Gestalt Psychology

response to the introspective analysis of consciousness advocated by Titchener and the behavioral analysis of J. B. Watson came in the form of an approach to psychology that arose in Germany at about the same time that behaviorism had arisen in the United States. The term gestalt, translated as “whole” or “configuration,” referred to an organized entity that was different from the sum of its constituent parts. The
term was initially introduced by Christian von Ehrenfels, who pointed out that a melody played in two different keys is recognized as such even though the notes in each case are different. He suggested that combinations of elements produced a “gestaltqualität,” or whole-quality, that constituted a new element of consciousness. The use of the term by the triumvirate of Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang
Köhler referred not to a new element but to the organized nature of conscious experience. The gestalt psychologists opposed what they perceived to be artificial attempts to reduce experience or behavior to constituent parts and then to synthesize
them again into organized wholes, and articulated their views in influential books (e.g., Köhler, 1929). Gestalt psychology was initiated by observations on apparent movement (Wertheimer, 1912), in which two lights located at some distance apart give rise to the experience of one light moving from one location to the other when the
lights go on and off in sequence. The phenomena seemed incapable of explanation by introspective identification of sensory elements. The gestaltists proposed that the introspection appropriate to psychology was a description of experience, a naive introspection that described the experience without any attempt to subject it to analysis. Perceptual phenomena and conscious experience were not the only domains
of gestalt theory; Köhler’s research on chimpanzees (Köhler, 1926) suggested that learning occurred not through trial and error but by insight that resulted from a perceptual reorganization that produced a new way of seeing the problem to be solved. Neither Thorndike’s trial-and-error explanations of learning nor behavioral analysis of organized goal-directed behavior seemed adequate to account for the behavior of the chimpanzees.
The disagreement with the structural approach to mind and the behavioral approach to behavior derived from fundamentally different assumptions about the nature of science. Titchener, and Watson as well, assumed that science proceeded by analysis, by breaking down chemical and material objects into the elements of which they are composed. The elemental analysis that Titchener perceived to be the hallmark
of physics was a nineteenth-century model that had given way to analyses in terms of fields in which forces operated to determine organization of particles rather than particles or elements giving rise to organization (e.g., introducing a magnetic force placed among a random pattern of iron filings organizes the filings in terms of the directions of force). Field theory and the laws of organization were proposed to
account for many phenomena (e.g., Ellis, 1950), not only of perception and problem solving and learning, but of, for example, social behavior (Asch, 1955), child development (Koffka, 1927), and thinking (Wertheimer, 1959), and served to prompt research designed to test theories in these areas.