Gestalt Psychology: Theory, Therapy, and Real-World Applications

Introduction to Gestalt Psychology

Gestalt psychology — founded by German scientists Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, Hermann Ebbinghaus, and Kurt Koffka — focuses broadly on how humans perceive the world around them. According to Introduction to Psychology, Gestalt psychology emerged as a response to structuralism, which held that introspection could effectively lead psychologists to an understanding of the mind. Structuralism was limited in the sense that people had difficulty describing their emotional responses to stimuli and their other inner experiences. With Gestalt psychology, however, researchers began to study how "people consider individual elements together as units or wholes" (Feldman, 2009, pp. 13–14). According to Feldman, Ebbinghaus and Wertheimer proposed that the "whole is different from the sum of its parts" — a claim that reduces to the assertion that human perception of objects is "greater and more meaningful than the individual elements that make up our perceptions" (Feldman, 14).

The Gestalt approach to understanding our world and ourselves has proven to be a valuable framework across many areas of human life. While Gestalt has at times been controversial and misunderstood, there is ample evidence in the literature that this approach to psychology and therapy is genuinely useful — and its effectiveness is the reason it continues to be embraced by psychologists, sociologists, and other professionals.

The Gestalt Approach to Perception and Color

Professor of cognitive psychology James R. Pomerantz believes that — "although poorly understood" — Gestalt phenomena "are a cornerstone of perceptual psychology" (Pomerantz, 2006, p. 619). These phenomena are "powerful and robust effects" with profound implications for how humans recognize objects. Pomerantz further argues that the role of color — as important as "shape perception" — should be understood through a Gestalt lens: not as a basic feature or "primitive property of the stimulus," but rather as what he describes as a "complex conjunction of wavelengths" incorporated into human perceptual processing.

This view fits seamlessly with the foundational principle of Gestalt psychology: the whole is different from the sum of its parts. Color, in other words, is a compilation of wavelengths that the eye and brain synthesize into a single perceived hue. Pomerantz uses this observation to make a bold claim: if color can be understood in Gestalt terms, might one argue that "color is the quintessential Gestalt?" (621).

Gestalt Psychology Through Art and Therapy

Expanding on the application of Gestalt principles beyond perception, Dr. Janie Rhyne approaches Gestalt psychology through the experience of art. She believes that "healthy children are naturally gestaltists" because they "live in the present, give full attention to what they are doing, [and] do what they want to" (Rhyne, 2001, p. 109). Healthy children, Rhyne continues, come to trust their "experiential data," and — unless trained otherwise — they know "what they know with direct simplicity and accuracy" (109).

Rhyne, considered a pioneer in Gestalt art therapy, argues that most members of society do not grow up "naturally" because people are coerced by culture — parents, teachers, social institutions — to conform to "accepted standards." This coercion causes people to "deny much of what we know to be true about our own nature" (110). By the time most individuals reach adulthood, Rhyne writes, they have "forgotten how to be [themselves]. We remember just enough of what being ourselves feels like to be afraid of it" (111). That fear prevents natural living and instead keeps individuals in a "state of tension or deadness," so that much of life is spent "performing instead of living." Most of a person's energy, she asserts, is consumed by denying "our fear of knowing ourselves and each other deeply and wholly" (110).

There is, however, a way out of this "wall of fear." Rhyne believes that most healthy, intelligent adults have a "sneaking suspicion that we are not what we seem to be," and that people fear others will see through "our game" — or worse, that they themselves will realize how hollow the performance has become (110). The alternatives Rhyne identifies are stark: commit to self-delusion, continue pretending, or embark on what she calls the "courageous" search to find the "genuine" within oneself (110).

Rhyne's answer lies in the Gestalt art experience. By using art materials to create images, a person can "rediscover" some of the "simple, naive wisdom" of childhood. The Gestalt art process essentially comes down to drawing — and instead of analyzing each individual element placed on paper, "the Gestalt psychologist says that we tend to see similar shapes, lines, and colors as belonging together" (114). Shapes and colors that appear unrelated and meaningless in isolation come to form something cohesive when placed together in "an integrated composition," making it self-evident that the whole "is obviously greater than the sum of the parts" (114).

Conclusion

Feldman, Robert. (2009). Psychology and Your Life. New York: McGraw-Hill Companies.

Ginger, Serge. (2007). Gestalt Therapy: The Art of Contact. London, UK: Karmac Books.

Melnick, Joseph, and Fall, Marijane. (2008). A Gestalt Approach to Group Supervision. Counselor Education & Supervision, 48(1), 48–60.

Pomerantz, James R. (2006). Colour as a Gestalt: Pop out with basic features and with conjunctions. Visual Cognition, 14(4–8), 619–628.

Rhyne, Janie. (2001). The Gestalt Approach to Experience, Art, and Art Therapy. The American Journal of Art Therapy, 40(1), 109–120.