Description
1. A structure or configuration of physical, biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable from its parts in summation.
2. Gestalt psychology in based on the unity of psychic life, the existence and primacy of psychological wholes which are not just a summation of elementary units. Basically, the parts of a shape only have meaning by the fact that they belong to a whole, that is, a shape cannot be split up into its elements without losing the meaning which it possessed as a whole. Thus human behaviour can be thought of as a gestalt, a mental whole which transcends the mere combination of its elements.
3. Within the long series of very different processes which lead from a vague idea of a lawfulness in data (discovered by gestalt perception) to a clear formulation of scientific knowledge, gestalt perception may enter at the most varied points in order to establish an orderly relationship between other rational links of the total event. True gestalten may be seen in figures or in equations. In other places, rational categories may be used in complexes whose natural unity has only been established by gestalt perception. The perception of complex gestalten may therefore be considered an indispensable partial function in the systematic whole from whose coordination the always incomplete picture of extrasubjective actuality is constructed.