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.

Soon others came along to structure and organize the field of psychology into different theories through scientific experiments and study.

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,

1969)
History
Gestalt is the German word meaning shape or form which is a perfect explanation of the theory. The concept of Gestalt was originated through musical explanation by Christian Von Ehrenfels's criteria. He stated that one needs the melody and tones to create a musical whole. A whole musical piece can not be comprehended soley by its notes, but there is more to it than playing just a C note then a D. To get the full effectiveness of the piece, one must find the rhythm of that staccato C half note that is slurred into a D sharp quarter note then so on to create the full melody. (Katz, 1950) This musical philosopher set the ground work for future psychologists to develop the theory.
In the early nineteenth century, gestaltists Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler founded the theory of Gestalt. Max Wertheimer designed the original outline of Gestalt and published Investigation of the Gestalt Doctrine in 1922. In his book, Wertheimer characterized the theory through two hypotheses. The first hypothesis was the bundle hypothesis. The bundle hypothesis states that a complex organism is a sum of simplistic contents. The second is the association hypothesis. This hypothesis uses the association of items or organisms. If person A spends time with person B, then A will have a high likelihood of contacting person B. Wertheimer goes onto describe both hypotheses as instances of foundational pieces. (Malone, 2009)
Gestalt theory was soon turned from a two dimensional idea to three dimensional thinking with the help of Kurt Koffka in 1930. He saw movement as a spinning top creating more depth and more options to exploring a subject. Through Koffka the theory became more tangible. There are different atoms and elements around the world. There is hydrogen and oxygen. Adding another hydrogen it creates a double hydrogen with one oxygen. This is H20 or water. If someone adds another oxygen it creates H2O2 or polywater, a thicker more gel like substance. It making these smaller parts and using critical thinking to create more meaningful wholes. (Koffka, 1935)
It would take nearly forty years after Koffka for Köhler to draw Gestalt parallel with physics. Wolfgang Köhler studied Clark Maxwell, a figure in the development of physics, and primer instructor of quantum physics, Max Planck. Studying both of these great men, Köhler gave Gestalt psychology a more scientific grounding, stating that Gestaltists are all in agreement with natural sciences. He went onto create the Ehrenfel's criteria in qualifying as a Gestalt phenomena that physical processes had to meet. Some of the qualifications was that they had to be suprasummative and transposable. This means that the effects are not derivable from their properties and that their organizations had to survive change. Köhler had a tendency to lean towards simplicity and regularity that was soon called Prägnanz. (Malone, 2009)
These three great men were founders of the Gestalt theory and paved the way for others such as Frederick S. Perls to develop Gestalt therapy. Fritz Perls and his wife, Laura Perls, took the information that Köhler, Koffka, and Wertheimer and put it to practical use. Fritz has been deemed worthy by many of his colleagues as originator or developer of Gestalt theory, but he himself will deny the title simply stating that Gestalt has been around for years but he is merely a generator of the psychology. Born in Berlin of 1893, worked with Kurt Goldstein at the Goldstein Institute for Brain Damaged Soldiers this is where he developed his theory that humans are wholes rather than the sum of their functional parts. There Perls was analyzed by Wilhelm Riech and other key figures in the psychoanalytic movement before founding the Institute of Gestalt Therapy in 1952 with his wife. Together they discouraged Gestalt cults and developed a phenomenlogical approach to their clients where they gained awareness of what they are experiencing which changes occurs. Fritz stressed the issue of awareness and the organism of Gestalt theory. He states that a person is the sum of our organs and vitals. The keyword use is is or are and that humans do not just have. The use of the word are creates a whole while stating that a person has something introduces a split. This later goes into detail of how the environmental or outside factors are part of a persons whole and plays a part in control. Frederick S Perls may have not been a founder or creator of Gestalt but played a key role in the development of the psychological use. (Perls, 1969)