ISSN 0439-755X
CN 11-1911/B

›› 1958, Vol. 2 ›› Issue (00): 87-100.

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CRITICAL COMMENTS ON GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY

CHU HSI-LIANG (Huachung Teacher's College)   

  • Received:1900-01-01 Revised:1900-01-01 Published:1958-01-01 Online:1958-01-01

Abstract: Gestalt school revolted against the method of analysis and urged that the wholenessproperties furnished the problem most worth while in psychology. But Gestaltist did not recognize that an organized whole or a Gestalt was the result of the integrated processes of the analysing and synthesizing functions of the cerebral cortex; and the so-called "phiphenomenon" was also depended on the favourable conditions of the differentiation of time and space. It is unscientific and misleading to emphasize the wholeness-properties but to reject analysis.Gestalt school regards thought as relatively independent of sensory experience and considers "insight" (Khler) as pure thinking that does not come through traced associations or results of trial and error behaviour. Evidently, for Gestaltist, it is a "fact" that knowledge is not derived from the senses and man thinks without the help of a brain!Kurt Koffka stresses the importance of the "behavioural environment" and says, "The environment is always an environment of something, so my behavioural enviournment is the environment of me and my behaviour". In reality, this is a repetition of Avenarius' the "principal co-ordination", i. e., "the indissoluble co-ordination of the self and the environment".——There is nothing but a paraphrase of subjective idealism, while Kurt Lewin asserts that we must not merely consider the environment as it objectively exists, the environment also is psychological; it has meaning for the individual. For this reason, Lewin erroneously fabricates a new term, the "psychological environment" for the study of the broader aspects of human behaviour (Koffka's "geographical environment" and "behavioural environment" included). Ihdeed! This is a simple rehash of the "principal co-ordination", à la Koffka.In short, Gestalt school insists that the whole are given in advance of experience, or Gestalten are inborn units——This is essentially Kantian apriorism (Transcendental idealism). As a matter of fact, the notion of Gestalt is not very modern but it is "scientifically a step backward".