Definition of Gestalt (Psychology)

It is known by the name of Gestalt to that current of the psychology emerged in Germany back in the 19th century, which had among its promoters the psychologists Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Koffka and Kurt Lewin and which promoted the following axiom: the whole is more than the sum of the parts, which ultimately ended up being the best identification to describe the thought of this highly recognized and controversial school psychology.

According to the followers, scholars and defenders of Gestalt, the human mind configures through certain laws the elements that come to it through the senses and memory, meanwhile, this configuration will have a primary character over the elements that compose it and then the latter by themselves will not be able to lead us to the understanding of the mental process.

Two were the universities that in history stood out for being the diffusers and those that carried out the first experiments applying the thought described above

, that of Graz, who proposed the theory that the form or everything is the product of a perceptual act and that of Berlin which was the one that showed that the form or gestalt is given immediately and that the perception it is a product of gestalt.

Among the best known laws that this current enunciated, we find: law of the closure, which maintains that our mind adds the missing elements to complete a figure, it is an innate tendency to conclude the objects or forms that appear to us incomplete; law of likeness, which proposes that our mind tends to group similar elements into a unit; continuity law, which says that the details that maintain a pattern tend to group together, that is, we tend to perceive continuous elements even if they are interrupted; symmetry law, which states that symmetric images are perceived as equal and the proximity law, which sentences elements to be grouped with those that are at a shorter distance.

Topics in Gestalt (Psychology)