[This paper was a presidential address to Division 24 at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Chicago, September 1975. It was first published in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 14, pp 23-32, then republished in M. Henle, 1879 and All That, Essays in the Theory and History of Psychology, Columbia University Press, New York 1986, pp 22-35. Have a look at th...

This paper was a presidential address to Division 24 at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Chicago, September 1975. It was first published in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 14, pp 23-32, then republished in M. Henle, 1879 and All That, Essays in the Theory and History of Psychology, Columbia University Press, New York 1986, pp 22-35. Have a look at the...

The aim of this paper is to sketch the major aspects of Gestaltpsychologie: Wertheimer‘s factors, global v. local factors, isomorphism, auto-organisation, Prägnanz as singularity and as a tendency towards stability. While Gestaltpsychologie as a school no longer exists, its lesson is yet seminal and can inspire many developments of contemporary cognitive psychology. Few examples are here illust...

When I first conceived the plan of writing this book I guessed, though I did not know, how much effort it would cost to carry it out, and what demands it would put on a potential reader. And I doubted, not rhetorically but very honestly and sincerely, whether such labour on the part of the author and the reader was justified. I was not so much troubled by the idea of writing another book on psy...

In 1912, Max Wertheimer published his paper on phi motion, widely recognized as the start of Gestalt psychology. Because of its continued relevance in modern psychology, this centennial anniversary is an excellent opportunity to take stock of what Gestalt psychology has offered and how it has changed since its inception. We first introduce the key findings and ideas in the Berlin school of Gest...

Gestalt Therapy has been growing and developing since its arrival in the 1950's. For some authors, Gestalt-therapy is involved process of receiving phenomenology Humanistic Psychology. However, specifics institutionalized aspects studies, as disciplinarization, are barely visible Mato Grosso do Sul (MS). In this scenario, research aims to describe analyze Gestalt-Therapy's disciplinarization MS...

In writing about the present status of Gestalt psychology in Italy, a reference to the picture of it recently published by Ian VERSTEGEN (2000) is a ‘must’. He concludes his paper with the statement: “Psychology in Italy by the 1990s had been completely internationalised and ‘Americanized’. There is no fourth generation of Italian Gestalt psychology of which we may speak”. It is my impression t...

background: since psychological tests such as questionnaire or drawing tests are almost qualitative, their results carry a degree of uncertainty and sometimes subjectivity. the deficiency of all drawing tests is that the assessment is carried out after drawing the objects and lots of information such as pen angle, speed, curvature and pressure are missed through the test. in other words, the ps...

In the 1920s Max Wertheimer enunciated a credo of Gestalt theory: the properties of any of the parts are governed by the structural laws of the whole. Intense efforts at the time to discover these laws had only very limited success. Psychology was in the grips of the Fechnerian tradition to seek exact relationships between the material and the mental and, because the Gestalt movement could not ...