Gestalt theory: fundamental laws and principles

Gestalt psychology proposes an intellectual line that breaks with behaviorism.

The Gestalt theory is a concept that will surely ring a bell if you are one of those people who are curious about the world of psychology. It is a theory currently widely used in psychotherapy and problem solving, but it has also become popular because it is one of the most attractive psychological approaches for those who believe that the way of being, behaving and feeling of the human being cannot be reduced only to what is directly observable or measurable..

However, if you have read anything about Gestalt theory you will also know that it is not famous for being easily summarized in a single sentence. Its philosophical foundations and laws The Gestalt theory about our way of perceiving things is rooted in years and years of research, and its formulations about the human mind are not always intuitive.

That is why a good understanding of Gestalt theory requires a small change of mentality, and there is nothing better to achieve this than to learning in what sense its approach is oriented and what are its principles..

Gestalt theory and its humanistic influences

The Gestalt psychology can be framed within the broader framework of 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 the right decisions, and works with a conception of the human being as an agent capable of developing freely and autonomously.

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 is the case with behaviorism.

A little history of Gestalt

Gestalt theory appeared in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century as a reaction to behaviorist psychology. as a reaction to behaviorist psychologywhich rejected the consideration of subjective states of consciousness when investigating people's behavior and emphasized the effects of the behavior of people. emphasized the effects that the family context, and by extension the social and cultural context, has on us.. Unlike the behaviorists, researchers who ascribed to the Gestalt theory were basically concerned with studying mental processes, which at that time were considered fundamentally invisible, since there were no tools to get to know well what was going on in the brain.

Thus, Gestalt theory brings us closer to a conception of human beings characterized by their active role in perceiving reality and making decisions. According to the Gestaltists we all create in our minds more or less coherent images of ourselves and our surroundings, and these images are not simply the simple image of what we perceive.These images are not simply the union of sequences of information that come to us through our senses, but are something more.

Constructing reality and interpreting it

The German word Gestaltwhich is often translated into English as "form", represents this process by which we construct frames of perception of reality.We all interpret reality and make decisions about it on the basis of these mental "forms" or "figures" that we create without realizing it. Gestalt theory focuses on explaining how we perceive things and make 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. Thus, the set of these packets of information coming from the senses would be added in our brain and from this superposition of units would appear what we experience.

The Gestalt theory, however, denies that there is a "whole", denies that there is a perceptual "whole" that is composed of all the data that reach our body.. On the contrary, it proposes that what we experience is more than the sum of its parts, and therefore exists as a whole, a figure that can only be considered as a whole. Thus, what happens is that the globality of our mental "forms" is imposed on what comes to us through the senses, and not the other way around.

According to this approach, we learn about what surrounds us not by adding up the set of pieces of information that reach us through the senses, but from the "figures" that are created in our mind. For example, from the Gestalt theory used in the Gestalt therapy created by Fritz Perls (which is not exactly the same as Gestalt psychology, older than this one), forms of psychotherapy are proposed in which the objective is that the patient can understand certain problems in a global sense, in a different way than before. which is different from what he did before and which allows him to develop his potentialities.

Thus, according to Gestalt theory, people are not recipients of various sensations, but our mind is composed of different totalities. For Gestaltists, it is not necessary to focus on the pieces of which our mental figures seem to be made up in order to solve a conflict or to adopt a more useful mentality, but what we must try to do is to achieve a new structural understanding understanding of what is going on.

Examples for understanding the idea of "form

An example of this can be found in the movies. In spite of 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 the reality around us, instead of just passively receiving the information coming from everywhere and reacting accordingly.

The same is clearly manifested when we see these optical illusions in which two or more images appear superimposed 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 theory of Gestalt, 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 laws of Gestalt, which were initially proposed by the psychologist Max Wertheimerwhose ideas were further developed and strengthened by Wolfgang Köhler (in the picture) and Kurt Koffka.

The most important law that gives us a better idea of the logic that governs the generation of perceptions as a whole is the law of good form. law of good formaccording to which what we perceive with greater accuracy and speed are those forms that are more complete but, at the same time, simpler or symmetrical.

More laws and principles of Gestalt

Other laws of the theory of Gestalt are:

• The figure-background lawWe cannot perceive the same form 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.

• The law of continuityIf several elements seem to be placed in a flow oriented towards some part, they will be perceived as a whole.

• Law of proximity: elements close to each other tend to be perceived as if they were part of a unit.

• Law of similarity: similar elements are perceived as having the same shape.

• The law of closureA shape is better perceived the more closed its contour is.

• Law of completeness: an open form tends to be perceived as closed.

What are these "forms" like according to Gestalt theory?

As forms are a totality, they cannot be reduced to a single sense. This means that for Gestaltists a mental image is not really a visual imagesuch as that which can be produced by projecting light onto a retina, but is something more. So much so that, for the 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 in which the laws of Gestalt seem to apply to all kinds of perceptions.

In short, the theory of Gestalt offers us a psychological approach in which the person has an active role in constructing units of meaning about his experiences and that, in addition, he is able to restructure his mental "forms" in order to adopt more useful points of view and better orient his decision making and goals.

Fritz Perls and Gestalt Therapy

Fritz Perlsin accordance with most of the postulates of Gestalt psychology, developed his own therapy: Gestalt Therapy. Gestalt Therapy. We invite you 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?"