Theory of Gestalt: laws and fundamental principles
The Gestalt theory It is a concept that will surely sound to you if you are one of those people who are curious about the world of psychology. It is a theory currently used in psychotherapy and problem solving, but it has also become popular for being one of the most attractive psychological approaches for those who believe that the way of being, behaving and feeling of the human being can not be reduced only to what is directly observable or measurable .
However, if you have read something about the theory of Gestalt you will also know that it is not famous for being easily summarized in a single sentence. Their philosophical foundations and laws about our way of perceiving things are rooted in years and years of research, and their formulations about the human mind are not always intuitive.
That is why to understand the theory of the Gestalt a small change of mentality is necessary, and nothing better to achieve this than learn in what sense your focus is oriented and what your principles are .
The theory of Gestalt and its humanistic influences
The Psychology of Gestalt can be framed within the broader framework of humanistic psychology, since it emphasizes the subjective experiences of each person, gives importance to positive aspects of psychology such as self-realization and the search for right decisions, and works with a conception of the human being as an agent capable of developing freely and autonomously.
This means that it does not focus on the negative aspects of the mind, as it happens with certain types of psychoanalysis, nor does it limit its object of study to the observable behavior of people, as it happens in behaviorism.
A little history about Gestalt
The theory of Gestalt appeared in the Germany of the early twentieth century as a reaction to behavioral psychology , which rejected the consideration of subjective states of consciousness when investigating the behavior of people and he emphasized the effects that the family context, and by social and cultural extension, has on us . Unlike the behaviorists, the researchers who subscribed to the Gestalt theory were basically concerned with studying the mental processes that at that time were considered fundamentally invisible, as there were no tools to get to know what happened in the brain.
In this way, Gestalt theory brings us closer to a conception of the human being characterized by its active role when it comes to perceiving reality and making decisions. According to the Gestaltists, we all create in our mind more or less coherent images about us and what surrounds us , and these images are not the simple union of the information sequences that reach us through our senses, but they are something else.
Building reality and interpreting it
The German word Gestalt, which is often translated into Spanish as "form", represents this process by which we build frames of perception of reality : all people interpret reality and make decisions about it based on these mental "forms" or "figures" that we create without realizing. Gestalt theory focuses on giving explanations about how we perceive things and make decisions based on the "forms" we create.
The theory of Gestalt and the concept of "form"
Some schools of psychology consider that the mental representations that are created in our consciousness are the sum of pieces of image, sound, touch and memory. In this way, the set of these information packages that are coming from the senses would be added to our brain and from that superposition of units would appear what we experience.
The theory of Gestalt, however, denies that there is a perceptive "everything" that is composed of the set of data that are coming to our body . On the contrary, it proposes that what we experience is more than the sum of its parts, and that therefore it exists as a whole, a figure that can only be considered whole. So, what happens is that the globality of our mental "forms" is imposed on what is coming to us through the senses, and not the other way around.
According to this approach, we learn about what surrounds us not by adding the set of pieces of information that reach us through the senses, but from the "figures" that are created in our mind. For example, from the Gestalt theory used in Gestalt therapy created by Fritz Perls (which is not exactly the same as Gestalt psychology, older than this one) forms of psychotherapy are proposed in which the objective is that the patient can understand certain problems in a global sense that is different from how he did it before and that allows him to develop his potentialities.
Thus, according to Gestalt theory, people would not be recipients of different sensations, but our minds would be composed of different totalities. For gestaltists it is not necessary to focus on the pieces of what our mental figures seem to be formed about anything to solve a conflict or adopt a more useful mentality, but what we have to try is to achieve a structural understanding new of what happens.
Examples to understand the idea of "form"
An example of this can be found in the films . Despite being a succession of photographs that pass quickly, we perceive them as something very different: a sequence of moving images .
Although this quality (the movement) is not present in the different images, what we experience is a globality that does have this property. From the perspective of the Gestalt theory this is so because we create global forms about the reality that surrounds us, instead of just receiving passively the information that comes from everywhere and reacting accordingly.
The same is clearly stated when we see those optical illusions in which two or more images appear superimposed but we are not able to see more than one at a time: the globality of the figure seems to take over our senses.
The laws of Gestalt
Within the theory of Gestalt, laws have been formulated that explain the principles by which, depending on the context in which we find ourselves, we perceive certain things and not others. These are the laws of Gestalt, which were originally proposed by the psychologist Max Wertheimer , whose ideas were developed and reinforced by Wolfgang Köhler (in the image) and Kurt Koffka .
The most important law and that gives us a better idea about the logic that governs the generation of perceptions as a whole is the law of good form , according to which what we perceive with greater accuracy and speed are those that are more complete but, at the same time, simpler or symmetrical.
More laws and principles of the Gestalt
Other laws of the Gestalt theory are:
- The law of figure-background : we can not perceive the same form as a figure and at the same time as the background of that figure. The background is everything that is not perceived as a figure.
- Law of continuity : if several elements seem to be placed forming a flow oriented towards some part, they will be perceived as a whole.
- Law of proximity : the elements next to each other tend to be perceived as if they were part of a unit.
- Law of similarity : the similar elements are perceived as having the same shape.
- The law of closure : a shape is perceived better the closer its contour is.
- Law of completion : an open form tends to be perceived as closed.
How are these "forms" according to the theory of Gestalt?
Because forms are a totality, they can not be reduced to a single sense. That means that for Gestaltists a mental image is not really a visual image , like the one that can be produced when projecting light on a retina, but it is something else. So much so that, for followers of Gestalt theory, the laws of Gestalt are applicable not only to what is perceived through sight, although they are usually exemplified only by drawings and icons. It is not difficult to imagine examples in which the laws of the Gestalt seem to apply to all kinds of perceptions.
In short, the theory of Gestalt proposes a psychological approach in which the person has an active role building meaning units about their experiences and, in addition, is able to restructure their mental "ways" to adopt more useful points of view and better guide their decision-making as well as their objectives.
Fritz Perls and Gestalt Therapy
Fritz Perls , according to most postulates of Gestalt psychology, developed a therapy of its own: the Gestalt therapy . We invite you to know them through these two articles:
"Biography of Fritz Perls and his contributions to Psychology"
"Gestalt therapy: what is it and on what principles is it based?"
