Gestalt Psychology

It is generally acknowledged that the Gestalt School of psychology had three founders:

Max Wertheimer (April 15, 1880 – October 12, 1943)
Kurt Koffka (Berlin, March 18, 1886 - Northampton, November 22, 1941)
Wolfgang Köhler

Some authorities believe that the school had a fourth founder, Fritz Perls .



Gestalt psychology (also Gestalt of the Berlin School) is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is different than the sum of its parts. The classic Gestalt example is a soap bubble, whose spherical shape is not defined by a rigid template, or a mathematical formula, but rather it emerges spontaneously by the parallel action of surface tension acting at all points in the surface simultaneously. This is in contrast to the "atomistic" principle of operation of the digital computer, where every computation is broken down into a sequence of simple steps, each of which is computed independently of the problem as a whole. The Gestalt effect refers to the form-forming capability of our senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves.

Berlin School of experimental psychology


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Berlin School of experimental psychology was headed by Carl Stumpf (a pupil of Franz Brentano and Rudolf Hermann Lotze), who became professor at the University of Berlin where he founded the Berlin laboratory of experimental psychology (in 1893).

Among his pupils were Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Lewin.

Only after Köhler took over the direction of the psychology institute in 1922 the Berlin School effectively became a school for Gestalt Psychology.

See also Christian von Ehrenfels