Contents
I am glad to welcome you, dear readers of the blog! I decided to acquaint you with various areas in psychology, and today I will start with the characteristics and tasks that Gestalt psychology sets itself briefly, so as not to tire with details.
The history of occurrence and characteristics of the direction
The founders are such personalities as Kurt Koffka, Wolfang Keller and Max Wertheimer, but it was Fritz Perls, his wife Laura and Paul Goodman who finalized the ideas and began to apply in their practice. They believed that it is natural for a person to perceive objects as a whole, without highlighting individual parts. To make it clearer, I’ll give an example: if you show a photo of a cat and ask what you see, most likely you will answer “cat”, well, maybe “animal”, few people would think to list all its components separately. But if you start to single out these components as part of the whole, this will be called gestalt.
Principles of Perception
The relationship between figure and ground
What is very valuable and important at the moment, where attention is directed, is a figure, and everything else that fades into the background, respectively, is the background. That is, I come to the opening of the store where they arranged a buffet table, and I am very hungry, so at the moment I am only interested in food, and it doesn’t matter at all how many people are nearby, what color of napkins and in general, nothing but food. I can’t even really distinguish what exactly the dishes consist of. Because a plate with sandwiches and other things will be a figure, everything else will be a background. But they can change places. When I feel full, I will become interested in something else, I will begin to highlight completely different needs.
Law of balance
It says that our psyche strives for stability, that is, as soon as a person selects a figure from the background, he gives it a form convenient for him, the characteristic of which is determined by closeness, simplicity, regularity, completeness, etc. And if it meets these criteria, then it is customary to call it a “good gestalt”. Now I will try more about these criteria:
- Intimacy — if the stimuli are nearby, they are perceived as one whole. The most banal example is when a guy and a girl who go together can be defined by others as a couple.
- Similarity. Stimuli are perceived together if they have some similarities in shape, color, size, etc.
- Integrity. Our perception simply needs simplification and integrity.
- Closure — if something has an incomplete form, we will definitely complete it ourselves.
- Adjacency when the stimuli are close in space and time.
The main concepts that Gestaltists use in their work
- Organism and environment. A person is not considered separately from the environment, because interaction is constantly taking place between them, because the environment influences a person, and he, in turn, transforms it. There is even the concept of mental metabolism, which says that the body must give to the environment and receive from it. These can be thoughts, ideas, feelings, otherwise there will be no growth of this very organism, development and balance in general, as a result of which it may even cease to exist. I will try to give an example about the influence to make it more clear. When changes occur within us, they also occur in the outside world. So you accumulated anger at a colleague, and then something happened to your worldview, and you let go of this feeling, ceasing to expect something from him. And suddenly they noticed how his attitude towards you has changed, and he began to treat you differently.
- phi phenomenon – Wertheimer conducted one experiment, showing the subjects two straight lines, changing the time intervals, and found out that with an interval of 60 milliseconds, it seems to a person that these lines are moving, and he called this phenomenon a phi-phenomenon.
- Insight — insight, an unexpected understanding of the essence of the problem.
- Contact limit — that is, it is the border that separates «I» from «not me», and regulates the exchange in the process of contacting.
On the basis of all this theory, Gestalt therapy arose, which from its inception to the present day has occupied a leading position in psychotherapy. But it has made some additions and also includes other areas, such as psychoanalysis, the teachings of Reich or Otto Rank, using the principles of phenomenology, holism and existentialism.
Challenges set by Gestalt
1.Teach a person to be in touch with himself
That is, to realize what is happening to him, what feelings he experiences, to understand what he wants, what needs he satisfies, and so on. A person with a high level of aikyu will not be successful and happy if his emotional intelligence is at a minimum. Unfortunately, schools and families rarely teach to recognize their feelings, to live them, to realize why they arose. A person who is not in touch with himself will shut himself off from emotions that he considers negative and ignore them, which will entail internal discomfort and various kinds of illness.
2. Learn to be in contact with others
Maturity and awareness will have no meaning if a person does not interact with other people. After all, he manifests himself and recognizes himself only through communication, when he has the opportunity to share experience, realize needs and understand what he is. These two tasks constitute the main provisions of Gestalt, calling this direction of psychology — contact therapy.
3. Learn to be «here and now»
That is, to be in reality, and not live in memories or dreams. Even if the therapy is for an event that happened a long time ago, the emphasis is on the experiences of the moment. The past cannot be changed, it is only possible to change our attitude towards it.
4. Show that there is no need to “poking around” in your unconscious
Since the most important and necessary will certainly lie on the surface. And it will be a figure. It’s really simple, and it makes life much easier, since there is no need to “think up” possible difficulties for yourself, cling to them and hold on. As soon as the actual problem is recognized and solved, a new figure will appear, and so on.
5. Learn to live any feeling
A very interesting task, as it differs significantly from the methods of other areas in psychology and psychotherapy. Usually, after all, it is customary to deal with negative experiences, transform them into positive ones, cover them with some other emotions, or rationalize them. The idea is that if you consciously stay in the experience of a feeling for as long as it takes, it will change. That is, if you are sad, you do not need to purposefully amuse yourself, as the effect will be short-lived, if at all. It is better to immerse yourself in it, think about what it is connected with and allow yourself to be in it, then this sadness will pass, leaving space inside for another emotion to replace it.
The final stage of the gestalt
Perls, the founder of this trend, believed that a person must be mature, then he will be healthy and successful. That is, she must be able to take responsibility for her actions, be able to appropriate experience, even if it was negative, take risks and satisfy her needs on her own, interacting with others, and not manipulating them. Paul Goodman described just the cycle of experience, that is, the process of satisfying the need itself, so that, as they say, “the gestalt was completed”:
- Precontact is a phase when a person has not yet identified a need. Well, for example, my stomach began to “boil”, but I still can’t understand why, maybe because I want to eat, or maybe indigestion due to breakfast.
- Direct contact itself, when a person has already recognized what exactly he wants and begins to interact with the environment in order to satisfy the desire. Only here it is the impulse, and not already the process. That is, I understood what I want to eat and what kind of dish. Therefore, I decide to go to the kitchen to cook it.
- Full contact. The phase of connection with the object of desire. Borders are erased, and actions take place here and now. Continuing my example — I cooked and eat.
- Assimilation is comprehension, digestion, both literally and figuratively. A very important phase, which does not always happen if you make a mistake in at least one of the steps described above. If we move away from the theory, and use the example of food, then I could incorrectly recognize the desire and cook soup, although I wanted, as it turned out later, sweets with tea. Then there will be no saturation from the soup, I mean emotional. Has it ever happened that the stomach is full, but still you want something? Because satisfaction has not come. Thanks to assimilation, a person develops and moves forward, because he does not have to return to the previous stages, then listen to himself, then experiment with ways to finally get what he wants.
Conclusion
To understand the provisions and other theory, non-specialists in this industry may have had to make more efforts, so in the end I want to share the prayer that Fritz Perls came up with, it just conveys the whole meaning of this direction:
I do my thing and you do your thing.
I don’t live in this world to live up to your expectations
And you don’t live in this world to match mine.
You are you.
And I am me.
If we accidentally meet each other, it’s wonderful.
And if not, so be it.
See you soon, friends. Subscribe to blog updates, there is still a lot of material about practical psychology ahead. Bye Bye.