Gestalt Approach

Ever wonder how you can know that a melody played in one key is the same melody when it is played in another key, even though all the notes are different? This and related questions, such as how you segment a scene into figure and background, have been the subject of a branch of psychology called the Gestalt school since the beginning of the 20th century. The Gestalt approach to perception of considering how the mind organizes meaningless, elemental stimuli into meaningful global perceptions originated when Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932) published his pivotal paper “Über Gestaltqualitäten” (On the Qualities of Form) in 1890. This work postulated the radical view that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” What von Ehrenfels meant by this now-classic phrase was an extension of an earlier view postulated by philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant held that the mind's representation of reality requires active processing of sensory information. Kant called our mind's representation of reality the phenomenal world, but reality itself the nominal world. That is, we perceive the phenomenal world only by filtering the outside world, which Kant called the noumenal world, through our minds. The noumenal world consists of “things in themselves” and can never be experienced directly, whereas the phenomenal world is created by adding intuitions and conceptions to our sensory impressions. Thus, von Ehrenfels's Gestaltqualitäten cannot be explained by merely associating elementary sensations, but require mental interaction with sensations.

Although there is no direct English counterpart for the German word gestalt, commonly employed terms are configuration, holistic, form, structure, and pattern. Gestalt describes a configuration or form that is unified. The notion that the mind actively organizes elemental stimuli from the outside world was in direct opposition to the Structuralist philosophy put forward most directly by Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) and championed in the United States by his student Edward Titchener (1867–1927). Structuralism postulated that all psychological facts consist of unrelated inert atoms that could only be combined by associations. They used introspection to support their claim that consciousness was composed of mechanistic associations of stimulus elements without any underlying meaning gluing them together. So, that an apple would be described as “red,” “round,” “hard,” or “sweet,” Wundt and Titchener essentially imagined psychology as a science, much like physics or chemistry, in which consciousness is a collection of identifiable parts such as the elements on a periodic table that can be separated and studied. In contrast, the Gestalt approach focused on phenomenology; that is, the study of the meaningful, intact experience not analyzed or reduced to elemental parts. A square has a unity and identity that cannot be fully appreciated by its description as four straight lines connected by right angles.