Gestalt psychology emphasizes the holistic nature of experience and behavior, and advocates the study of psychological phenomena from the perspective of holistic dynamic structure. Also translated as Holistic (Gestalt) Psychology. Founded in Germany in 1912, it was further developed in the United States. It adopted Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological point of view, and advocated the psychological study of phenomenal experience, i.e., the nonmental nonobject neutral experience. When observing the experience of a phenomenon, the phenomenon needs to be kept as it is and not analyzed as a sensation element, the experience of phenomena is regarded as a whole or a Gestalt, thus it is called Gestalt psychology. Since the primary studies of this system were initially carried out in the laboratory of the University of Berlin, it is sometimes called the Berlin School. The main leaders were Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka.
Gestalt psychology began with an experiment of apparent...
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Further Reading
Che W-B (2010) Chinese theoretical psychology. Capital Normal University Press, Beijing
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Juefu, G., Kan, Z. (2024). Gestalt Psychology. In: The ECPH Encyclopedia of Psychology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6000-2_766-1
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