GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY


Meaning of GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY in English

20th-century school of psychology that provided the foundation for the modern study of perception. Its precepts, formulated as a reaction against the atomistic orientation of previous theories, emphasized that the whole of anything is greater than its parts. The attributes of the whole of anything are not deducible from analysis of the parts in isolation. The word Gestalt is used in modern German to mean the way a thing has been gestellt; i.e., placed, or put together. There is no exact equivalent in English. Form and shape are the usual translations; in psychology the word is often rendered pattern or configuration. Gestalt theory began toward the close of the 19th century in Austria and south Germany as a protest against the associationist and structural schools' piecemeal analyses of experience into atomistic elements. Gestalt studies made use instead of the methods of phenomenology. This method, with a tradition going back to Goethe, involves nothing more than the description of direct psychological experience, with no restrictions on what is permissible in the description. Gestalt psychology was in part an attempt to add a humanistic dimension to what was considered a barren approach to the scientific study of mental life. Gestalt psychology sought to encompass the qualities of form, meaning, and value that prevailing psychologists had either ignored or thought to fall outside the confines of science. Max Wertheimer (q.v.) in 1912 published the paper considered to mark the founding of the Gestalt school. In it he reported the result of an experimental study done at Frankfurt with two colleagues, Wolfgang Khler and Kurt Koffka (qq.v.); these three formed the core of the Gestalt school for the next decades. The earliest Gestalt work concerned the area of perception, particularly visual perceptual organization as illuminated by the phenomenon of illusion. A perceptual illusion that provided strong support for Gestalt principles was the phi-phenomenon, an illusion of apparent motion named and described in 1912 by Wertheimer. The phi-phenomenon is a visual illusion in which stationary objects shown in rapid succession appear to move by transcending the threshold at which they can be perceived separately (the phenomenon is experienced in viewing motion pictures). The effect of the phi-phenomenon was apparently inexplicable on the old assumption that the sensations of perceptual experience stand in a one-to-one relation to the physical stimuli. The perceived motion is an emergent experience, not present in the stimuli in isolation but dependent upon the relational characteristics of the stimuli. The nervous system of the observer and the observer's experience do not passively register the physical input in a piecemeal way. Rather, the neural organization as well as the perceptual experience springs immediately into existence as an entire field with differentiated parts. In later writings this principle was stated as the law of Prgnanz: The neural and perceptual organization of any set of impinging stimuli forms as good a Gestalt, or whole, as the prevailing conditions allow. Major elaborations of the new formulation occurred within the next decades. Wertheimer, Khler, Koffka, and their students extended the Gestalt approach to problems in other areas of perception, problem solving, learning, and thinking. The Gestalt principles were later applied to motivation, social psychology, and personality, particularly by Kurt Lewin (q.v.), and to aesthetics and economic behaviour. Wertheimer demonstrated that Gestalt concepts could also be used to shed light on problems in ethics, political behaviour, and the nature of truth. Gestalt psychology's traditions have continued in the perceptual investigations undertaken by Rudolf Arnheim and Hans Wallach in the United States.

Britannica English vocabulary.      Английский словарь Британика.