rss_2.0Sciendo RSS Feed for Gestalt Theoryhttps://sciendo.com/journal/GTHhttps://www.sciendo.comhttps://sciendo-parsed.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/6471e344215d2f6c89db4060/cover-image.jpghttps://sciendo.com/journal/GTH140216https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2024-0006<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Summary</title> <p>Applied Gestalt theory in the tradition of Gestalt psychology on the one hand and Gestalt pedagogy in the tradition of Gestalt therapy on the other hand are two different ways of thinking about education. Gestalt pedagogy proves to be compatible in many ways with current positions in education studies, in particular those of phenomenological pedagogy, dialogical pedagogy and theories of meaningful learning. All three approaches could provide a common ground for the two Gestalt traditions – not only for bringing them into relation, but also for strengthening their theoretical frameworks and thus enriching education studies.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2024-00062024-08-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2024-0003<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>We propose that in pictures both the extended limbs of actors and the ground are involved in gestalts for movement. Limbs extend to suggest more motion literally when a dancer is in air and refer to a canonical pose when on the ground. A running pony’s curled limbs off the ground depict fast action literally. A horse’s flying-gallop off the ground suggests speedy motion metaphorically. Cast shadows indicate the actor’s location with respect to the ground. We consider extended and curled limbs, on-ground and off, in literal and metaphoric pictures.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2024-00032024-08-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2024-0007<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Summary</title> <p>The developmental age is often characterized by problems of somatization of psychological problems and conflicts: Anorexia, enuresis, encopresis and persistent constipation. The Drawn-Story (DS) technique presented in this article was developed to enhance and support the narrative-dialogic relationship in the psychodiagnostic and psychotherapeutic context – initially primarily for work with children of developmental age, but later also for other patient groups. It is a projective drawing technique that was developed by Giancarlo Trombini in the 1970s based on his training in Gestalt psychology and psychoanalysis at the University of Bologna and has since been further developed by him, Elena Trombini and their colleagues and also used in other fields of application.</p> <p>This article uses an early case history of DS to explore central aspects of this technique in greater depth. It also explores the question of whether the Concluding Therapeutic Turn observed in therapies with adults can also be observed in developmental age therapy according to the criterion of reconciliation of time perspectives.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2024-00072024-08-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2024-0008<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>In diesem Beitrag werden die Anfänge der GTA und der Gestalt Theory ab Ende der 1970er Jahre nachgezeichnet. Diese Anfänge waren angesichts der Zerschlagung der Gestaltpsychologie und der Vertreibung eines großen Teils ihrer akademischen Vertreter durch das Nazi Regime überaus schwierig: War mit dem Ende des sog. „Dritten Reiches“ die Nazi-Ideologie in Deutschland noch keineswegs überwunden, was sich u.a. auch darin zeigte, dass man sich nicht erinnern mochte, welche bedeutende international geachteter Richtung mit der Berliner Schule der Gestaltpsychologie vor dem Nazi-Regime die Psychologie in Deutschland prägte, geschweige denn, dass man sich bemüht hätte, führende Vertreter zurück zu gewinnen. Der Fokus der Darstellung ist aber auch auf die beiden Persönlichkeiten Hans-Jürgen Walter und Hilarion Petzold gerichtet, die aus der Gestalttherapie kommend umfassende Konzepte von Psychotherapeutischem Verständnis entwickelten, die unter der Bezeichnung „Gestalttheoretische Psychotherapie“ und „Integrative Therapie“ wichtige Grundsteine auch für heutige Diskurse darstellen. Beide konnten am 25. März 2024 ihren 80. Geburtstag feiern, wobei die Gratulation seitens der GTA auch das Gedenken an Rainer Kästl einschließt, der ebenfalls für die Entwicklung der Gestalttheoretischen Psychotherapie Bedeutendes beigetragen hat, seinen 75. Geburtstag in 2024 aber aufgrund seines frühen Todes (2020) nicht begehen konnte.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2024-00082024-08-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2024-0004<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Summary</title> <p>Acoustic depth is an elusive indicator that touches the world of emergencies, or perceptual focus, in a peculiar way. The realm in which these forms of recognition operate indeed links media theory to perception theory and aesthetic reflection. Expressions such as acoustic scene, sound depth or sharpness, or acoustic image when discussing the receptive forms of various microphone models, are just a few cases where imaginative synthesis translates the sense of phenomena arising from the resistance of sensory properties to the structures of linguistic formalization. The language of media is full of these references, which seem to refer to a common sense that emerges in the differentiation of perceptual channels, but is rarely made explicit in a clear manner. To understand acoustic depht’s nature, we can use the concept of emergence: every time we hear a sound, that acoustic process is always surrounded by a myriad of small sounds that interact with it.</p> <p>The notion of emergence can be applied to anything present in the surrounding environment. It can be applied to any configuration that breaks the homogeneity of a perceptual field. So, we can analyze the complexity of this synthetic formation by tracing it back to increasingly simpler synthetic planes. When talking about composition, synthesis, and association, it has already the results of compositional operations and which provided the ultimate or primary material – either term suffices, depending on the direction we choose to take.</p> <p>These are essential factors in spatial orientation processes, but they are structurally opaque: we’ll work on three examples taken from classical music, ethnomusicology, and hearing aids.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2024-00042024-08-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2024-0005<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This study examines Edmund Husserl’s and Giovanni Bruno Vicario’s perspectives on time. Husserl’s work focuses on consciousness and its processes of synthesis, thus on a transcendental concept of time. Vicario, a member of the Trieste Gestalt school of psychology, rather explores the issue through an experimental perspective. This difference leads Vicario to criticize Husserl, reinterpreting and, sometimes, misunderstanding his texts. Through a careful textual analysis of Husserl’s and Vicario’s works on time, it is argued that, despite methodological differences, their views can be integrated into a pluralistic understanding of time. This includes both phenomenological and psychological perspectives, and offers valid alternatives to a unified and physicalistic view of time.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2024-00052024-08-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-0021<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>The relationship between Kurt Lewin and Lev S. Vygotsky is important for many methodological questions raised by the two psychologists such as distinguishing a genetic and an accidental event type. The concept of „Gestalt“ is another important issue. The present article analyzes and contextualizes the significance of this concept in their discussions since they met in Berlin in 1925. It can be shown that a difference between Lewin’s and Vygotsky’s approach becomes salient in the ways they refer to Gestalt theory as a holistic approach. While Lewin understands the here-and-now of situation in which an event occurs as depending on the present field forces as a whole, Vygotsky agrees largely with Lewin’s postulate to consider all field forces, but then moves on from the field as an originally spatial model to introduce a semantic model. According to Vygotsky this is necessary to theorize fluidity and flexibility in behavior and thus to understand the necessary psychologically preconditions for free will and independency.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-00212024-05-02T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-0017<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Summary</title> <p>In this contribution, I discuss the perceptual potential of certain genres of experimental and contemporary music, commonly grouped under the label “sound-based music”. The sonic patterns typical of this music are mostly associated, during listening, with visual and tactile sensory qualities and can evoke mental representations as shapes in motion. These are the result of physical-acoustic energies organized according to a perceptual grammar whose organization follows a series of Gestalt and kinaesthetic principles. The paper explores the nature of the relationship between sound patterns of sound-based music and their mental images. Based on morphodynamic theory, it is proposed the emergence of cognitive image schemas, which are at the centre of this relationship. The image schemas depict the forces and tensions of our experience of the world (e.g., figure-background, near-far, superimposition, compulsion, blockage), as being the cognitive and experiential response to the incoming sound patterns. The sense of this music activates precisely the basic structures of sensorimotor experience by which we encounter a world that we can understand and act within, leading to a rich series of high-level associations and responses.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-00172024-05-02T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-0018<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Summary</title> <p>During his prolific career, the German Jewish scientist Franz Boas (Minden, 1858 - New York, 1942) recognized as the founding father of American Cultural Anthropology – maintained assiduous contacts with the European scientific community, in a privileged way with that of the German area. The contribution addresses the Boasian correspondence with the two directors of the <italic>Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv</italic>, the philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, and the ethnomusicolo-gist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel. All three were united by a common scientific experimental training and a solid musical education, typical of their <italic>Bildungsbu</italic><italic>ü</italic><italic>rgertum</italic>. With them, Boas consistently shared his fieldwork findings regarding music, sound, and language among the Indians of British Columbia: indeed, their epistolary exchanges intertwine epistemological reflections centered on the study of «<italic>exotische Musik</italic>» in context with technical problems, derived from the use of phonographic recordings and the relative shipments of wax cylinders by Boas to the Phonographic Archive. So far, the critical literature has not paid particular attention to their correspondence, that offer instead a privileged look in observing the birth of Ethnomusicology, at the time still defined as comparative Musicology (<italic>vergleichende Musikwissenschaft</italic>). Starting from a biographical contextualization and following the micro-history of the scientific and personal relationship of these scientists, the contribution aims to explore the hypothesis that the emerging Ethnomusicology significantly contributed to the definition of Cultural Anthropology as a discipline. In his painstaking research devoted to the Native Indian sounds and languages, Boas observed indeed what happens if a mind is exposed to a new sound, musical or linguistic context; he had therefore to rigorously deal with the phenomena of mishearing, sound-blindness and biasing filter related to the perception of «new sounds». Thanks to his fieldwork, Boas would endorse a relativistic and “in context” approach to perception and mental representations of sounds, fostering his eventual lifelong, hectic concern about a broaden antiracist theory of human mental functions.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-00182024-05-02T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2024-0001ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2024-00012024-05-02T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-0023<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Summary</title> <p>Habituation mechanisms play a pivotal role in enabling organisms to filter out irrelevant stimuli and concentrate on essential ones. Through repeated exposure, the brain learns to disregard stimuli that are irrelevant, effectively ceasing to respond to potentially distracting input. Previous studies have demonstrated that the orienting response to visual distractors disrupting visual detection tasks habituates as tasks progress and distractors are encountered repeatedly, as their initial interference diminishes. Theoretical models posit that this reduction is contingent upon the establishment of an internal representation of external stimuli. Moreover, further studies have indicated that habituation can be context- specific, suggesting that the mechanisms involved incorporate information about features of irrelevant stimuli that extend beyond their discrete characteristics. In this contribution, we further delved into the question of whether the context in which habituation occurs retains a general habituative capacity when a new, to-be-ignored stimulus is introduced. We discuss evidence indicating that the context in which habituation has already taken place facilitates the habituation process for a new stimulus. This suggests that it becomes easier to ignore new stimuli in contexts where we have already learned to disregard other stimuli, underscoring the intricate interplay between habituation, context, and attentional processes.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-00232024-05-02T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-0019<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Summary</title> <p>A pupil of Köhler and von Hornbostel in Berlin, Arnheim published an article in the Musical Quarterly in 1984, where he applied the principles of visual composition to the musical form. In a painting, for example, the forces of visual composition are essential for aesthetic enjoyment; in music, sounds are essential as they are always occurring in time, and this constitutes the main dynamic vector of music. Starting with the tetrachord of ancient Greek music and analysing the relationships between notes in the major and minor scales, Arnheim identifies what in the Western musical tradition represents the basis on which each note must relate: the tonal centre, the attractive motor that determines the perceptual dynamics of musical expression. Two examples, taken from Schubert and Béla Bartók, show us how the structure of the melodic construction is essential in generating different states of mind; Arnheim, however, does not stop at the simple eliciting of an emotion, but situates the musical structure in a more general framework, which refers to perceptual patterns belonging to any sphere, mental or physical, thanks to which we experience our reality.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-00192024-05-02T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-0020<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Summary</title> <p>Music has been primarily conceived as a temporal art. However, over the last two centuries or so, researchers across different disciplines including musicology, psychology, and philosophy, have been intrigued by the spatial nature of music and sounds, using spatial concepts to define music. This paper aims to demonstrate that an understanding of music perception from a temporal perspective inherently implies a certain spatial dimension. To do this, first, I briefly examine some key arguments that lead to conceiving sound perception in temporal terms. At the same time, I highlight some of the limitations of a purely temporal account of sound perception which necessitate the incorporation of spatial considerations into the conceptualization of sound perception. Consequently, I move on to consider prominent spatial accounts of musical sounds that have been elaborated by psychologists, musicologists, and music composers. In conclusion, I discuss some of the challenges arising from the analogy between music and space, whether conceived in perceptual or cognitive terms.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-00202024-05-02T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-0024<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This phenomenological research investigates how it is possible to determine the extent to which a chromatic colour appears white and black in order to use it to build a new Colour Rendering Index. We tested two methods of subjective evaluation; in the first, the perceptual presence of white (and black) in a colour alone was assessed on a unipolar intensity scale, independently for the two attributes. In the second method, evaluations of whiteness (and blackness) were conducted for colours presented in a sequence ordered from the least to the greatest presence of the respective attribute. In both tests evaluations were made either by moving an arrow on a slider from left (minimum) to right (maximum) or by choosing a grey cylinder that matched the same degree of similarity to white (and black) as the test colour. In four experiments, 16 colours of 4 hues and 4 different shades were studied; in a fifth experiment, 48 colours, 12 for each quadrant of the colour wheel, were studied; finally, in another test, 10 greys were studied. In the first three experiments, the results were unexpected, as the evaluations of whiteness and blackness were complementary, adding up to 100%, while in the current NCS, 100% includes not only the evaluation of white and black but also that of chromaticness, therefore white and black are not complementary. In the fourth and fifth experiments, the sum of the evaluations of white and black was always less than 100%, in accordance with the present NCS. In the last experiment, the evaluations of white and black given independently to the 10 greys samples were complementary, confirming the bipolar nature of white-black continuum. Suggestions have been provided to resolve the discrepancy between the results of this research and the structure of the current NCS.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-00242024-05-02T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2024-0002ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2024-00022024-05-02T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-0022ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-00222024-05-02T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-0012<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Game-based approaches are emerging in many fields, such as education, social sciences, marketing and government. Most studies debate its role in consolidating learning, guided by both internal and external rewards.</p> <p>These approaches are also being applied in rehabilitation, where patients must undergo a re-learning process of motor gestures after an injury to a body structure. In physiotherapy, much importance is given to analytical-functional movement aspects, but less to the recovery of the complete experience, including motivation, perception, and emotional experience of the patient during the process.</p> <p>The aim of this narrative review is to investigate the role of subjective experience in the application of gamification in physiotherapy, considering the added value it provides to recovery by involving neural structures, not just motor functions. By analyzing the most investigated aspects in using gamification in rehabilitation, we will outline the primary methods of investigation into the engagement and emotions involved in the process.</p> <p>Through a selection of scientific articles found on main databases, we identified articles investigating the patient’s experience. The analysis of these articles was based on aspects related to the recovery of movement, the technology used, as well as the methods of investigation and collection of qualitative data regarding the emotions and perceptions of patients during the gamification experience.</p> <p>The results are divided into two primary topics. Overall, this review supports the idea that gamification could represent a rehabilitation approach integrating physiotherapy, more suitable for the final stages of recovery, such as returning to work or sports.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-00122023-08-30T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-0016ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-00162023-08-30T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-0001ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-00012023-08-30T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-0004<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Summary</title> <p>This paper presents and contextualizes the construct of Aesthetic Relational Knowing (ARK), as the intuitive experience of the therapist that emerges from the phenomenological field created in a meeting between therapist and client. The concept of isomorphism is considered as an epistemological turning point and a possible bridge connecting Gestalt therapy, Gestalt theory and Neurosciences. An example of the clinical consequences of this change of perspective is given. Moreover, a validation pilot study has shown that ARK is described by three factors: empathy, resonance and bodily awareness. The ARK can be defined as a three-dimensional construct that supports the positive use of the therapist’s perception in terms of aesthetic knowing of the phenomenological field of the therapeutic situation. The construct of Aesthetic Relational Knowing can be considered a phenomenological, aesthetic and field-oriented contribution to psychotherapy training, supervision and research.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gth-2023-00042023-08-30T00:00:00.000+00:00en-us-1