: “Summary and Recommendations: The Services of Psychology: Abuse of Psychology”

… Poetry has suffered too much already from those who are merely looking for something to investigate and those who wish to exercise some cherished theory. The best among the experimentalists and the analysts will agree over this.

But between these two extreme wings of the psychological forces there is the comparatively neglected and unheard-of middle body, the cautious, traditional, academic, semi-philosophical psychologists who have been profiting from the vigorous manoeuvres of the advanced wings and are now much more ready than they were twenty years ago to take a hand in the application of the science. The general reader whose ideas as to the methods and endeavours of psychologists derive more from the popularisers of Freud or from the Behaviourists than from students of Stout or Ward, needs perhaps some assurance that it is possible to combine an interest and faith in psychological inquiries with a due appreciation of the complexity of poetry. Yet a psychologist who belongs to this main body is perhaps the last person in the world to underrate this complexity.

[Werner's Note: psychology]

Richards's purpose is to develop an argument concerning “the services that psychological theory may afford us here, its uses and limitations” (1930c.1929: 309) in the study of poetry. To do so, in this citation he constructs what may be termed a rhetorical gestalt, which delineates an integrative use of rhetorical strategies of language (Crockett 1998: 93; Deer 1992: 216). Richards's use of military terminology (forces, manoeuvres, wings as a military unit) can therefore be read as a metaphor of the disagreements among the various schools of Psychology, which stresses their ongoing conflict. Yet, in addition, his use of the term “psychological forces” can also be understood as alluding to that term as used in Gestalt psychology (adapted from Physics),³ a field with which he was well acquainted (Glicksohn and Goodblatt 2014; Goodblatt and Glicksohn 2003, 2010). Gestalt psychologists use this term to discuss visual perception as a dynamic process whereby the perceiver organizes the objects within a perceptual field in relation to each other (Arnheim 1974: 17; Koffka 1935: 67). Richards's rhetorical positioning of the “middle body” as a figure on the ground of the “two extreme wings of the psychological forces” (Behaviorism and Psychoanalysis) thus adapts the figure-ground Gestalt Principle of organization, which states that any gestalt is characterized by “a figured portion called figure and a background called ground” (Helson 1933: 16). Through this rhetorical positioning—and creating as well a visual representation—Richards alludes to the school of Gestalt Psychology as the plausible resolution of the conflict.

In the section cited, Richards also refers to George F. Stout and James Ward, who were Cambridge psychologists. As a student in the Cambridge program on Moral Sciences that combined philosophy and psychology (Russo 1989; Tillyard 1958), Richards was certainly influenced by both Stout and Ward; as his biographer, the literary scholar John Paul Russo writes: “Ward was one of the three people whom Richards considered ‘formative’ in his education in psychology (the others were Ward's pupil G. F. Stout and William James), and he knew Ward personally at Cambridge” (1989: 103). These scholars made strong arguments against the philosophical school of the British Associationists, who had advocated an “associational theory … [that] represents all mental events, simple or complex, as collocations of generically unchanged elements [atoms]” (Humphrey 1951: 7). Ward's scholarship comprised an “onslaught upon [such] atomism in psychology” (Bartlett 1925: 452). Already in 1904, Ward writes: “Among other problems particularly deserving of consideration, I should like at least to mention the genesis of spatial and temporal perception; the whole psychology of language, analytic and genetic; psychical analysis, objects of a higher order, the so-called Gestalt-qualitäten, in a word, the psychology of intellection generally” (1904: 621). Not only does Ward raise the notion of Gestalt-qualitäten prior to its use by the Berlin School of Gestalt Psychology a decade later, he also raises a notion very familiar to Werner's own work on the process of development (Werner 1957). For Ward writes: “And yet the moment we regard the brain functionally—and not the brain merely, but the whole organism—the atomistic analogy fails us at once. Functionally regarded, the organism is from first to last a continuous whole; phylogenetically and ontogenetically it is gradually differentiated from a single cell, not compounded by the juxtaposition of several originally distinct cells” (1904: 615). On his part, Stout “maintained that mental elements must be changed when they enter into new combinations, very much as the [later] Gestalt psychologists claim” (Humphrey 1951: 10). Furthermore, as the philosopher John Passmore writes, “As is well known, Stout's … [book] anticipated in many respects the work of the Gestalt school, in his … emphatic rejection of the view that our belief in the existence of complex things derives from our experience of associatively linked simple sensations” (1944: 7).

Further evidence for the affiliation of Richards with a Gestalt orientation is to be found in the preface to his Principles of Literary Criticism (1930c.1924: 4), of which he writes that it is a “companion volume” to Practical Criticism. For on turning to this book, one finds that Richards realizes the importance of Gestalt psychology when he writes in Chapter Four: “There are very many problems of psychology, from those with which some of the exponents of Gestalt theorie are grappling to those by which psycho-analysts are bewildered, for which this neglected, this overlooked aspect of the mind may provide a key, but it is pre-eminently in regard to the arts that it is of service” (1930c.1924: 25–26). Furthermore, in Chapter Eleven, Richards writes: “But the kind of account which is likely to be substantiated by future research has become clear, largely through the work of Behaviourists and Psycho-analysts, the assumptions and results of both needing to be corrected however in ways which the recent experimental and theoretical investigations of the ‘Gestalt’ School are indicating” (1930c.1924: 83).

Werner's second note relates specifically to a major issue of Gestalt psychology (Practical Criticism 1930c.1929: 232-3):

Richards. Part 3. Chapter 4: “Poetic Form”

Such arguments which might be elaborated [e.g., “that the mere sound of verse has independently any considerable aesthetic virtue” 1930c.1929: 232] do not tend to diminish the power of the sound (the inherent rhythm) when it works in conjunction with sense and feeling …. In fact the close co-operation of the form with the meaning—modifying it and being modified by it in ways that though subtle are, in general, perfectly intelligible—is the chief secret of Style in poetry. But so much mystery and obscurity has been raised around this relation by talk about the identity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Gestalt Psychology and Cognitive Literary Studies
• 2 Aspects and Methodology of a Cognitive Literary Study
• 3 John Donne. Songs and Sonets: “The Flea”
• 4 John Donne. Songs and Sonets: “The Bait” Revisited
• 5 John Donne. Holy Sonnets: “At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners”
• 6 Dan Pagis. Late Leisure: “You Walk Inside Old Street Clocks”
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index