Gestalt: Psychology, Principles, & Therapy

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph.D. Candidate
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Gestalt psychology teaches that understanding one’s mind as a whole is key to personal growth and psychological healing. Let’s discover the principles and nature of gestalt therapy.
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I like to think I have many talents, but I know that creating visual and physical works of art is definitely not one of them. When I try to imagine sculpting, painting, or even drawing something, I have a very hard time even envisioning what I might create. Thankfully, I am still able to appreciate artwork, and I love going to art museums. One aspect of looking at a painting that most astonishes me is that when I stand up close to a work of art, the paint strokes and the colors don’t seem to make much sense. It’s only when I step back and take in the totality of the work that those smaller parts make sense.
I can hardly conceive of how the artist knew to put those pieces together, brush stroke by brush stroke, to achieve the overall effect they did. It’s kind of like seeing things on two very different levels. Believe it or not, this is a pattern that showed up in the world of psychology, too, and from this question – “do we look at the parts or at the whole?” – the field of gestalt psychology was born. Let’s look at the history, principles, and applications of this field of psychology, to see how it might matter for your own life.
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What Is Gestalt? (A Definition)

Another personal disclosure: I was a linguistics major in college, not a psychology major. I saw it as an excuse to study foreign languages, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to learn Spanish and Arabic. One of my favorite tidbits from this period of my life: there is no literal translation in Spanish for the English word “awkward”. Spanish has words for uncomfortable and clumsy, but no single word that captures the social nature of the English word “awkward”.
 
Well, the same pattern applies, in reverse, for the German word Gestalt. (All nouns in German are written with capitalized first letters.) The closest words in English may be pattern, shape, form, or configuration, but these words do not approach the full meaning of Gestalt (Mann, 2020). A Gestalt is the overall impression of something, the full experience of it. For example, the Gestalt of a person is not just how they look, but also the energy they give off, the sensations one has when one walks away after meeting them (Mann, 2020).
 
Importantly, a Gestalt is a whole impression – it is not seeing things in pieces, but rather experiencing something as a complete, single entity. And in this sense, it is much more than the sum of its parts – it is a unique experience that cannot be had by looking just at the parts alone (Perls, 1992).

What Is Gestalt Psychology? (A Definition)

Gestalt psychology takes an idea that originated in the world of perception research and applies it to understanding the mind (Greenwood, 2020). Just as we can and do perceive a melody in its entirety, rather than as a series of notes, we can look at the mind as a whole entity, rather than a collection of parts. The originators of Gestalt psychology applied the idea of the Gestalt to psychology because they were discouraged by some of the trends in psychology at the time. In particular, they disliked the prevailing belief that we could best understand complex things – such as human experiences – by breaking them down into their component parts and studying those individually (Rock & Palmer, 1990).
 
For example, psychoanalytic thinking taught us that unconscious experiences could be studied in isolation in therapy, with a psychoanalyst doing the interpreting. By contrast, gestalt psychology proposed that people’s consciousness should be studied as a whole, with the person themselves playing a central role in the interpretation. 
 
At the same time, gestalt psychology does allow for things that are whole to be parts of bigger wholes (Greenwood, 2020). For example, the figure in the forefront of a painting would be considered as a Gestalt in and of itself, but the painting as a whole – figure and background together – also constituted its own Gestalt.

Gestalt Theory

Gestalt theory developed in part from the realization that we tend to perceive things as wholes, that these wholes look a certain way, and that experiencing things as a whole is generally a positive experience (Wertheimer & Riezler, 1944). In fact, as any number of optical illusions have shown, our brains like to organize what we see into coherent wholes, often even tweaking our perception of our environments to accomplish this sense of coherence. In other words, if we naturally organize our world into wholes, rather than parts, why would we focus on the parts as if they contained the key to understanding the whole? The characteristics of the parts themselves may lack meaning until they are considered as a totality (Wertheimer & Riezler, 1944).

Gestalt Principles

The core principle of gestalt theory and psychology, again, is that breaking things down into smaller and more elemental pieces will not provide understanding, but rather considering the wholeness of something will (Rock & Palmer, 1990).
 
We can continue unpacking this fundamental principle by thinking again about a musical melody. Think for a moment about your favorite song and try to pinpoint a particular melody within the song. Now, do you think you would recognize that melody if it was played in a different key, or by a different instrument, or even if the words sung were in a different language? I very much expect that you would. The fact that you would recognize the melody, even if so many of its characteristics had changed, suggests that it is the complete experience of the melody, the Gestalt of it, that matters (Rock & Palmer, 1990).

​Benefits of Gestalt Psychology

Gestalt psychology provides at least two benefits. First, it was part of a movement in psychology away from the techniques and principles of psychoanalysis, which researchers had struggled to show was an effective treatment (Perls, 1992). By bringing more of a focus on the patient’s present-moment experience, gestalt psychology helped usher in a new approach to therapy. Second, gestalt psychology gave rise to gestalt therapy, which has been shown to be an effective treatment for several different clinical disorders and psychological challenges (Raffagnino, 2019).

Examples of Gestalt Psychology

Another example of gestalt psychology in action comes from the world of schizophrenia treatment and research (Silverstein & Uhlhaas, 2004). Gestalt psychology conceives of schizophrenia as a disorder driven by ineffective perceptual organization. In plain English, this means that the unusual or even delusional thinking that characterizes schizophrenia could result from seeing different wholes, or Gestalts, from what people without schizophrenia would perceive.

​Gestalt Therapy

As we already learned, the application of gestalt psychology to therapy began in response to dissatisfaction with how psychoanalysis was conducted. A gestalt therapist is focused on increasing the awareness of the client regarding how they perceive the world, with the goal of helping the client respond to and effectively change their perceptions (Perls, 1992). In contrast to psychoanalysis, it works from what are called experiential and humanistic approaches. The client is put in the driver’s seat and the therapist remains more active and emotionally engaged with the client than in psychoanalysis. The therapist gives the client space to articulate and set their own goals as well.
 
This process helps the client understand their own personal way of interpreting the gestalt of their experience. Along the way, the client and therapist identify points where the client has stopped paying attention to the totality of their experience, typically because they have developed an unhelpful thought pattern or behavior that distracts them from being present and perceiving their experience (Wagner-Moore, 2004). The therapist and client also look at how the client’s beliefs and needs shape their perceptions. 

In all of this, therapist and client focus on the here and now, rather than trying to understand the past. After all, perception of one’s environment is happening in the present, so much of the work of gestalt therapy is to slow down and determine what one is actually experiencing in the moment, with an effort to step away from interpretation and into present-moment awareness (Mann, 2020).

Gestalt Therapy Techniques

Gestalt therapy has several techniques that are used to unify and resolve pieces of one’s self that appear to be in disagreement (Greenberg et al., 1994). These “splits” can occur because the person has internal conflict, has conflict with another person, or is attributing their own thoughts or judgments to other people. Often, this conflict comes down to a clash between one’s values or principles and one’s emotional drives (Greenberg et al., 1993). Across all these concerns, a commonly-used technique in gestalt therapy is what is called two-chair work.
 
Two-chair work involves the client representing each side of themselves in a dialogue between the sides. The part of the self that is driven by emotional needs and wants is called the experiencing self, and it is engaged in conversation with the thinking part of the self, which may be judging one’s desires against the standard of one’s principles or what society thinks the person should do. A client might sit in the first chair and describe their feelings, then move to the other chair and speak from a thinking space. 

It is theorized that these parts do not talk to each other very much, or do not openly have dialogue, so the goal of the two-chair exercise is to have the two parts get into contact with each other (Greenberg et al., 1993). It is expected that this contact will help the client reconcile the parts that are in dispute and become more self-accepting as they see the totality of themselves.
 
Gestalt therapy sees life as requiring constant, creative adjustments (Mann, 2020). If we are constantly in contact with the world, with the Gestalt of our experience, we will know that it is continuously changing, and therefore requires us to adjust our expectations and understandings. Ineffective adjustment may come from continuing to respond to the world as it was; we need to form a new Gestalt again and again, and release the ways of responding that once worked but do not serve our present realities.

Gestalt Principle of Closure

Gestalt theory says that we expect things to have closure, to be whole and self-contained (Moore & Fitz, 1993). Our eyes try to complete shapes that seem incomplete, and we may spend unnecessary time trying to find closure when both objects in our environment, and experiences we have had, seem to lack it.

Gestalt Principle of Proximity

The principle of proximity in gestalt theory tells us that we naturally group together things that are near each other (Moore & Fitz, 1993). I think this is something we do visually but also with all of our experiences. For example, our brains love to draw associations between events that happened near each other in time, even if there is no clear reason for them to be related to each other.

Gestalt in Art

Gestalt theory, with its emphasis on visual perception and how we organize what we see into coherent wholes, has naturally had a strong influence on art and design (Behrens, 1998). However, a description of these principles in action takes us away from gestalt psychology and is beyond the scope of this article. If you would like more information about the different gestalt principles related to art, as well as useful applications to the field of design, I recommend watching this video:

Video: Gestalt Psychology and Why It's Essential for Good Design

Articles Related to Gestalt

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Gestalt

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Gestalt

I find gestalt theory to be a refreshing counterpoint to the focus that some psychotherapies have on pinpointing problems in very specific cognitive or emotional patterns. For example, while I may have unrealistic expectations for myself in terms of being moral and productive, it may not be enough to simply challenge and critique those thoughts of mine in isolation. Rather, it will be more effective to think about the totality of my experience: what am I feeling? Where are these voices coming from? What happens if I put those self-expectations in dialogue with my feelings in this situation – feelings that I often dismiss as not being relevant?
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I hope this dive into gestalt psychology has been informative for you. With its focus on becoming aware of and accepting the wholeness of our experiences, the principles of gestalt therapy in particular may be helpful in getting us to tap into underappreciated aspects of our daily experiences.

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