Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the

Social Sciences
Gestalt Psychology

Contributors: William R. Woodward

Edited by: Byron Kaldis
Book Title: Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences
Chapter Title: "Gestalt Psychology"
Pub. Date: 2013
Access Date: December 8, 2016
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9781412986892
Online ISBN: 9781452276052
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452276052.n144
Print pages: 383-386
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This entry presents the Gestalt school of psychology, which, among other things, in
developing theories of experience and, in particular, theories of perception, provided not only
the famous Gestalt-switch notion employed by Kuhn and the Wittgensteinians to assess
either a certain view of radical theory change in science or the seeing-as-conception of
understanding but also the general idea of wholes that was found congenial by holist views in
the social sciences. The part–whole relations studied by Gestalt psychology, especially in
visual or acoustic perception, offered support to specific ways of establishing anti-individualist
arguments in the philosophy of the social sciences. In particular, they emphasized “functional
wholes,” “dynamic events,” and “fields” in experience, which were also true in physics.

A usual mistake is to portray the Gestalt holist stance as espousing the motto “The whole is
more than the sum of its parts.” This is not actually what they maintained, since they had a
more sophisticated understanding of whole–part relations. As one of the founders of Gestalt
psychology, Kurt Koffka (1935/2001), put it, “It is more correct to say the whole is something
else than the sum of its parts, because summing is a meaningless procedure, whereas the
whole–part relationship is meaningful” (p. 176).

Definition of Gestalt

Gestalt psychologists emphasized the study of consciousness, but not in the same way as
structuralist psychologists did, who used controlled introspection in sensory experiments.
Unlike atomist conceptions of psychology, which searched for the elements of experience
regarded as primary, Gestalt theory emphasized that both perceived forms (Gestalten) and
the experienced world are already structured wholes: Experience involves “sensory
organization” in which the parts (of experience) are dependent on the whole. Gestalt theorists
rejected the view of structuralists and associationists that consciousness consists of
associated elements. For example, the reversible figure of the Rubin vase, which also appears
as two faces, is fundamentally different from collections of sensations—that is, a mere
aggregate of sense-data. Later Gestaltists accepted behavioral wholes, such as the
demonstration of an ape that uses insight to put together two bamboo sticks to reach a
banana, instead of learning gradually through trial and error. Though they emphasized
consciousness, they linked it with the brain by assuming isomorphism.

In terms of methodology, classical Gestalt psychology depended heavily upon the single
demonstration or experimentum crucis; however, by the mid-20th century, Gestalt social
psychology had bridged experiment and social action.

The Austrian psychologist and philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels, who fist coined the term
Gestalt i n t h e s p e c i a l s e n s e t o b e a d o p t e d b y G e s t a l t p s y c h o l o g i s t s , s p o k e o f
Gestaltqualitäten. Going beyond the definition of Gestalt as mere shape or form, he
emphasized the presence of such qualities in all experience by pointing out that no sensation
arises by local stimuli alone but, rather, in relation to sets of stimuli or in a “togetherness” with
a background environment or perceptual context, thus pioneering the notion of “whole” in
experience.

Prehistory of Gestalt in Philosophy and Medicine

Although Gestalt psychology adhered to scientific naturalism and experiment, it had deep
philosophical roots. Philosophers following Kant began to distinguish the act of judging from

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the judged object. The proper object for idealist philosophers was not a mental picture but the
entire object or situation. “Cheetahs exist” or “It's raining” are unitary judgments of a “state of
affairs” (Sachverhalt), also translated as “atomic facts,” which are not combinations of ideas in
a proposition. The philosophers Hermann Lotze, Carl Stumpf, Alexius Meinong, Kasimir
Twardowski, Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, and Ludwig Wittgenstein developed this
critique of judgment. In Berlin before and after World War I, Carl Stumpf agreed with William
James that we experience a “stream of consciousness” from which we distinguish “mental
functions.” In visual space, we perceive location directly, not through muscle movements in
the retina. Two tones sounded together yield a third tone different from the component tones.

In 19th-century perception research, Ewald Hering challenged Hermann Helmholtz's

description of the eye as a camera in which we bring together sensations by unconscious
inference. A zigzag hole in a white cardboard can appear as a black patch or as a hole. Each
perception has psychological reality as a “seen object,” even if the retinal image is the same.
Christian von Ehrenfels noted that one can play a melody in one key and then in another key
and immediately recognize the tune. Similarly, Austrian philosophers in Vienna and Graz
contributed a model of cognition based on the Müller-Lyer illusion, in which the length of two
lines is judged longer or shorter based on illusions created by arrows at their ends.

In the early 20th century, Gestalt psychologists experimented with tone color, figural
aftereffects, illusions, and perceptual constancies. Brain scientists explored equipotentiality
and mass action, behavioral neurology, and self-actualization. Social psychologists extended
Gestalt theory to social fields of force in a life-world and to humanizing the workplace. Gestalt
therapists encouraged healthy contacts with the world through reorganization of the self in a
social field.

Gestalt in Human Perception and Animal Insight Experiments

Stumpf's students in Berlin, Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler named and
popularized Gestalt psychology elsewhere, principally in the United States, based upon a
wide range of perceptual, learning, and cognitive experiments. Wertheimer's classic phi
phenomenon experiment used slits of light in a revolving tachistoscope wheel to produce a
perception of apparent motion. Exposure intervals, as well as the color, arrangement, and size
of the stimuli, could be varied.

Kurt Koffka introduced the “white tablecloth experiments,” where a subject encounters a white
and a black tablecloth, but the black one has greater illumination. Subjects have no difficulty
identifying that the white is white, even though the “proximal stimuli” of the black one are
brighter. The subject utilizes a “color gradient” to make a Gestalt perceptual judgment. This
involved a new understanding of stimulus. A hungry fish bites the worm, but the satiated one
does not; the same stimulus object may elicit a different pattern of response as a “direct
experience correlate of the stimuli.” No hypothetical psychological processes are involved. In
his book The Growth of the Mind, Koffka applied the anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's
concept of the primitive mind to the child, maintaining that the child's mind grows by
differentiation, from the whole to the parts. In Russia, the developmental psychologists Lev
Vygotsky and Alexander Luria drew on the work of Koffka, Kurt Lewin, Tamara Dembo, and
Anita Karsten, bringing a Gestalt perspective into their cultural-historical school.

In the Tenerife Island experiments with apes during World War I, Wolfgang Köhler observed
apes overcoming obstacles to reach a goal object—by stacking boxes. He and others (Carl
Bühler, Charlotte Bühler) argued against Edward Lee Thorndike's learning experiments with

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cats, in which a cat engaged in random efforts to get out of a puzzle box and the
experimenter graphed the time taken to do so by a learning curve. Such instrumental learning
abstracted from the animal's behavior, whereas Kohler's insight phenomenon has face
validity.

Also in Germany, Kurt Lewin treated actions as “behavioral wholes” in which emotion and
volition contribute to a specific situation with an end product. Bluma Zeigarnik and Maria
Rickers-Ovsiankina showed that memory is better for uncompleted tasks. Tamara Dembo
manipulated the experiment–subject relationship by causing frustration in subjects trying to
complete an assigned task.

Gestalt Social Psychology

Dembo's observation of “firmness” and “loosening” of tension systems led to Lewin's later
concepts of psychological “life space” and “social fields of force.” Evgenia Hanfmann and
Rickers-Ovsiankina took Lewin's program into counseling, giving attention to the orientation of
students to the clinical situation. The work of many of Lewin's students contributed to social
action research by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues in the United
States.

Lewin also focused on how the situation appears to the actor, and he diagrammed the needs
of the person in different layers. He included motivation forces, as well as self and field, but
opposed historical explanation by childhood experiences (psychoanalysis) or past learning
(behaviorism). Physics provided the concepts of field of force and vectors and ahistorical laws
by which social Gestaltists described personality and social fields.

The experimenter first became a subject of psychological attention in Lewin's research. By

contrast, contemporary research about character types and mental traits is abstracted from
groups of persons, and the experimenter is invisible. Lewin's largely East European female
research group had a cosmopolitan awareness of social-psychological questions, recognizing
that personality is embedded in social situations.

Another émigré, Fritz Heider, proposed balance theory: If A dislikes B and B dislikes C, then
he predicted that A would like C. Or if a person likes President Eisenhower and he was
reported to have done something bad, then one could protect equilibrium by disbelieving this
report. Taking this balance theory further, Leon Festinger found that if students were offered a
small reward for giving a speech that contradicts their beliefs, they are more likely to change
their attitude than if they were given a larger reward. He called this “cognitive dissonance.”
Heider and Festinger did not share Lewin's emphasis on the Gestalt social field; theirs was an
individual social psychology.

In medicine, the neurologists Jakob von Uexküll, Konstantin von Monakow, and Kurt
Goldstein emphasized “holism” in brain science. Some cultural psychologists defended a
“racializing” national socialism with ideas of “racial soul,” “purity,” and “folkish study of
humanity.” Others built early careers by publishing in Nazi journals and weaving in statements
of party orthodoxy.

Since the mid 20th century, many personality and social psychologists have argued that the
historical approach based on frequencies can be joined with social field accounts employing
experimenter–subject interaction. David Krech and R. S. Crutchfield, in their 1948 textbook,
included historical frequency data along with group phenomena; however, the emphasis was

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on the psychological states of individuals. By comparison, when Solomon Asch performed

multiple trials with confederates to produce a conformity effect in the subject's judgment of
the length of a line, the emphasis became the individual and the group: They mutually
influence one another in socially engaged psychological behaviors. Muzafer Sherif and
Carolyn Wood Sherif manipulated groups of boys at summer camp to become friends, then to
compete as rivals, and finally to reconcile through working toward a superordinate goal. Their
concern with the origin and development of norms marks them too as truly social
psychologists, the direction in which Lewin had pointed.

Gestalt Therapy

A vibrant clinical branch of Gestalt therapy grew out of the work of Fritz Perls and Laura
Posner Perls (who studied color contrast with the Gestaltist Adhémar Gelb in Frankfurt and
cowrote Ego, Hunger and Aggression in 1947). Paul Goodman then wrote Gestalt Therapy
with Fritz Perls and Ralph Hefferline in 1951. They emphasized the client's “resistance” or
bodily armor, drawing from their mentor Wilhelm Reich and from Jacob L. Moreno's
psychodrama. In doubling or “hot seat,” clients kneel to symbolize the hidden aspect in their
lives while saying what they would feel but never tell. Since the 1950s, Gestalt therapy
schools have arisen across North America and the world. The psychoanalytic concept of
“mechanisms of defense” (Anna Freud) evolved into the restrospective “resistances to contact”
(Perls). For example, clients may be asked to pay attention to bodily sensations while walking
in a circle. Erving and Miriam Polster changed the emphasis to “working with the resistance.”
A therapist should look at the person the way you would view a sunset, with love and
affection. One technique is mining for stories. A client dreamed that she and her sister had
escaped together. From whom, asked the therapist. From people. From what people? From
our parents. By insisting upon concreteness, the therapist facilitates the client's transition
from A to B. Then, focused emotional work becomes possible.

Relativism versus Realism: Philosophy of Science versus Gestalt Psychology

Philosophers of science debated the significance of the so-called Gestalt switch in terms of
realism versus relativism. This raises issues of the foundations of scientific truth when
(Kuhnian) paradigms change.

Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations (1952), introduced the figure of a duck-rabbit.

It can be involuntarily seen as one, then the other, but never as both simultaneously. Here,
the same sense-data (lines or figures perceived) give rise to two different perceptions (either
duck or rabbit)—in other words, to one precept at a time. So, the argument goes, the
underlying reality or fact of the matter may be one, but it is perceived differently given the
diverse theories affecting our observation—hence the relativism in scientific theory formation.
Transposed to how a paradigm switch (as a Gestalt switch) works in scientific theory
replacement, we can understand the difference, for example, between how Tycho Brahe (a
geocentrist) saw the sun rising and Kepler (a heliocentrist) saw the earth's revolutions
lowering it with respect to the sun. While the underlying reality is supposed to be one, the
theoretical lenses through which it is viewed are different. In the hands of N. R. Hanson and
Thomas Kuhn, a paradigm switch worked like a Gestalt switch.

Wittgenstein explained this by sensory and intellectual contributions, a legacy perhaps of his
predecessors in the Austrian school of philosophy, including Franz Brentano and Edmund
Husserl. In another example, three dots are seen as a triangle; the dots are the sensory

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portion, and the triangle is the judgment.

Gestalt psychologists argue that this returns us to the intellectualism of the tradition they
rejected. They are realists in asserting that perception itself is structured. Reality is given to us
with a rich phenomenology. The conditions that produce this Gestalt switch depend on the
“definiteness” of stimulus conditions; if they are poor, switching may occur. Such conditions
occur in everyday life, yet we perceive accurately.

The implications for philosophy of science were profound. If the Gestalt switch consists of
both sensory and intellectual entities (the underlying facts plus the theoretical lenses), they
must be connected by associations. How can scientists then communicate about the facts if
they simply interpret according to their experience? Thomas Kuhn's use of the duck-rabbit to
illustrate a scientific paradigm shift thus invokes an older epistemology, one that Gestalt
psychologists argued against with their perceptual experiments. He represents the relativism
that has emerged in the philosophy of science since the mid 20th century; the early-20th-
century Gestaltists remain perceptual realists.

gestalt psychology
gestalt therapy
stimuli
relativism
rabbits
psychologists
science philosophy

William R. Woodward
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452276052.n144
See also

Emergence
Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Meaning
Holism, in the Social Sciences
Observation and Theory-Ladenness
Phenomenological Schools of Psychology
Philosophical Psychology, History of
Systems Theory

Further Readings
Asch, M. G. (1996). Gestalt psychology in German culture: Holism and the quest for
objectivity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
De Rivera, J. (1976). Field theory as human science. Contributions of Lewin's Berlin group.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Ellis, W. D. (Ed.). (1938). A source book of Gestalt psychology. London, England: Routledge
& K e g a n P a u l. ( C o n t a i n s f i v e c h a p t e r s b y M . W e r t h e i m e r , t h r e e b y K ö h l e r )
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/11496-000
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson.
Koffka, K. (1924). The growth of the mind: An introduction to child psychology (R. M. Ogden,
Trans.). New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace.
Koffka, K. (2001). Principles of Gestalt psychology. London, England: Routledge. (Original
work published 1935)

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Köhler, W. (1969). The task of Gestalt psychology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Köhler, W. (1992). Gestalt psychology: An introduction to new concepts in modern
psychology. New York, NY: Liveright. (Original work published 1947)
Kuhn, T. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Lewin, K. (1935). A dynamic theory of personality. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Schefler, I. (1972). Vision and revolution: A postscript on Kuhn. Philosophy of Science, 39,
366–374. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/288456
Smith, B. (1988). Foundations of Gestalt theory. Munich, Germany: Philosophia.
Verstegen, I. (2001). Gestalt psychologists on the Gestalt switch. Il Cannocchiale Revista di
studi filosofici, 2, 3–9. Retrieved from http://sites.google.com/site/ianverstegen/gestaltswitch
Wittgenstein, L. (2001). Philosophical investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford,
England: Blackwell. (Original work published 1952)
Wright, E. (1992). Gestalt switching: Hanson, Aronson, and Harré. Philosophy of Science, 59,
480–486. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/289685

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