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Essay on Gestalt psychology
Gestalt psychology, a term derived from the German term 'gestalten' or organized wholes, is a theory of perception which enjoyed a time as the most popular theory during the early twentieth century. Perceptual psychology aims to find out how we attach and derive meaningful symbols from the simple electrical impulses that make us aware of light, dark and color in our visual systems. While vision goes on between the eye and the brain, perception is a process entirely within the mind. Gestalt theory maintains that the mind has innate organizational abilities which allow us to deconstruct a whole image into various components without having to actively analyze them.
The guiding principal of Gestalt psychology is that the larger picture will be seen before its component parts. This has particular relevance for the visual arts, and is effectively the psychological equivalent of the old saying 'the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.' This was proved by Navon, who found that when people were briefly presented with large outlines of letters composed of smaller letters, the large letter was identified but not the small one.
Do we then claim that all facts are contained in such interconnected groups or units that, each quantification is a description of true quality, each complex and sequence of events orderly and meaningful? In short, do we claim that the universe and all events in it form one big Gestalt?
If we did we should be as dogmatic as the positivists who claim that no event is orderly or meaningful, and as those who assert that quality is essentially different from quantity. But just as the category of causality does not mean that any event is causally connected with any other, so the Gestalt category does not mean that any two states or events belong together in one Gestalt...............
