Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2025 March 14
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March 14
[edit]Gestalt psychology
[edit]Have all the Gestalt psychologists died out? Behrens 1998 indicates that Rudolf Arnheim was the last one left, but he died in 2007. I've read elsewhere that in academia many disciplines and their ideas tend to die out if there are no students left to carry their torches. In this case, Behrens argues "gestalt theory's influence in the field of psychology is unobtrusive in the sense that its findings have all been absorbed by more recent viewpoints and because most of the prominent gestalt psychologists have either retired or died." Just checking to see if Arnheim was indeed the last one or if the idea continues today. Note, this is not related to Gestalt therapy, as that is entirely different. Viriditas (talk) 00:37, 14 March 2025 (UTC)
- Just like Gestalt psychologists could not precisely define central concepts of psychology, we cannot precisely define the concept of "Gestalt psychologist". The school arose as a reaction to a rather reductionist school, but as its ideas became mainstream, it gradually lost its identity – there was no need to carry torches. Today's psychologists studying human cognition will generally not self-identify as such. You can ask, "Have the atomist physicists died out? Was Alexander W. Williamson the last atomist?" A better answer is that today all physicists are atomists (nutcases apart), but labeling them as such is not helpful in any way. Likewise, labelling Arnheim's later work as being Gestalt psychology is perhaps not wrong, but also not particularly helpful. ‑‑Lambiam 10:02, 14 March 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks. I just discovered Grolier's coverage of this topic in the IA. In addition to what you write above, it says that concepts of Gestalt psychology were absorbed into or overlapped with social psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and other fields. I came to this topic because of notan. In the literature, it is said that nobody knows how the ideas of Gestalt and Japanese art arose. As it turns out these Gestalt ideas influenced a number of artists and art schools, strangely those in the United States in the 1890s, which was approximately several decades before Gestalt psychology was formed in 1912. Behrens 1998 discusses this, attributing it to the popularity of Japonisme and the "persuasive resemblance between gestalt principles and...Japanese-inspired aesthetics". It wasn't until the 1930s that Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Josef Albers heard the lectures of the Gestalt psychologist Karlfried Graf Dürckheim at the Bauhaus. In any case, the rise of Gestalt-like aesthetics in American art schools under Ernest Fenollosa and Arthur Wesley Dow decades before it arose in Germany begins to look like a case of multiple discovery on the one hand, and the pervasive influence of Japonisme on the other. Viriditas (talk) 22:04, 14 March 2025 (UTC)
- There is a journal Gestalt Theory , now in its 47th year and apparently still kicking. ‑‑Lambiam 07:33, 15 March 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks. I just discovered Grolier's coverage of this topic in the IA. In addition to what you write above, it says that concepts of Gestalt psychology were absorbed into or overlapped with social psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and other fields. I came to this topic because of notan. In the literature, it is said that nobody knows how the ideas of Gestalt and Japanese art arose. As it turns out these Gestalt ideas influenced a number of artists and art schools, strangely those in the United States in the 1890s, which was approximately several decades before Gestalt psychology was formed in 1912. Behrens 1998 discusses this, attributing it to the popularity of Japonisme and the "persuasive resemblance between gestalt principles and...Japanese-inspired aesthetics". It wasn't until the 1930s that Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Josef Albers heard the lectures of the Gestalt psychologist Karlfried Graf Dürckheim at the Bauhaus. In any case, the rise of Gestalt-like aesthetics in American art schools under Ernest Fenollosa and Arthur Wesley Dow decades before it arose in Germany begins to look like a case of multiple discovery on the one hand, and the pervasive influence of Japonisme on the other. Viriditas (talk) 22:04, 14 March 2025 (UTC)