Gestalt Psychology

Antecedents of Gestalt Psychology

The German word Gestalt itself is hard to translate; Titchener suggested the term configuration, but this did not catch on. Possible other translations are form, or pattern, or structure, all of which give some impression of the meaning of the word but none of which alone exactly captures the meaning of the German term.Thus, the word Gestalt has become part of the technical vocabulary of psychology. Long before the formal development of the Gestalt school in psychology and philosophy, Goethe had used the term and concept in a manner that to some degree anticipated its later use by the Gestalt psychologists.

There were also other anticipations and antecedents of Gestalt psychology, as has been pointed out repeatedly in previous chapters. Although they were not direct anticipators, John Stuart Mill, with his idea of mental chemistry, put forth a similar notion; William James emphasized that the stream of consciousness is a whole, a totality; John Dewey’s criticism of the reflex arc concept was holistic; and even Wilhelm Wundt had emphasized the process of creative synthesis. The philosopher—physicist Ernst Mach used phenomenology' much in the way the later Gestalt psychologists did. And indeed other “holistic” psychologies were emerging about the time Gestalt theory was beginning to mature—at Hamburg with William Stern, for example, and at Graz.

Ehrenfels and Gestaltqualität

The university at Graz, in Austria, became the center of the Gestaltqualitiit school, mostly in the person of Christian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932) but leavened also by the leader of the “Graz school,” Alexius Meinong (1853—1920). In 1890 Ehrenfels published a paper in which he insisted that Wundts psychology had neglected a very important element: the form quality, or Gestaltqualitdt.

Form quality, for Ehrenfels, is an element over and above the elements composing a whole. A melody played in a given key is not just the sum of the notes but is, in addition, their total configuration. Change the relations among the elements, and the whole changes. But you can transpose the melody—that is, put it into a different key and thus change all the elements yet still retain the melody itself, the Gestaltqualitdt—as long as the relations among the individual elements or notes remain the same. Dependence on relations among elements and transposability are the essential properties of such form qualities. Thus, form qualities include, in addition to melodies, such properties as triangularity, roundness, or the quality of the phoneme that corresponds to the letter b. The emphasis on transposition was also to engage Gestalt psychologists later in transposition experiments with children and animals; research participants, including animals, tend to respond not so much to absolute brightness or size as to relations like relative brightness, being the largest item in a set, and so forth. Learned relationships among objects can be transposed to new sets of objects.

Phenomenology

The phenomenological method was basic to Gestalt psychology. The term phenomenology has several meanings in philosophy and psychology; in the present context, it means the unbiased description of subjective experience. Among the phenomenological predecessors of the Gestaltists in addition to Mach were Edmund Husserl and Carl Stumpf, the latter of whom directly influenced all three of the leading early Gestalt psychologists, Wertheimer, Koffka, and Köhler. David Katz (1884—1953), a student of G. E. Miiller at Göttingen, undertook a detailed phenomenology of color perception. Edgar Rubin (1886—1951), another student of Miiller, wrote his PhD dissertation on the distinction between figure and ground, which was later picked up by the Gestalt psychologists (the study itself was performed several years after the Gestalt movement had become firmly established). Harry Helson (1889—1977), who obtained his PhD with Boring at Harvard, examined the antecedent and contemporaneous Gestalt trends in detail; this work, as was previously mentioned, was published as a series of articles by the American Journal of Psychology in 1925 and 1926 and as a monograph.

The Founders of Gestalt Psychology

The founders of the Gestalt school were Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler. Wertheimer made the original statement, and the other two accepted and elaborated it. A fourth adherent, somewhat younger than the other three, was Kurt Lewin. All emphasized the principle of relational determination: that is, properties of parts depend on the relation of the parts to the whole; part qualities depend on the place, role, and function of the part in the whole. They also held that in most configurations the whole does not equal the sum of its parts, nor is the whole simply more than the sum of its parts. A whole is a dynamic system that is fundamentally different from any kind of sum or sum-mative, accidental concatenation. The whole is in an important sense prior to its parts in that its characteristics determine the nature of the parts and of their interrelationships. Central to their thinking was Wertheimers law of Prägnanz, which states that the organization of any whole is as good as the prevailing conditions allow.