Gestalt Views in Psychology
Gestalt psychologists find it is important to think of problems as a whole. Max Wertheimer considered thinking to happen in two ways: productive and reproductive.
Productive thinking is solving a problem with insight.
This is a quick insightful unplanned response to situations and environmental interaction.
Reproductive thinking is solving a problem with previous experiences and what is already known. (1945/1959).
This is a very common thinking. For example, when a person is given several segments of information, he/she deliberately examines the relationships among its parts, analyzes their purpose, concept, and totality, he/she reaches the "aha!" moment, using what is already known. Understanding in this case happens intentionally by reproductive thinking.
Another gestalt psychologist, Perkins, believes insight deals with three processes:
- Unconscious leap in thinking.
- The increased amount of speed in mental processing.
- The amount of short-circuiting which occurs in normal reasoning.
Views going against the gestalt psychology are:
- Nothing-special view
- Neo-gestalt view
- The Three-Process View
Gestalt psychology should not be confused with the gestalt therapy of Fritz Perls, which is only peripherally linked to gestalt psychology. A strictly gestalt psychology-based therapeutic method is Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy, developed by the German gestalt psychologist and psychotherapist Hans-Jürgen Walter.
Read more about this topic: Gestalt Psychology
Famous quotes containing the words views and/or psychology:
“It is even more grim and wild than you had anticipated, a damp and intricate wilderness, in the spring everywhere wet and miry. The aspect of the country, indeed, is universally stern and savage, excepting the distant views of the forest from hills, and the lake prospects, which are mild and civilizing in a degree.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)