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Tonight at my campus Objectivist Club we were asked for an Objectivist opinion on Gestalt psychology. I am unfamiliar with this school of thought. Would anybody like to share an informed opinion on this?

The Wikipedia article has a few red flags such as "holistic" and "rooted in Immanuel Kant". However, the theory in essence appears to be pretty technical but that still does not mean that it cannot be rooted in bad philosophy.

Edited by DarkWaters
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Tonight at my campus Objectivist Club we were asked for an Objectivist opinion on Gestalt psychology. I am unfamiliar with this school of thought. Would anybody like to share an informed opinion on this?

The Wikipedia article has a few red flags such as "holistic" and "rooted in Immanuel Kant". However, the theory in essence appears to be pretty technical but that still does not mean that it cannot be rooted in bad philosophy.

I have studied it only a little, so if by informed, you mean professional psychologists oppinion, I can't help. Otherwise,

I am unoffended by it for the most part. Their desire was to break cognition down into it's most simple component parts.(I am not convinced that they succeeded in their purpose) Mostly the parts they came up with seem to be different versions of the minds tendency to identify. So...turn sensations into recognizable perceptions. For example, Grouping(where objects close to each other seem to be held together in your mind as identifiable clumps) seems basically like the concept formation process where the crow epist. can be overcome. So 25 circles spread across a page is just a bunch of circles...if they are in 5 rows of 5 however, you identify them immediatly as 5 groups of circles rather then a bunch of circles. Their other basics seem to be similiarly reducible to other terms.

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Thank you for your responses thusfar.

I don't think Ayn Rand wrote on it, so I would avoid the formulation "Objectivist opinion."

My apologies, I meant to ask for an Objectivist's opinion. I did not think that she wrote on Gestalt Theory either.

Edited by DarkWaters
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The basic notion of Gestalt psychologists was that the sum of each part is less than the whole subject. This view opposed previous psychologic schools such as structuralism of Titchener. Their impact on psychology was quite big (especially given number of scientists who were gestaltists - it has never been a big school with many followers like behaviorism) and many of their findings are now accepted in main stream of psychology and many people don´t even know that they stem from research of gestaltists. This is particularly true about their findings in field of perception and cognitive psychology in general. Among famous gestaltists belong Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, Solomon Asch, Kurt Lewin and Wolfgang Köhler. In my opinion it was important that thanks to them there was some oposition against mechanism of behaviorists. Thanks to that their researches were some of a few in their time which are applicable even today (that can´t be said so easily about behaviorist research, which don´t have that big value today because they did many experiments with small applicability to humans).

Among their famous researches belong such experiments as Asch´s experiment with conformity, Köhler´s expeiments with chimps (e.g. Sultan) where he found insight, Lewin´s experiment of leadership; and many more experiments concerning perception.

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  • 3 months later...

I don't know much about it but I really like the concept of gestalt as "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". I believe it's quiet appropriate for the individual, as it describes mental health as succesful integration. It can be disastrous if applied to social organization.

I sometimes like to use this term to describe good products which are cohesive, integrated.

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  • 3 months later...

I remember reading that gestalt therapy was especially effective for treating drug addiction et al. Gestaltist would "shock" their patients ("You are a loser!") and break their usual pattern and get them riled up for change. That and a lot of other techniques, but this one seemed the most interesting to me.

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I don't know much about it but I really like the concept of gestalt as "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". I believe it's quiet appropriate for the individual, as it describes mental health as succesful integration. It can be disastrous if applied to social organization.

I sometimes like to use this term to describe good products which are cohesive, integrated.

Why is it a disaster to apply the holistic view to social organization? Among other things, society creates a matrix for synergistic interaction among agents, hence its "greater than the sum of its parts".

Bob Kolker

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I remember reading that gestalt therapy was especially effective for treating drug addiction et al. Gestaltist would "shock" their patients ("You are a loser!") and break their usual pattern and get them riled up for change. That and a lot of other techniques, but this one seemed the most interesting to me.

Gestalt therapy has not much to do with Gestalt psychology. They have some common assumptions, but otherwise they are two separate issues.

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