Gestalt psychology, also known as gestalt psychology, was one of the main schools of modern western psychology. It was born in Germany and later developed in the United States. This school opposes both the elementalism of American constructivist psychology and the stimulus-response formula of behaviorist psychology. It advocates the study of direct experience (that is, consciousness) and behavior. It emphasizes the integrity of experience and behavior. The sum of the parts advocates studying psychological phenomena from the perspective of the overall dynamic structure. The school was founded by Wertheimer and is represented by Kohler and Kaufka.
Representative
Major research and contributions
Wertheimer
Established the theoretical foundation of Gestalt psychology through the study of kinetics; applied the principles of Gestalt psychology to human creative thinking, and advocated the cultivation of students' creative thinking in education; studied ethical issues
Kohler
Applying Gestalt principles to developmental psychology; studying epiphany learning; systemizing Gestalt psychology theory
Kaufka
Explicitly identify the task of psychology as studying the causal relationship between behaviors and psychophysical fields; implement the Gestalt theory in developmental psychology
Source of this form: [8]
Chinese psychologist
Chinese psychology historian Che Wenbo believes that Gestalt psychology mainly has the following problems:
Fall into idealism
Gestalt theory originally attached importance to natural observation, which is desirable in terms of close to actual life. However, they believe that consciousness itself has the gestalt nature and is not affected by past experience, so they try to narrow down or even deny the role of past experience in the process of cognition, making "gestalt" a transcendent thing. Gestalt psychology exaggerates psychological initiative and explains the completeness of psychological formation with a priori models and the inherent laws of the subject. As a result, it results in a priori theory and subjective idealism.
Untethered from metaphysics
Gestalt psychology opposes the whole and the part, thinking that there is the whole first, then the part; the whole determines the part, and the part has no effect on the whole. The theory is therefore one-sided. The theory only emphasizes qualitative analysis and ignores quantitative analysis. They thought that the psychology at that time was still in its infancy, and experience was only suitable for qualitative analysis, but not quantitative analysis. In fact, qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis are interdependent and indivisible. Therefore, research that emphasizes only qualitative observation and ignores quantity is one-sided. Gestalt Psychology believes that psychology and behavior are field phenomena, so it is argued that current events are only affected by the current situation, not by current and future psychological facts. The theory ignores developmental perspectives and historical causal analysis, and is one-sided.
Less rigorous theory
Gestalt psychology ignores the study of physiological foundations; some concepts are vague and do not specify their scientific meanings very strictly; some experiments lack sufficient evidence. At the same time, the genre used a lot of mathematical concepts in its own theory without specifying them. Many concepts tend to be abused, which makes the theory of Gestalt psychology too obscure and difficult to understand. All this has affected the perfect discipline construction of Gestalt Psychology, making it fail to establish a perfect theoretical system. [11]
