Gestalt Psychology
by . New York: Horace Liveright. 1929. 8vo. x + 403 pp. $4.00.
To the numerous ramifications of psychological theory which derive from the works of men like Wundt, Freud, and Watson there must now be added a ‘new’ psychology of form or configuration. It is well to remember that not only is psychology a relatively young and immature science: it is a field of inquiry which presents, in many directions, the most stubborn resistance to scientific method and proof. Moreover, where exact data are lacking, speculation wall rush in to fill the gaps. Psychology still offers a picture of men quarreling over interpretations, hypotheses, and theories, for the simple reason that the facts are too few and insecure to settle the arguments once and for all.
In the first two chapters of his book Köhler argues that the opposition between introspection and behavior ought to disappear as soon as it is clearly realized that ideas, thoughts, and emotions do not belong in a totally different world from reflexes, movements, and actions. Both sets of data are matters of direct observation and experience and, as such, are suitable objects for psychological investigation. In addition, however, to casting aspersions upon each other’s cherished objects of study, both introspectionists and behaviorists alike share the onus of having assumed that their data, whether they be the movements of the organism or the ideas of consciousness, are built up out of simple, invariable elements.
It is the elaboration of this theme which constitutes at once Köhler’s vigorous polemic against older types of psychology and his significant contribution to a new point of view. Sensations and reflexes: these tended to be looked upon in traditional psychology as elementary invariants of consciousness and behavior which, when bundled and welded together by the mechanics of association and conditioned responses, formed perceptions and habits, purposive thought and directed action. Against the strongholds of this view Köhler turns his heaviest guns. He maintains with considerable coercive power that the objects of mind, as immediately presented fo direct experience, come as complete unanalyzable wholes, as Gestalten which cannot be split up into parts. Any statement about a whole in terms of its parts must rest on artificial analysis, for any item which is examined as though it were the part of a previous whole has secured for itself, by virtue of its isolation from former surroundings, properties which obviously do not belong to the whole, but only to the part Hence no analysis of the so-called elements of experience can ever yield a valid account of the most characteristic properties of mind, inasmuch as these properties vanish as soon as analysis begins. It is questionable, moreover, whether there are any such things as mental elements, for the items which have been wrested out of larger wholes, and to which the term ‘elements’ is often applied, are themselves new Gestalten the properties of which, as in the ease of all configurations, depend on certain dynamical conditions in the field of the nervous system.
The laws of Gestalten, then, are to be stated not in terms of the properties of artificial parts, but rather in terms of the functional relationship between the properties of experience and tinunderlying dynamics of nervous process. The hypotheses regarding interaction and self-distribution of nerve-forces as the conditions which determine the nature of organized wholes in experience are important because of the suggestions which they offer for novel lines of research in psychology and physiology. These sections of Köhler’s work are not easy reading: they require careful study and application. Yet even the general reader, if he looks to psychology for something more than mere entertainment or practical advice, will discover in these sections, no less than in other parts of the book, a storehouse of searching criticisms and brilliant suggestions from the pen of a rare thinker, and one who occupies a leading position in theoretical psychology to-day. At all events, thoughtful examination of the ideas of the present volume (especially those in Chapters I, III, VI, and VII) will put the reader in the way fit understanding the developments along the frontiers of theoretical psychology, and will enable him to follow more easily the changes which, in the opinion of the reviewer, will inevitably come over all of psychology as Gestalttheorie gets shaken down into generally accepted doctrine.
As the reader’s mind and eye move smoothly and easily over Kohler’s sentences, he may be brought up with a start at the passing memory that the author was not writing in his native tongue. ‘I have done all that I possibly could, pleads Köhler in apology for what seemed to him the inadequacy of his skill with a foreign language. M ould that a few American psychologists had half the grace and lucidity in their use of English that the head of the Institute of Psychology in the University of Berlin appears to summon with so little effort!
CARROLL C. PRATT