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:
“Parents must begin to discover their children as individuals of developing tastes and views and so help them be, and see, themselves as thinking, feeling people. It is far too easy for a middle-years child to absorb an over-simplified picture of himself as a sloppy, unreliable, careless, irresponsible, lazy creature and not much morean attitude toward himself he will carry far beyond these years.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)