Gestalt theory: fundamental laws and principles
The Gestalt theory It is a concept that will surely sound familiar to you if you are one of those people who are curious about the world of psychology. It is a widely used theory currently in psychotherapy and problem solving, but it has also become popular as one of the psychological approaches more attractive to those who believe that the way of being, behaving and feeling of being human cannot be reduced only to what is directly observable or measurable.
However, if you have read something about Gestalt theory you will also know that it is not famous for being easily summarized in a single sentence. Their philosophical foundations and laws about how we perceive things are rooted in years and years of research, and his formulations about the human mind are not always intuitive.
That is why to understand Gestalt theory well, a small change in mentality is necessary, and nothing better to achieve this than learn in what direction its approach is oriented and what its principles are.
Gestalt theory and its humanistic influences
The Gestalt psychology can be framed within the broader framework of the 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 correct decisions, and works with a conception of the human being as an agent capable of developing in a free and autonomous.
This means that it does not focus on the negative aspects of the mind, as is the case with certain types of psychoanalysis, nor does it limit its object of study to the observable behavior of people, as happens in the behaviorism.
A little history about Gestalt
Gestalt theory appeared in Germany in the early 20th century as a reaction to behavioral psychology, which rejected the consideration of subjective states of consciousness when investigating the behavior of people and emphasized the effects that the family context, and by social and cultural extension, has on us. Unlike the behaviorists, the researchers who adhered to the Gestalt theory were basically concerned with studying mental processes that at that time were considered something fundamentally invisible, as there were no tools to get to know well 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 more or less coherent images in our mind about ourselves and what surrounds us, and these images are not the simple union of the information sequences that come to us through our senses, but they are something more.
Constructing 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 "shapes" or "figures" that we create without realizing it. Gestalt theory focuses on giving explanations about our way of perceiving things and making decisions based on the "forms" we create.
Gestalt theory 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 arriving from the senses would be added in our brain and from that superposition of units, what we experience would appear.
Gestalt theory, however, denies that there is a perceptual "whole" that is composed of the set of data that is reaching our body. On the contrary, he 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. Thus, 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 by not adding the set of pieces of information that comes to us through the senses, but from the "figures" that are created in our mind. For example, from the Gestalt theory that is used in Gestalt therapy created by Fritz Perls (which is not exactly the same as Gestalt psychology, older than this) forms of psychotherapy are proposed in the what 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 various sensations, but rather our minds would be made up of different wholes. For Gestaltists it is not necessary to focus on the pieces from which our mental figures seem to be made about. of anything to resolve a conflict or adopt a more useful mindset, but what you have to try is to achieve a structural understanding new of what happens.
Examples to understand the idea of "shape"
An example of this can be found in 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 (movement) is not present in the different images, what we experience is a globality that does have this property. From the perspective of Gestalt theory this is so because we create global forms about reality that we surrounds us, instead of just passively receiving the information that comes from everywhere and reacting in consequence.
The same is clearly manifested when we see those optical illusions in which two or more superimposed images appear 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 Gestalt theory, 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 Gestalt laws, which were initially 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 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 more complete forms but, at the same time, simpler or symmetrical.
More laws and principles of Gestalt
Other laws of Gestalt theory are:
The law of the figure-ground: we cannot perceive the same shape 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 appear to be arranged in a flow oriented somewhere, they will be perceived as a whole.
Law of proximity: Elements close to each other tend to be perceived as being part of a unit.
Law of similarity: Similar elements are perceived as having the same shape.
The law of closure: a shape is better perceived the more closed its outline is.
Completion Law: an open shape tends to be perceived as closed.
What are these "forms" like according to Gestalt theory?
As the forms are a totality, they cannot be reduced to a single sense. That means 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 with drawings and icons. It is not difficult to imagine examples where the laws of Gestalt seem to apply to all kinds of perceptions.
In short, the Gestalt theory proposes a psychological approach in which the person has an active role in constructing units of significance about his experiences and that, in addition, he is able to restructure his mental "forms" to adopt more useful points of view and better guide both his decision-making and his objectives.
Fritz Perls and Gestalt Therapy
Fritz perls, according to most of the postulates of Gestalt psychology, he developed his own therapy: the Gestalt therapy. We invite you to get 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?"