THE GESTALT PSYCHOLOGISTS

Nick Penaranda
PSYC 465
Chris Monk
THE GESTALT PSYCHOLOGISTS 1
Introduction
Anyone who has taken an introduction to psychology class is at least vaguely familiar with the
word Gestalt, and he or she takes it to mean whole, as in, the whole picture. In addition, the student
of psychology may also remember the so-called Gestalt Laws, such as the effects of similarity or
proximity when perceiving a scene. That is, similar objects or objects that are close together are perceived
to be grouped together. He or she may also be able to rattle off a few more principles of the law of
Prgnanz, and as far as most people are concerned, that is sufficient knowledge of the Gestalt schools
contributions to psychology.
The law of Prgnanz is one of the many psychological contributions of the Gestalt school.
However, Gestalt Psychology encompasses much more than that. Whole is generally accepted as a
translation of the word Gestalt, but it is an imperfect translation. While Gestalt Psychology can be
thought of as a holistic psychology because of the implications of Gestalt principles on a wide range of
topics in psychology, that is not the reason behind the name. Another translation of the word Gestalt is
Form. Thus, Gestalt Psychology can also be thought of as the psychology of Forms, dealing with
mental experiences that are fundamentally different than the sensory experiences that constitute them. Yet
even this definition does not encompass all of Gestalt Psychology.
There is a reason that the word Gestalt has no perfect complement in the English language. In
addition to perception, topics such as thinking, learning, the scientific method, and the mind-body
problem were all addressed by Gestalt psychologists. Gestalt does not refer to any single thing, such as
behaviorism to observable behavior or psychodynamics to unconscious processes. Instead, the name
refers to the rejection of the reductionist approaches to all of psychology and the focus on whole
experiences, processes and methodologies that are fundamentally different than any of their constituent
parts.
Three menMax Wertheimer, Wolfgang Khler and Kurt Koffkawere the driving force
behind this new school of psychology in Germany during the early 1900s. The present paper discusses
THE GESTALT PSYCHOLOGISTS 2
how these Gestalt psychologists developed their new ideas, how these ideas were different from then-
current psychological thought, and their legacy on psychology.

Antecedents
Gestalt psychologists drew their inspiration from a wide variety of sources, ranging from
physicists to philosophers. The concept that mental organization is a natural process that is separate and
distinct from association and integration of individual sensations is borrowed from Immanuel Kant (King,
Viney, & Woody, 2009). He hypothesized that sensory information is organized and given meaning by a
priori mental processes. He also expressed the importance of relying on both rationalism and experience
to gain knowledge (Kant, 1787/1884). Like Kant, Gestalt psychologists believed that a priori mental
processes aided in perceptual tasks, and relied on rationalism to obtain more meaningful empirical
methods and observations (King et al., 2009).
In addition to philosophy, other scientific fields outside of psychology influenced the Gestalt
psychologists. A physicist named Max Planck, famous for his work on quantum physics, influenced
Khler with his view on strict empiricism. Planck believed that novel and creative thought were as
important to scientific progress as taking good measurements. He was concerned less with quantifying
observed effects, but rather with theoretically explaining the underlying causes. Khler agreed with
Planck that strict empirical methods should not dictate the flow of scientific thought (King et al., 2009).
Albert Einsteins work in theoretical physics also influenced Gestalt Psychology. Wertheimer, a
good friend of Einstein, found inspiration in Einsteins work. Einsteins theory of special relativity, which
acknowledged the relevance of the observer, made an impression on Wertheimer. He, in turn, recognized
the importance of context and other qualities of the observer and how these affect his or her experience.
Ernst Mach, another famous physicist and philosopher, also contributed some ideas to Gestalt
Psychology. In his book The Analysis of Sensations, published in 1897, he describes qualities of
experiences that he calls forms, such as space- and time-form, that exist independent of the individual
elements of the experience. This idea of forms would later be expanded by the Gestalt psychologists.
THE GESTALT PSYCHOLOGISTS 3
Of course, the Gestalt movement did not suddenly appear in a world devoid of psychological
thought. Scientific psychology was still in its relative infancy when the Gestalt psychologists began
forming their own ideas. Functionalism and its proponents, such as William James, were beginning to
steer away from Structuralism and its atomistic ideas and introspective methodologies. Functionalists and
the Gestalt Psychologists agreed on the usefulness of experience and empiricism in basing and validating
theories. Despite this, however, Gestalt psychologists disagreed with James about other things such as the
nature of instincts and sensory experience (King et al., 2009).
In his 1890 paper On Gestalt Qualities, Christian von Ehrenfels introduced the idea of Machian
form qualities into the field of psychology. Ehrenfels, like Functionalists and other holistic psychologists,
believed that what is perceived (the whole) is greater than the sum of sensory experiences. (the parts)
Gestalt psychologists would later expand on and modify this idea by saying that not only is the whole
greater than the sum of its parts, it is fundamentally different. Thus, to explain the whole experience
requires an explanation independent of the explanation of its parts. This concept comes into play in the
first experimental inquiry into Gestalt principles, which is regarded to be the formal emergence of the
Gestalt school.

Contributions
Wertheimers experiments on the phi phenomenon signaled the beginning of Gestalt psychology
(King et al., 2009). The phi phenomenon is a visual illusion which causes an observer to perceive
movement in non-moving, static objects, such as electronic marquees. The individual lights in an
electronic marquee are not moving, but the timing and spatial orientation of each flashing light is
perceived as motion (phi phenomenon, 2009). One of the prevailing theories of the time was that the
eye, in moving to follow the light, provides kinesthetic feedback to the brain which is then perceived as
movement. Wertheimer illustrated a problem with this explanation when he demonstrated that movement
can be perceived in two or more different directions simultaneously. The experiment involved an observer
being presented with a light in the center of a visual field, which is followed by brief flashes of light to the
THE GESTALT PSYCHOLOGISTS 4
left and right (King et al., 2009). According to Wertheimer, these stimuli are not perceived as individual,
discrete sensory experiences, but rather as one (or more) moving bodies. In fact, Wertheimer goes as far
as to say that the observer doesnt see the individual sensations at all, but rather only the moving, whole
forms. It is only after further analysis of the whole form that the observer may or may not uncover its
constituent elements. Wertheimer continues to say that it is impossible to detect the presence of the whole
form, or Gestalten, by only looking at each sensation as if they were independent of other sensations
(King et al., 2009).
Wertheimers conclusions in 1912 are central not only to perception but to all of psychology in
the eyes of the Gestaltists. His experiment serves as a good analogy to apply to the scientific method of
the time. The notion of analyzing individual parts to come to conclusions about the whole is, in Khlers
words, science from below. Conversely, theorizing about the whole and then validating theories
through empirical analysis of its parts is working from above (Khler, 1944). This is similar to the
difference between bottom-up and top-down processing. The Gestalt psychologists felt that the
psychological community had become too reliant on from below methodologies. Specifically, Khler
felt that some schools of thought improperly imitated the hard, physical sciences in their use of strictly
empirical methods. He felt that deference to quantitative (i.e., from below) rather than qualitative (i.e.,
from above) procedures stunted the growth of theoretical psychology. In other words, scientific
psychology had jumped the gun by attempting to validate incomplete and tenuous theories (King et al.,
2009).
This basic idea of from above or from below methodology carries weight in other areas of
psychology. Referring back to Einsteins ideas of relativity and Machs forms, the Gestalt psychologists
believed that all thingsstimuli and their corresponding sensations, Gestalten, entire scenes, context and
even observersare relative to each other and to the greater whole. Thus, any part is meaningless without
also considering the whole of parts.
It is this ideology that the law of Prgnanz emerged. For example, the similarity of objects,
spatial orientation of sensations, figure and ground, and continuation are simply observed phenomena
THE GESTALT PSYCHOLOGISTS 5
caused by a higher system of organization. That is, the mind organizes incoming parts of a scenebe it
visual, auditory or otherinto the best-fitting and harmonious perception. Literally translated, Prgnanz
means pithiness, or conciseness. The Gestalt psychologists believed that construction of the most concise,
sensical meaning was not only the point of human perception, but also the mechanism by which it
achieves this goal.
While the law of Prgnanz was originally established by Wertheimer, he moved on to study
Gestalt in other ways while Koffka continued to experiment with perceptual Gestalt. In the 1920s, he was
tasked with introducing Gestalt Psychology to Americans (Khler, 1942). Unfortunately, Koffka may be
responsible for the common misconception that Gestalt psychology addresses only perception. Khler
(1942) writes, Koffka's [1922 article] probably led to the erroneous belief that Gestalt psychologists
unduly overrate perception and have little to offer in other parts of psychology (p. 99). Even though
Koffka also contributed much to developmental psychology, he was best known for his work on
perceptual systems. Nevertheless, other Gestalt psychologists continued to make big contributions in
other areas.
Wertheimer spent much time dealing with the issue of thought. He wanted to understand how
people are capable of coming up with new ideas, a process he called productive thinking. He considered
various problems and classic examples which led him to believe that productive thought was a result of a
humans capacity to grasp structural features and to envision structural reorganization (King et al.,
2009, p. 358). In other words, the ability to think in units greater than individual pieces of a problem
allows people to establish new ideas about the nature of things.
Meanwhile, Khler was busy refuting behaviorist claims regarding learning. In a classic
experiment, he demonstrated that even non-human organisms follow Gestalt principles of perception
(King et al., 2009; Koffka, 1922). He also emphasized the fact that behaviorist methodologies were
flawed, stating that learning tasks such as maze-navigation precludes the natural ability of insight. Insight,
according to Khler, is the appearance of a complete solution with reference to the whole layout of the
field (as cited in King et al., 2009, p. 360). He demonstrated this in his classic book The Mentality of
THE GESTALT PSYCHOLOGISTS 6
Apes (1925/1976), where he describes how chimpanzees managed to solve problems without any
artificial conditioning (King et al., 2009).
Gestalt Psychology would continue to make great contributions until 1933 when the Nazi regime
stifled scientific freedom in Germany (King et al., 2009). While some of Gestalt Psychologys ideas were
not as well received as the law of Prgnanz, such as psychophysiological isomorphism (see King et al.,
2009, p. 364), the main ideas of Gestalt Psychology would have a long lasting impact on scientific
psychology.

Impacts and Influence
As noted above, Gestalt Psychology developed in response to the structuralists and functionalists
of the day. As Gestalt Psychology developed, so too did other schools, such as behaviorism and
psychoanalysis. By the late 1920s, Ogden describes psychology as being in a whirl (1928). The
paradigms of psychology were shifting rapidly and thinkers on all sides fervently disagreed. As a
solution, Ogden suggested that the competing schools of psychology reconsider their findings under the
lens of Gestalt theory, so that others may find them more agreeable and thus, possibly lead to a better
understanding of the whole psychology. This adoption of Gestaltian methodologies planted the seeds of
the Cognitive Revolution of the 1950s.
Line (1931) further discusses the impact of Gestalt Psychology. According to him, [Gestalt
Psychologys] accomplishments are necessarily few, save in the matter of pointing out defects inherent in
many current theories and methods (p. 26). In this vein, the Gestalt psychologists have successfully
reconciled the various conflicting theories and brought about a more cohesive and productive
psychological community.
One such reconciling body of work was that of Kurt Lewin, whose Field Theory explored the
traditionally behaviorist domain of human and animal motivation through a Gestaltian lens (Khler,
1959). His theories have recognizable implications today in the form of approach-avoidance, double-
THE GESTALT PSYCHOLOGISTS 7
approach and double-avoidance conflicts (King et al., 2009). Another recognizable contribution from
students of the Gestalt school is the work of Karl Duncker. Through experimentation on problem solving,
he discovered the phenomenon of functional fixedness (Adamson, 1952; King et al., 2009), which is, in
laymans terms, being unable to think outside of the box. The cognitive and behavioral fields were not
the only ones to benefit from the advent of Gestalt psychology. Solomon Asch, one of the most influential
social psychologists, borrowed heavily from Gestalt ideologies when he developed his theories on
conformity of individuals and group dynamics (King et al., 2009).
Countless other fields in psychology have, in one way or another, been affected by the ideas of
the Gestalt psychologists. King et al. (2009) briefly lists the following: Memory and cognition ,
perception , evolutionary psychology , visual neuroscience and artificial intelligence (p. 373).
The influence of Gestalt psychology has even reached outside of psychology. Khler writes of his cohort
and contemporary physicist: I read a paper in which Bridgman of Harvard interprets Heisenberg's
famous principle in such terms that I am tempted to call him, Bridgman, a Gestalt physicist. (1959, p.
729) It is clear that the Gestalt psychologists have contributed a great deal to the scientific world.
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