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Gestalt psychology
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BY The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica | View Edit History

Gestalt psychology, school of FAST FACTS

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psychology founded in the 20th
century that provided the Key People: Christian, Freiherr (baron)

foundation for the modern von Ehrenfels

study of perception. Gestalt Related Topics: psychology •

Prägnanz • good continuation •
theory emphasizes that the
proximity • closure
whole of anything is greater
than its parts. That is, the See all facts and data →
 FAST FACTS

attributes of the whole are not
 MEDIA  deducible from analysis of the
 ADDITIONAL INFO  parts in isolation. The word Gestalt is used in modern German to
mean the way a thing has been “placed,” or “put together.” There
is no exact equivalent in English. “Form” and “shape” are the
usual translations; in psychology the word is often interpreted as
“pattern” or “configuration.”

Gestalt theory originated in Austria and Germany as a reaction

against the associationist and structural schools’ atomistic
orientation (an approach which fragmented experience into
distinct and unrelated elements). Gestalt studies made use instead
of phenomenology. This method, with a tradition going back to
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, involves nothing more than the
description of direct psychological experience, with no restrictions
on what is permissible in the description. Gestalt psychology was
in part an attempt to add a humanistic dimension to what was
considered a sterile approach to the scientific study of mental life.
Gestalt psychology further sought to encompass the qualities of
form, meaning, and value that prevailing psychologists had either
ignored or presumed to fall outside the boundaries of science.

The publication of Czech-born psychologist Max Wertheimer’s

“Experimentelle Studien über das Sehen von Bewegung”
(“Experimental Studies of the Perception of Movement”) in 1912
marks the founding of the Gestalt school. In it Wertheimer
reported the result of a study on apparent movement conducted in
Frankfurt am Main, Germany, with psychologists Wolfgang
Köhler and Kurt Koffka. Together, these three formed the core of
the Gestalt school for the next few decades. (By the mid-1930s all
had become professors in the United States.)

The earliest Gestalt work concerned perception, with particular

emphasis on visual perceptual organization as explained by the
phenomenon of illusion. In 1912 Wertheimer discovered the phi
phenomenon, an optical illusion in which stationary objects
shown in rapid succession, transcending the threshold at which
they can be perceived separately, appear to move. The explanation
of this phenomenon—also known as persistence of vision and
experienced when viewing motion pictures—provided strong
support for Gestalt principles.

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Under the old assumption that sensations of perceptual

experience stand in one-to-one relation to physical stimuli, the
effect of the phi phenomenon was apparently inexplicable.
However, Wertheimer understood that the perceived motion is an
emergent experience, not present in the stimuli in isolation but
dependent upon the relational characteristics of the stimuli. As the
motion is perceived, the observer’s nervous system and experience
do not passively register the physical input in a piecemeal way.
Rather, the neural organization as well as the perceptual
experience springs immediately into existence as an entire field
with differentiated parts. In later writings this principle was stated
as the law of Prägnanz, meaning that the neural and perceptual
organization of any set of stimuli will form as good a Gestalt, or
whole, as the prevailing conditions will allow.

Major elaborations of the new formulation occurred within the

next decades. Wertheimer, Köhler, Koffka, and their students
extended the Gestalt approach to problems in other areas of
perception, problem solving, learning, and thinking. The Gestalt
principles were later applied to motivation, social psychology, and
personality (particularly by Kurt Lewin) and to aesthetics and
economic behaviour. Wertheimer demonstrated that Gestalt
concepts could also be used to shed light on problems in ethics,
political behaviour, and the nature of truth. Gestalt psychology’s
traditions continued in the perceptual investigations undertaken
by Rudolf Arnheim and Hans Wallach in the United States.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

This article was most recently revised and updated by Patricia Bauer.

Learn More in these related Britannica articles:

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Approaches such as the Gestalt therapy of German American

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i Oth h th it ti l h f
aesthetics: Form

…by the theories of the Gestalt psychologists Max Wertheimer,

Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka, whose semiempirical,
semiphilosophical researches into the perception of form and
pattern seem to make direct contact with many of the more…

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