The Vital Concepts of the Gestalt - Term Paper Example

 Abstract This essay discusses some of the vital concepts of the Gestalt, which a theory is pertaining to the unified pattern of elements. The essay links the concepts with visual arts and imagery. A few personal experiences are described from the Gestalt theoretical perspective as well. Table of Contents Table of Contents 1 The Central Concepts of Gestalt 3 The Laws Associated with Gestalt and Art 9 Describing Visual Arts from the Gestalt Perspective 10 Real Life Experiences and Gestalt Stages 13 References 16 The purpose of this essay is to critically evaluate the main concepts of Gestalt and transactional analysis in relation to my personal experience of imagery and arts. Die Gestalt essentially means shape in German language. It is basically the concept which describes wholeness. The study of the Die Gestalt was initiated in the 1920s, and ever since has become a major branch of studies, which helps to better understand and solve issues related to human psychology as well as visual imagery and visual arts. Besides throwing light on the concept of wholeness, Gestalt also evaluates higher cognitive processes pertaining to behaviourism. The aspects of Gestalt, which will be discussed in the essay would pertain to the investigations made by Gestalt theory to get an insight into the relatively unknown realm of visual perceptions, principally the critical issues related to the interrelationships between the whole of visual experience and the parts of that visual experience, which make up the visual imagery. The visual world is extremely complex and the arts make the visual world even more complex. The mind tries to solve or determine the message from visual data such as an abstract art, by using the solution, which is the simplest to understand. One of the methods used by the human mind is grouping certain items, which have certain similar characteristics. The primary study of Gestalt is therefore to understand how such groupings are formed in the human mind. Since the groupings of similar visual images in the human mind has far-reaching effects not only in the sphere of the arts, but also in the sphere of understanding human psychology, Gestalt helps to unravel the mysteries of the human mind to a great extent and contributes immensely to the in depth understanding of the visual arts. Ian Verstegen (2005, p. 24) comments ‘The senses are intelligent in two ways: by posing objects in relationships that reveal productive solutions to difficult problems and by already classifying objects according to abstract principles. In either case, the relationship of elements that promote understanding derived from the cognition of this relationship reveals expression, which lies in the juxtaposition of unalike elements (sensory objects, mental images).’ The Central Concepts of Gestalt The central concepts of Gestalt isn't only limited to the study of how these groups are formed, it also attempts to study the effects that such grouping processes have on the human psychology and perception. Hence, the stronger the grouping is, the stronger is the Gestalt. It is believed that the groupings of such data help in the unity of a design, which is conceptualized and rendered by an artist. One of the most powerful tools therefore, is to identify the units, which have constituted to form visual arts. Moreover, just like the grouping concepts are used for understanding unity, the same concepts can utilized for ungrouping items and make them look unique in their own right. So the concepts of Gestalt can also be utilized for creating variety in a visual image, just like the principles are applied to create the unity in an image. The perfect modulation of variety and unity can be achieved in visual arts such as body movements, painting, sand art, and installation art by the proper application of the concept of Gestalt. Eric Berne is regarded as the father of transactional analysis. The theories of Eric Berne have radically improved the last four decades, and presently transactional analysis extends to the fields of education, psychotherapy, counselling, and organizational development. Transactional analysis is often used with Gestalt counselling for understanding complex psychological patterns and learns more about the disparate humanistic approaches. Some of the most important concepts of Gestalt systems are invariance, emergence, multi-stability and Reification. Emergence is an important process, which is used for understanding the formation of complex visual patterns. Emergence is a crucial pattern or process, which takes place in the human brain for analyzing visual forms. It is the blending of all the parts of the image, which helps in the emergence of an image. The emergence of an image is hence dependent on its identifiable parts, however the brain does not process each and every identifiable part one by one to recognize or comprehend an image. It rather perceives the individual components as a composite image. For example, if one looks at the picture of a shark, the person viewing the image of a shark recognizes the shark instantaneously, the person does not require identifying each and every part of the sharks such as its fin, it's teeth, jaws, it's shape the or its eyes to finally deduce that it is a shark. Ian Verstegen (2005, p. 26) comments ‘There are two issues here, the identity of gestalt laws for seeing and hearing, and the representation of works of art as a spatial mental image. As for the first problem, any problem of temporal organization can be described with spatial concepts. Figure and ground effects can be achieved with both vision and hearing, as can any number of perceptual illusions.’ In transactional analysis, there are basically three primary states. The states are the child state, the adult state and the parent state. They are called the ‘Archaeopsyche’, ‘Neopsyche’ and ‘Exteropsyche' respectively. Transactional analysis is also called TA and it was pioneered by Eric Berne. All people behave in one of these three stages, in certain periods in their lives. The Freudian concepts of psychology is one of the most famous psychological concepts to better understand the human mind, however if the transactional analysis of Gestalt is a psychological and analytical tool which is becoming increasingly popular. The parent state is such a state in which people start behaving like a person, which suits parental behaviour. The imitating of parents, despite the fact that the person may not be a parent, bears testament to the fact that people are predisposed to parental behaviour. One prime example is shouting out to another person in order to correct that person or prevent him from committing a mistake. Nevertheless, transactional analysis is states in which people who are adults and probably maybe in their 50s sometimes acts like a small child. Behaviour includes crying, laughing, or looking at the floor as direct reaction to some events. For example, if a person has been scolded or reprimanded in office for mistake, that person might look at the floor or start pouting, which are behaviours, which are commonly associated with children. The adult state is however, the most preferred state, according to transactional analysis. The adult state makes a person use the power of reasoning and not sense reality subjectively. People who rather act objectively and use rationale to analyze and solve practical problems are the people who are said to be in a perfect state or the adult state. A few months back, I was involved in a practical arts therapy session. In that session, we were instructed to build a wig wam and create a tribe for coordinating with each other. We were also supposed to communicate with other tribes, which were all make belief. Surprisingly, I realized that I was getting more and more involved with the project. I was experiencing a number of psychological changes frequently. I was sometimes passing through the child state while at other times going through the parent state and the adult state. When I was with the tribe, the child state overtook me and I was feeling those same feelings, which I used to feel childhood and the emotions of spontaneity, creativity, and especially the spirit of recreation overtook me and I felt that I was in a different state. At other times, the child state reappeared when I was made certain demands by a supervisor or was sometimes given orders. When I was given orders especially, I felt my independence was being restricted and I sometimes felt like whining just like the schoolchild. At other times, I felt like a parent when I was given the role of supervising the small tribe or the small team. I often scolded few of my teammates and this came instinctively since I probably wanted the team members not to create further mistakes. This was the parent state, which probably controlled me. However most of the time, I was successful in maintaining the adult state. The adult state helped me to deal with situations with more practicality and help me resolve issues related to building of a make shift house, making people behave like tribes, dressing up and behaving like someone else or living the life of a tribe. Thus, the adult state helped me to understand and realize that the exercise was just an exercise, which pertains to art therapy session and I should not get excessively involved with it. Reification is the process, which makes the brain to read the contours of visual references as real contours. Therefore, Reification makes the brain process visual information, which is actually illusions. This type of Gestalt concept supports the idea that the human brain can sometimes believe the explicit spatial information rather than believing the sensory stimulus provided by the eyes. Hence, reification is actually a visual fallacy, and is one of the important pillars of the Gestalt concept. Ian Verstegen (2005, p. 23) states ‘By its very nature perception contains abstraction but it also possesses another form of intelligence in the spatial opposition of agents to embody patterns of thought.’ Multi-stability is another concept where a single image has the tendency to create dual perceptual experiences for the viewer. Such experiences can appear back and forth and create an unstable perception within the mind of the user. One of the best examples of multi-stability is the Necker Cube or a number of illusions such as the famous Rubin’s figure. One of the famous artists who occasionally drew pictures, which were based on the theme of multi-stability, was the artist MC Escher. The concept of Gestalt does not tell the reason and explain exactly the mental processes which cause such multiple perceptual experiences to occur, Gestalt rather states that such visual perception occur and does not go deep by scientifically explaining it. Invariance is the concept, which states that the human mind can easily perceive and recognize simple geometrical shapes and objects, without recognizing its influential components such as its rotation, the scale, translation, elastic deformations and various lightings. The computational theories developed by David Marr, has greatly contributed in explaining the classification of geometrical objects by using the visual faculty. The fundamental principles of Gestalt combine the concepts of multi-stability, reification, emergence and invariance to explain the intricacies and complexities of processing visual arts by the human mind. These four primary concepts are not modelled individually but are rather different features of the same concept of Die Gestalt. The Laws Associated with Gestalt and Art There are a number of laws, which are associated with the concept of Gestalt. One of the laws is called the law of Pragnanz. In German, the law of pragnanz basically means the law of conciseness or briefness. The law states that the human mind usually processes information or should process visual information, which makes the visual data orderly, regular, simple and symmetric. The psychologists who deal with Gestalt have attempted to categorize the face laws associated with Gestalt. These laws eventually help to protect how the user interprets a visual sensation of visual stimuli. Some of the Gestalt Laws include the law of similarity, the law of closure, the law of proximity, the law of symmetry, the law of common fate and the law of continuity. The law of closure states that the human mind often experiences visual elements, which are not perceived through the visual stimuli. These visual elements help the mind to conceptualise a regular figure. The law of similarity on the other hand states that the minds occasionally categorize elements, which are similar into a collective group of elements. These collective groups may have similarities in form, colour, brightness or size. The law of proximity states that the mind can occasionally misinterpret two or more visual elements, which have close spatial proximity to be part of a single visual data. Therefore, the mind perceives a few objects as collective visual objects, rather than perceiving it as visual data, which are distinctly different and are only placed close to each other. The law of symmetry is a similar law, which causes images which are symmetrical to be perceived as collective images. One of the major differences between the law of symmetry and the law of proximity is in the law of symmetry; the symmetrical images are viewed in totality despite being placed far away from each other. The law of continuity states that the minds generally follow a kinetic, visual and auditory for interpreting data. Finally, the law of common fate states that the visual elements, which move in one particular direction are often interpreted by the human mind as one collective unit. Ian Verstegen (2005, p. 19) quotes ‘Although it is a powerful statistical tool, some important criticisms have been leveled against the technique by gestalt oriented psychologists based on its irrationality bias. Work by Dean Peabody (Peabody & Goldberg, 1989) has pointed to its inability to separate descriptive traits from emotive traits. Since descriptive traits are cognitive, it fails to show how emotion derives from cognition.’ Describing Visual Arts from the Gestalt Perspective The elements of the scene in visual art form are usually explained by the Gestalt concept using the terms of figure and ground. In a work of art such as painting, figure and ground are often used by experienced painters to give a stunning visual effect to their work. Similar elements, which constitute the figure, can include horses or people, whereas the dissimilar elements in the form of ground can be the horizon lines in brown representing soil or blue lines representing sky. This contrast between the similar elements of figure and dissimilar elements of ground gives an impression to the mind of the observer that the painting is a whole. Such paintings, which use the essential principles of the Gestalt concept, are generally progressive and visually appealing at the same time. One of the famous paintings of MC Escher had a picture of white horses with riders juxtaposed with black horses with riders. It is very difficult to see the white horses with riders and the black horses with riders at the same time. This is one of the best examples of figure and ground, which proves that the human mind can have different perceptions of an art, if the painter uses some of the central concepts of Gestalt in his or her paintings. Yet another example of figure and ground are the paintings, which uses the element of camouflage. The methods used for camouflaging the objects are by making the figure very similar to the ground in terms of shape, colour and size. There are a number of paintings, which show several birds perched upon a tree. The birds are very difficult to recognize since they appear to be merged together with the logs of wood. This figure and ground merges together in the principle of similarity. One of the guiding laws of the principle of similarity states that objects in a work of art such as painting or body arts, which has resemblance in colour, shape, texture, orientation or value, would be generally viewed by the observers as belonging together. Ian Verstegen (2005, p. 19) states ‘Many use the arts to enlighten aspects of object perception but the real domain of the psychology of art, the part that shows how a psychological model can do justice to the profundity of the human mind as well as its artifacts, is expression. But there is still a gap between the symbolic and expressive life of people and their creations.’ The visual arts also make use of the Gestalt principle of contiguity and proximity. These two principles suggest that objects in the visual arts, which are located close to each other, would appear as if they belong together. For example, in a painting which has several tiny circles, which are lined up vertically as well as horizontally in a canvas, the circles, which are horizontally closer to each other than vertically, would appear as if there are a number of horizontal lines. Therefore, the spaces between the circles could determine how the observer perceives the visual art. The principle of continuity on the other hand states that the human mind prefers figures, which have continuity in them. For example, in a diagram, which has four straight lines, which converges on a point, the human mind would perceive the four straight lines as two straight lines, which divide each other forming a cross shape. One of the reasons why the human mind prefers continuity is that our ancestors often had to complete the form of how predators such as the bear would be, with the help of incomplete visual information. Such ancestral mental conditionings have created this process of continuity in our minds, which finds its expression when we observe and appreciate visual data such as the visual arts. Ian Verstegen (2005, p. 49) states ‘Arnheim’s treatment of sculpture has been almost as rich as his treatment of the pictorial arts. In a very real sense, the compositional principles can be applied to sculpture by a simple transposition into three dimensions. Most psychologists do not recognize it as such, but Arnheim’s writings on the perception of three dimensional objects – like works of sculpture – represent an important extension of gestalt organizational ideas to the spatial dimension.’ Another important principle is the principle of area, which is often used in Gestalt. In the field of painting and especially installation arts, a number of artists use two shapes, which are identical to each other, however their sizes are very different. For instance, an installation art, which uses huge square, containing a smaller square within it, viewers at a distance would perceive the larger square as the ground whereas the smaller square to be the figure. The same installation art can have a reverse visual effect when the larger square is coloured black whereas the smaller square is coloured white. The principle of symmetry is often used in visual data such as optical illusions, paintings and abstract art. For example, a diagram might have a number of geometrical shapes in the form of diamonds, which overlap each other. The mind will perceive each of those several diamond shapes as a whole, and not as individual diamonds. A person who perceives an image of visual data from the perspective of symmetry, he or she would see a different shape which have anything remotely common to of the shape of a diamond. Real Life Experiences and Gestalt Stages The individual self is not seen as an entity which is separate, rather it is an entity which continuously transforms and interacts with the surrounding society. In Gestalt Therapy, the handful of stages which people generally pass through in their interaction process is the Gestalt cycle of experience. The stages which comprise the cycle of experience include sensation, awareness, mobilization, action, contact, satisfaction, and withdrawal. One example where the stages of experience can be clearly noticed is the time when people feel hungry. The feeling of hunger could equate to sensation; the realisation that one is hungry is awareness; the action taken to acquire the food is called mobilization; the process of eating the food is called contact; the time when the person feels satiated after a meal is called satisfaction; and the time when the person no longer feel this urge of eating and thereby is completely relaxed is called withdrawal. Ian Verstegen (2005, p. 17) states ‘Gestalt psychologists have gone on to explore all of the traditional problems of figural perception and proposed and experimentally tested their explanation based upon relational determination. As Rock (1990) has pointed out, some phenomena are more easily treated with the concept than others, but on the whole it is a fruitful concept for their explanation. It continues to be important, for example, in the explanation of figural illusions (Erikson, 1970) and anomalous figures.’ When I had lost my father, I was heartbroken and very dejected. The processes I went through mentally can be categorized by the Gestalt Cycle of Experience. The bereavement and the melancholy of losing my father would be the first stage which is the sensation stage. For me the sensation stage and the awareness stage were hard to distinguish. I felt that I needed to desensitize myself or rather plan a course of action to release the negative energies that had accumulated in me. One of the best methods for mobilizing my pent up energies and releasing them in a proper way which helped me grieve my father’s death would be writing poems. Writing the poem was a great learning experience for me since I have a certain mental blockage and writing the poem was the action taken by me which finally helped me feel the sensations of satisfaction and withdrawal, as per the Gestalt cycle of experience. Ian Verstegen (2005, p. 135) states ‘Gestalt theory is not so much about rigid lines of development, which find qualitative parallels in different domains, as a theory of psychological differentiation. That is, different domains, the cultural, the individual and the task-oriented, allow and develop to a particular level of differentiation.’ My second personal experience, which reinforced my belief in the Gestalt cycle of experience was the time when I took the parental role of the head of the family after my father passed away. After my father's death, my mother was extremely shaken and she became very vulnerable and nervy. That was the time when I realized that I am needed to play the prominent role in the family for the welfare of my mother. Once again, I had built-up emotions, which I could not express to my mother. Hence I was passing through the stages of sensation and awareness of the Gestalt cycle of experience, but was unable to decide the vehicle for the mobilization and the action stage, so as to complete the Gestalt cycle of experience. I eventually resorted to using puppets. I found it liberating to express myself through puppets. The deep-rooted issues of mourning and the pressure of added responsibility was weighing down on me and using puppets for communicating with my mother helped me mobilize my emotions and subsequently gave me the satisfaction of having expressed myself. After a few months, I truly felt very relaxed and was able to complete the Gestalt cycle of experience by passing through the final stage of withdrawal. Ian Verstegen (2005, p. 27) quotes ‘Works of art must have some sort of visual representation in order to be understood. It must be understood as a complex of pure interactions of forces. This is of course true of static works of art, like paintings, but is equally true of temporal works of art. The symphony or the novel is perceived as organized wholes when grasped in their simultaneity.’ One of the key features of Gestalt is the process it uses for comprehending the intricacies and complexities of the human mind in understanding visual data. The stages of Gestalt can be easily related to personal events and experiences. The theories of Gestalt such as emergence and invariance helps us better appreciate fine works of art, especially of the visual nature. The central concepts of Gestalt are thus all pervading. In the world of visual media and visual arts such as painting, abstract, installation art and even cinema, the central concepts of Gestalt plays an important role in better understanding the intrinsic attributes of the visual art forms. Gestalt and the visual arts are inseparable and the Gestalt concept of wholeness is not only limited to visual arts and human psychology, but extends far beyond. References Berne, E. (1973). Games People Play: The Psychology Of Human Relationships, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Clarkson, P. (1989). Gestalt Counselling In Action, London: Sage Publications. Lister-Ford, c. (2002). Skills in TA Counselling and Psychotherapy, London: Sage Publications. Sills, c. & Joyce, P. (2001). Skills In Gestalt, London: Sage Publications. Verstegen, I. (2005). Arnheim, Gestalt and Art: A Psychological Theory, New York: Springer. Read More