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Origin and history

Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler founded Gestalt psychology in the early 20th century. The dominant view in psychology at the time was structuralism, exemplified by the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt, and Edward B. Titchener. Structuralism was rooted firmly in British empiricism and was based on three closely interrelated theories:

Together, these three theories give rise to the view that the mind constructs all perceptions and abstract thoughts strictly from lower-level sensations, which are related solely by being associated closely in space and time. The Gestaltists took issue with the widespread atomistic view that the aim of psychology should be to break consciousness down into putative basic elements.

In contrast, the Gestalt psychologists believed that breaking psychological phenomena down into smaller parts would not lead to understanding psychology. Instead, they viewed psychological phenomena as organized, structured wholes. They argued that the psychological "whole" has priority and that the "parts" are defined by the structure of the whole, rather than the other way round. Gestalt theories of perception are based on human nature being inclined to understand objects as an entire structure rather than the sum of its parts.

Wertheimer had been a student of Austrian philosopher, Christian von Ehrenfels, a member of the School of Brentano. Von Ehrenfels introduced the concept of Gestalt to philosophy and psychology in 1890, before the advent of Gestalt psychology as such. Von Ehrenfels observed that a perceptual experience, such as perceiving a melody or a shape, is more than the sum of its sensory components. He claimed that, in addition to the sensory elements of the perception, there is something additional that is an element in its own right, despite in some sense being derived from the organization of the component sensory elements. He called it Gestalt-qualität or "form-quality." It is this Gestalt-qualität that, according to von Ehrenfels, allows a tune to be transposed to a new key, using completely different notes, while still retaining its identity. The idea of a Gestalt-qualität has roots in theories by David Hume, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Immanuel Kant, David Hartley, and Ernst Mach. Both von Ehrenfels and Edmund Husserl seem to have been inspired by Mach's work Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations, 1886), in formulating their very similar concepts of gestalt and figural moment, respectively.

By 1914, the first published references to Gestalt theory could be found in a footnote of Gabriele von Wartensleben 's application of Gestalt theory to personality. She was a student at Frankfurt Academy for Social Sciences, who interacted deeply with Wertheimer and Köhler.

Through a series of experiments, Wertheimer discovered that a person observing a pair of alternating bars of light can, under the right conditions, experience the illusion of movement between one location and the other. He noted that this was a perception of motion absent any moving object. That is, it was pure phenomenal motion. He dubbed it phi ("phenomenal") motion. Wertheimer's publication of these results in 1912 marks the beginning of Gestalt psychology. In comparison to von Ehrenfels and others who had used the term "gestalt" earlier in various ways, Wertheimer's unique contribution was to insist that the "gestalt" is perceptually primary. The gestalt defines the parts from which it is composed, rather than being a secondary quality that emerges from those parts. Wertheimer took the more radical position that one hears the melody first and only then may perceptually divide it up into notes. Similarly, in vision, one sees the form of the circle first, with its apprehension not mediated by a process of part-summation. Only after this primary apprehension might one notice that it is made up of lines or dots or stars.

The two men who served as Wertheimer's subjects in the phi experiments were Köhler and Koffka. Köhler was an expert in physical acoustics, having studied under physicist Max Planck, but had taken his degree in psychology under Carl Stumpf. Koffka was also a student of Stumpf's, having studied movement phenomena and psychological aspects of rhythm. In 1917, Köhler published the results of four years of research on learning in chimpanzees. Köhler showed, contrary to the claims of most other learning theorists, that animals can learn by "sudden insight" into the "structure" of a problem, over and above the associative and incremental manner of learning that Ivan Pavlov and Edward Lee Thorndike had demonstrated with dogs and cats, respectively.

In 1921, Koffka published a Gestalt-oriented text on developmental psychology, Growth of the Mind. With the help of American psychologist Robert Ogden, Koffka introduced the Gestalt point of view to an American audience in 1922 by way of a paper in Psychological Bulletin. It contains criticisms of then-current explanations of a number of problems of perception, and the alternatives offered by the Gestalt school. Koffka moved to the United States in 1924, eventually settling at Smith College in 1927. In 1935, Koffka published his Principles of Gestalt Psychology. This textbook laid out the Gestalt vision of the scientific enterprise as a whole. Science, he said, is not the simple accumulation of facts. What makes research scientific is the incorporation of facts into a theoretical structure. The goal of the Gestaltists was to integrate the facts of inanimate nature, life, and mind into a single scientific structure. This meant that science would have to accommodate not only what Koffka called the quantitative facts of physical science but the facts of two other "scientific categories": questions of order and questions of Sinn, a German word which has been variously translated as significance, value, and meaning. Without incorporating the meaning of experience and behavior, Koffka believed that science would doom itself to trivialities in its investigation of human beings.

Having survived the Nazis up to the mid-1930s, all the core members of the Gestalt movement were forced out of Germany to the United States by 1935. Köhler published another book, Dynamics in Psychology, in 1940 but thereafter the Gestalt movement suffered a series of setbacks. Koffka died in 1941 and Wertheimer in 1943. Wertheimer's long-awaited book on mathematical problem-solving, Productive Thinking, was published posthumously in 1945, but Köhler was left to guide the movement without his two long-time colleagues.