Psychology
Gestalt Psychology
Gestalt psychology is a school of thought that emphasizes the importance of perception and the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. It focuses on how people perceive and interpret the world around them, emphasizing patterns, organization, and context. Gestalt psychologists believe that understanding the whole experience is essential for understanding human behavior and mental processes.
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11 Key excerpts on "Gestalt Psychology"
- Tracy Henley(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
We too will have more to say about the influence of Gestalt Psychology on contemporary psychology in Chapters 19 and 20. Summary Attacking both the structuralists and the behavior-ists for their elementism, the Gestaltists emphasized cognitive and behavioral configurations that could not be divided without destroying the meaning of those configurations. Gestalt is the German word for “whole,” or “configuration.” Antecedents of Gestalt Psychology include Kant’s contention that sensory experience is structured by the faculties of the mind; Mach’s contention that the perception of space form and time form are independent of any specific sensory elements; Ehrenfels’s observation that although form qualities emerge from sensory experience, they are different from that experi-ence; J. S. Mill’s notion of mental chemistry; James’s contention that consciousness is like an ever-mov-ing stream that cannot be divided into elements without losing its meaning; act psychology, which emphasizes the conscious acts of perceiving, sens-ing, and problem solving instead of the elements of thought; and the emergence of field theory in physics. The 1912 publication of Wertheimer’s article on the phi phenomenon usually marks the founding of the Gestalt school of psychology. The phi phenom-enon indicates that conscious experience cannot be reduced to sensory experience. The contention that physical forces in the brain determine consciousness was called psychophysical isomorphism, and the contention that brain activity is always distributed in the most simple, symmetrical, and organized way was called the law of Prägnanz. According to the Gestaltists, the most basic perception is that of a figure–ground relation-ship.
No longer available |Learn more- (Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- The English Press(Publisher)
The objective of Gestalt therapy is to enable the client to become more fully and creatively alive and to become free from the blocks and unfinished business that may diminish satisfaction, fulfillment, and growth, and to experiment with new ways of being. For this reason Gestalt therapy falls within the category of humanistic psychotherapies. Because Gestalt therapy includes perception and the meaning-making processes by which experience forms, it can also be considered a cognitive approach. Because Gestalt therapy relies on the contact between therapist and client, and because a relationship can be considered to be contact over time, Gestalt therapy can be considered a relational or interpersonal approach. Because Gestalt therapy appreciates the larger picture which is the complex situation involving multiple influences in a complex situation, it can be considered a multi-systemic approach. Because the processes of Gestalt therapy are experimental, involving action, Gestalt therapy can be considered both a paradoxical and an experiential/experimental approach. When Gestalt therapy is compared to other clinical domains, a person can find many matches, or points of similrity. Probably the clearest case of consilience is between gestalt therapy's field perspective and the various organismic and field theories that proliferated in neuroscience, medicine, and physics in the early and mid-20th century.
eBook - PDF- Petruska Clarkson, Jennifer Mackewn, Author(Authors)
- 1993(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
The English translations of the word gestalt do not capture the full sense that the whole precedes the parts and that the whole is always more than and different from the sum of its parts. The Whole Person A fundamental principle of holism is that nature is a unified and coherent whole made up of lesser wholes. All the elements of the 34 Fritz Perls Process of therapy and practical contributions [Psychological disturbance! ■Theory of self! Cycles of experience I I Field theory j influences freud, orthodox psychoanalysts and* innovative psychoanalysts Reich and body tharapy Theatre, dancei and movement! Holism Eastern religion Gestalt Psychology and Lewtn's field theory Existentialism and phenomenology Figure 2.2 Diagrammatic representation of how the influences of the field working upon Perls contributed to his ideas and how all his ideas are interrelated and interwoven and cannot be understood in isolation Major Contributions to Theory 35 universe - things, plants, animals, human beings - coexist in a changing process of coordinated activity. Existentially, human beings are not the centre of the universe but one active element in the complex ecological system of the cosmos. Perls was especially concerned with the holism of the human organism (or person) in his surroundings. Perls' holistic approach to the individual embraces and affirms complexity, inclusion and diversity and resists any attempt at reductionism. From his earliest writing Perls emphasized his holistic under-standing of humankind. His approach is based upon the inseparable unity of bodily, emotional and mental experience, upon the integrity of language, thought and behaviour. He believed that the body, mind and soul all naturally funaion as one whole process.
eBook - PDF- C. James Goodwin(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
250 Gestalt Psychology CHAPTER 9 There are wholes, the behavior of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole. —Max Wertheimer, 1924 PREVIEW AND CHAPTER OBJECTIVES Advocates of a new way of thinking often find that they must speak loudly to be heard. Such was the case for those who became known as gestalt psychologists. With missionary zeal, these Ger- man psychologists promoted an approach to psychology that objected deeply to the prevailing analytical strategy that characterized certain aspects of other German psychologies, Titchenerian structuralism, American behaviorism, and any theory derived from British associationist principles. The gestaltists argued that understanding mind and behavior could not be achieved by trying to dissect conscious experience into its individual sensory elements, or by reducing complex behav- ior to elementary stimulus-response units. Rather, their emphasis was on phenomenologically whole experiences, and before long their movement came to be identified with this catch phrase: The whole of an experience is greater than the sum of its individual parts. The first section of this chapter highlights the work of three Germans who established the gestalt movement in the early years of the 20th century: Max Wertheimer, normally considered the founder by virtue of his elegant yet simple demonstrations of apparent motion; Kurt Koffka, who introduced gestalt con- cepts to an American audience and extended gestalt ideas into developmental psychology; and Wolfgang Köhler, whose research on learning and problem solving in apes challenged behaviorism. All three gestalt pioneers emigrated from Europe and came to the United States, two of them (Wertheimer and Köhler) because of Hitler’s dismantling of the German academic environ- ment in the 1930s.
eBook - PDF- Danny Wedding, Raymond Corsini(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
Gestalt therapy began as a revision of psychoanalysis (Perls, 1992a) and quickly developed as a wholly independent, integrated system (Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, 1994). Because Gestalt therapy is an experiential and humanistic approach, it works with patients’ awareness and awareness skills rather than using the classic psychoana-lytic reliance on the analyst’s interpretation of the unconscious. In Gestalt therapy, the therapist is also actively and personally engaged with the patient rather than fostering transference by remaining in the analytic role of neutrality. Gestalt therapy replaced the mechanistic, simplistic, Newtonian system of classical psychoanalysis with a pro-cess-based postmodern relational field theory. Gestalt therapists use active methods that develop not only patients’ awareness but also their repertoires of awareness and behavioral tools. Active methods and active per-sonal engagement of Gestalt therapy are used to increase the awareness, freedom, and self-direction of patients rather than to direct them toward preset goals as in behavior therapy, cognitive behavior therapy, or encounter groups. The Gestalt therapy system is truly integrative and includes affective, sensory, cognitive, interpersonal, and behavioral components (Joyce & Sills, 2009). In Gestalt therapy, therapists and patients are encouraged to be creative in doing the awareness work. There are no prescribed or proscribed techniques in Gestalt therapy. Basic Concepts Holism and Field Theory LO1 Most humanistic theories of personality are holistic. Holism asserts that humans are inherently self-regulating, that they are growth oriented, and that persons and their symptoms cannot be understood apart from their environment. Holism and field theory are interrelated in Gestalt theory (Bowman, 2012). Field theory is a way of understand-ing how one’s context influences one’s experiencing.
eBook - PDF- Per Saugstad(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
But because they are compelling, as far as they go, and because they do carry the promise of having some explanatory power, various objective and quantitative treatments of the minimum principle have been attempted. Some of these have continued into recent years, but they have been essentially dissociated from the Gestalt theories about brain fields. If the beliefs underlying Gestalt Psychology are not tenable, why has this approach had such a profound and widespread effect on psychology? In my opinion, the answer must be that the Gestalt psychologists extended knowledge and gave a new perspective by pointing to a variety of situations in which the relationships between the various parts of the stimulation determine perception. Thus, they shifted attention from a concern with elements to one with patterns of stimulation. This was extremely fruitful in many instances. Their insistence that we must take into account the relationships between parts influenced not only the study of perception, but also the studies of learning, memory, and motivation. The focus on relationships was not new to Gestalt psychologists. Even Helmholtz and Wundt had been concerned with them, and, as I noted in Chapters 3 and 4, Hering, Mach, and G. E. Müller had repeatedly pointed to their effects. When the Gestalt psychologists received their training, students of Brentano, such as Stumpf, von Ehrenfels, Husserl, and psychologists of the Graz school were intensely occupied with the problem of the role relationships play in perception. The contribution of Wertheimer, Koffka, and Köhler was primarily the realization that this problem is central in the study of psychology. Gestalt Psychology rests on the idea that the brain functions as an electrical field. Most modern physiologists would probably agree with Semir Zeki (1993) that this idea is not very plausible; it was also regarded as empty speculation by most physiologists active at the time the idea was launched.
- K.B. Madsen(Author)
- 1988(Publication Date)
- North Holland(Publisher)
Gestalt Psychology, on the other hand, regards sensory organization as resulting in the formation of wholes, and primarily the latter's subsequently acquired 'meaning' or 'sense', etc. (Kohler, 1947, p. 139)13. The implicit hypothesis contained in many passages in Kohler's book may be reformulated explicitly: 3RD HYPOTHESIS: Sensory organization determines the experience of per- ceptual wholes. These can acquire 'meaning' by association. sensory organization. In the symbolic version: The Gestalt psychologists' production 181 3rd Hypothesis: H (sensory organization) + H (perceptual wholes) + H (associative 'meaning'). These three hypotheses are used by Kohler in order to explain the well-known 'Gestalt laws' , such as 'the principle of similarity', 'the principle of proximity' and 'the principle of the good Gestalt', etc. and to explain common optical or geometrical illusions. We shall return to these in connection with the data- stratum. Kohler also uses Gestalt psychological hypotheses about 'sensory organi- zation' to explain how people undertand each other's consciousnesses by way of their external behavior. This theory of 'social perception' is contained in Chapter VII: ,,Behavior, and may be summarized as follows: ,,If A observes B, then A will experience B's behavior as perceptual wholes in the form of goal-directed actions and expressions of A's state of being. This experience has a structural similarity (is isomorphic) with the observed per- son's conscious experiences. The hypothesis pertaining to social perception may be reformulated as follows: 4THHYPOTHESIS: On account of the isomorphy between a person's con- sciousness and behavioral expression, the behavior of an- other person (0) causes isomorphic psycho-physiological processes in the observer (S), which provide an experience of 0's behavioral expression together with his conscious experiences.
eBook - PDF- C. James Goodwin(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
This distinction between physical reality and reality as perceived led Koffka to a point that would soon be elaborated by Kurt Lewin, with his concept of “life space” (see later discussion). If the behav-ioral and geographic environments differ, then two people in the same geographic environment are likely to perceive it differently. For instance, the perceptions of a walk in the woods by a geologist and a botanist will vary considerably. THE GESTALT APPROACH TO COGNITION AND LEARNING Although the title of Koffka’s 1922 landmark article in Psychological Bulletin gave the impression that Gestalt Psychology was concerned only with perception, such was not the case. Rather, the gestalists conceived of their system as a general psychology, and they made specific contributions to the study of thinking, problem solving, and learning. The two best-known examples are Köhler’s research on prob-lem solving in apes and Wertheimer’s posthumous book, Productive Thinking (1945/1982). Köhler’s 256 CHAPTER 9 Gestalt Psychology The Mentality of Apes (1917/1926) was first published in German in 1917, and then translated into English in the 1920s. Köhler on Insight in Apes Early in his book, Köhler took dead aim at Thorndike’s puzzle box experiments. As you recall from Chapter 7, Thorndike concluded that learning and problem solving were processes of trial and “acciden-tal success,” with unsuccessful behaviors gradually being eliminated in favor of behaviors that worked. Köhler, however, disagreed that problem solving was such a mechanical, step-by-step process. Instead, in keeping with his gestalt orientation, he argued that solutions to problems occur when individuals can view the entire problem field and rearrange the elements of the problem into a new and meaningful con-figuration. Solutions have a perceptual quality to them, and they occur quickly, once the components have been reconfigured. Köhler used the term insight to label such a process.
eBook - PDF- Duane Schultz(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Academic Press(Publisher)
Consider a group of South Sea Islanders engaged in some community occupation, or a group of children playing together. Only under very special circumstances does an I stand out alone. Then the balance which obtained during harmonious and systematic occupa-tion may be upset and give way to a surrogate (under certain conditions, pathological) new balance. . . . The fundamental question can be very simply stated: Are the parts of a given whole determined by the inner structure of that whole, or are the events such that, as independent, piecemeal, fortuitous and blind the total activity is a sum of the part-activities? Human beings can, of course, devise a kind of physics of their own—e.g., a sequence of machines—exemplifying the latter half of our question, but this does not signify that all natural phenomena are of this type. Here is a place where Gestalt theory is least easily understood and this because of the great number of prejudices about nature which have accumulated during the centuries. Nature is thought of as something essentially blind in its laws, where whatever takes place in the whole is purely a sum of individual occurrences. This view was the natural result of the struggle which physics has always had to purge itself of teleology. Today it can be seen that we are obliged to traverse other routes than those suggested by this kind of purposivism. Let us proceed another step and ask: How does all this stand with regard to the problem of body and mind? What does my knowledge of another's mental experiences amount to and how do I obtain it? There are, of course, ORIGINAL SOURCE MATERIAL ON Gestalt Psychology 275 old and established dogmas on these points: The mental and physical are wholly heterogeneous: there obtains between them an absolute dichotomy.
- Claude E. Buxton(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Academic Press(Publisher)
Proponents of the information-processing approach, and especially ref-erences by computer simulators to bits, often remind the historian of Helmholtz. Leading cognitive psychologists have themselves suggested that their thinking is similar to that of Helmholtz and the Graz school (Neisser, 1976; Rock, 1960). These were, of course, precisely the posi-tions against which the Gestalt theorists originally rebelled. Some of the central problems raised by the Gestalt theorists, such as the role of autochthonous organizing tendencies in perception, were neglected. Recently these issues have been taken up again, with explicit reference to the pioneering achievements of the Gestalt theorists (Kubovy & Po-merantz, 1981). Whether the top-down processing referred to by these writers is what Wertheimer meant when he said that psychology should proceed from above is, however, debatable. Most textbook writers in perception provide some space for Wertheimer's Gestalt laws, while some attempt to integrate them with the information-processing ap-proach (Spoehr and Lehmkuehle, 1982). Still others note there is still no adequate theory for many of the phenomena studied by the Gestalt theorists, including apparent motion (Hochberg, 1974; Kaufman, 1974). The list of such examples could easily be extended to other fields of 11. Gestalt Psychology: Origins in Germany and Reception in the United States 335 psychology. Rudolf Arnheim's work in the psychology of art is perhaps the best known example of the contributions of Gestalt theory to fields outside perception (Arnheim, 1954/1974). In social psychology the ex-periments of Wertheimer's American follower, Solomon Asch, on the effects of group pressure on perception have achieved classical status. However, Asch's attempt systematically to reconstruct the entire field with the aid of Gestalt theory has earned respect, but apparently not a wide following (Asch, 1952).
eBook - PDFHistory of Modern Psychology
A Global Perspective
- C. James Goodwin(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
It is the latter perception that determines how we act. Koffka used an old German folktale to drive home the point. It concerned a weary traveler in the dead of winter who reached an inn after riding on horseback for hours over what seemed to be a vast open snow-covered plain. When he arrived, the innkeeper asked from which direction he had come. The rider pointed to the plain and the innkeeper, “in a tone of awe and wonder, said: ‘Do you know that you have ridden across the Lake of Constance?’ At which the rider dropped stone dead” (p. 28). Apparently, realizing that the behavioral environment (“this seems to be a wide open plain”) does not match the geographical environment (“a frozen lake that could easily crack under the weight of a horse—I could have drowned!”) can be rather stressful. This distinction between physical reality and reality as perceived led Koffka to a point that would soon be elaborated by Kurt Lewin, with his concept of “life space” (see later discussion). If the behavioral and geographic environments differ, then two people in the same geographic environment are likely to perceive it differently. For instance, the perceptions of a walk in the woods by a geologist and a botanist will vary considerably. THE GESTALT APPROACH TO COGNITION AND LEARNING Although the title of Koffka’s 1922 landmark article in Psychological Bulletin gave the impression that Gestalt Psychology was concerned only with perception, such was not the case. Rather, the gestalists conceived of their system as a general psychology, and they made specific contributions to the study of thinking, problem solving, and learning. The two best-known examples are Köhler’s research Figure 8.8 Because of the gestalt principle of closure, we perceive these incomplete drawings as a dog, a giraffe, and Edgar Allen Poe. 288 CHAPTER 8 Gestalt Psychology on problem solving in apes and Wertheimer’s posthumous book, Productive Thinking (1945/1982).
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