the gestalt school of psychology was founded in 1879.
the gestalt school of psychology was founded in 1879.
when was the gestalt school of psychology founded?
1879
the concept of gestalt was first introduced in philosophy and psychology in 1890 by christian von ehrenfels (a member of the school of brentano). the idea of gestalt has its roots in theories by david hume, johann wolfgang von goethe, immanuel kant, david hartley, and ernst mach. max wertheimer's unique contribution was to insist that the "gestalt" is perceptually primary, defining the parts it was composed from, rather than being a secondary quality that emerges from those parts, as von ehrenfels's earlier "gestalt-qualität" had been.
gestalt psychology
in 1921 koffka published a gestalt-oriented text on developmental psychology, "growth of the mind". with the help of american psychologist robert ogden, koffka introduced the gestalt point of view to an american audience in 1922 by way of a paper in "psychological bulletin". it contains criticisms of then-current explanations of a number of problems of perception, and the alternatives offered by the gestalt school. koffka moved to the united states in 1924, eventually settling at smith college in 1927. in 1935 koffka published his "principles of gestalt psychology". this textbook laid out the "gestalt" vision of the scientific enterprise as a whole. science, he said, is not the simple accumulation of facts. what makes research scientific is the incorporation of facts into a theoretical structure. the goal of the "gestalt"ists was to integrate the facts of inanimate nature, life, and mind into a single scientific structure. this meant that science would have to swallow not only what koffka called the quantitative facts of physical science but the facts of two other "scientific categories": questions of order and questions of "sinn", a german word which has been variously translated as significance, value, and meaning. without incorporating the meaning of experience and behavior, koffka believed that science would doom itself to trivialities in its investigation of human beings.
history of psychology