Humanistic Psychology

Gestalt

Introduction

The mind is a wonderfully mysterious place where the conscious roams and wonders to create the human personality. Every human experience is different for each and every person. This being said no two personalities are exactly the same. They may be similar, but like a fingerprint they differ in their uniqueness. Psychologists, psychiatrists, and other medical professionals in the field of psychology, study the mind and human behavior in order to find the reasons why a person behaves a certain way to better help the human population. That is what psychology is. The study of the mind and behavior. In the year 1879, Wilhelm Wundt became the founder of psychology when he established a laboratory to study conscious mind at the University of Leipzig, Germany. While people had been studying human behavior long before that, Wundt was the first to make it an independent science. Using his medically trained background, he dug deeper into the human consciousness to investigate sensations, perceptions, and experience that creates the personal awareness. His research and experiments became the foundation for others to study and build upon.

There is the functionalism theory, where William James theorized a person's behavior is based on its environment. Behaviorism is a theory based on caused and effect or stimulus and response. The humanistic psychologists say behavior is based on free will. Psychoanalyic Doctor Sigmund Freud believed that the mind and behavior is just a reaction of the unconscious mind. Then there is the Gestalt theory. This theory brings it all back to the person and the now. The Gestalt theory states that people are not just a sum of their parts, but the whole. People are not what they have, but what they are. (Perls,