by Colette Georgii

Created on: August 29, 2007   Last Updated: November 21, 2009

Gestalt psychology, founded in Germany around 1912 by Max Wertheimer (1888-1943), and his colleagues, K. Koffka (1886-1941) and W. Kohler (1887-1967), is concerned with how people perceive things and how problems are solved. Gestalt psychology presented a strict departure from behaviorism and structuralism and was about seeing things in wholes rather than in parts.

Gestalt is a German word that means something like form, organization, and configuration - there is no exact equivalent in English. Gestalt relied on concepts derived from physics and included field concepts such as the pattern of lines that make up a magnetic field, and is therefore sometimes referred to as field psychology.

The main characteristics of Gestalt psychology are

* opposition to atomism or the theory of wholes

* phenomenology

Opposition to atomism

Atomism refers to the way the beginning science of psychology focused on elements or atoms. Gestaltists were concerned with the nature of facts or atoms that were only held together loosely by association.

The Gestalt psychologists felt that the prevailing psychology's of the time which were structuralism and behaviorism missed the point by looking for elements such as sensations or conditioned reflexes and felt that these elements could not fully explain the experiences of the human being. Their idea was that experiences are patterns or organizations similar to the magnetic field. In a magnetic field events are influenced by other events within the magnetic field. A series of dots form a pattern, not isolated dots.

This series of dots or pattern can be compared to a kind of drawing in the field of art called stippling. The artist renders an entire drawing by placing dots on the drawing paper. When one sees the drawing, one does not look at the individual dots but sees the drawing as a whole drawing. One might see a tree filled with apples set against a backdrop of a river with ducks swimming on the river and grass beneath the tree and a few apples on the ground and the sky above. The artist can manipulate the dots in order to achieve both lightness and darkness. He will place dots further apart to project light, and closer together to show darkness. When we look at the drawing we will not see dots closer and further apart - we will see the whole drawing as one picture.

This type of pattern can also be compared to pixels on the TV screen or computer screen. We don't see individual pixels but whole pictures. The dots are organized in such a

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