We are delighted to invite you to the 24th Scientific Conference of the Society for Gestalt Theory and its Applications (GTA) organised jointly with the Institute of Musicology of Humboldt University and the BSP Business & Law School Berlin.
The conference venues are
“Gestalt – Imagery – Action” addresses structured wholes in the phenomenally given (Gestalt), multi-modal experiences without a direct sensory input (Imagery) and forms of action that may arise from experienced Gestalts and mental imagery (Action). Of particular interest are the mediations that occur between these dimensions.
In the 1920s, Gestalts were discussed as principles of self-organization in human thinking and perception, in behaviour, and in the physical world. Carl Stumpf and the founders of the Berlin School of Gestalt Theory Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka developed a new theory of mind, anchored in psychology and a scientific world-view. Kurt Lewin developed a Gestalt theory of action. Perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim adopted Gestalt theory for art and visual studies.
One hundred years after the thriving decade of Gestalt Theory in Berlin, this conference motto honours these ground-breaking scientific traditions whilst coupling them with current research paradigms. Current studies of mental imagery, of cognition and action and of the ecology of perception (affordance) draw on aspects of Gestalt theory, but rarely reflect on its ethical and holistic implications. The conference aims to critically engage these developments which unfold in a highly dynamic environment, spurred by computational and AI innovations. They complicate theory-driven approaches and invite us to reconsider the relevance of Gestalt concepts in general.
It will also create a space for students and for upstart researchers to articulate themselves in various formats. And it invites the public to share knowledge about Gestalt research in Berlin during a city walk.
The conference program will comprise key-note lectures, panel discussions, workshops, poster sessions, visits to historic sound archives, an easy listening session and a concert. We also plan a guided walk to the landmark sites of historic Gestalt Research in Berlin Mitte.
The conference languages are German and English.
Stay tuned to the page, which is constantly updated with details about the meeting and events.
Sebastian Klotz, Paola Tenchini, Serena Cattaruzza, Walter Coppola, Julia Kursell, Riccardo Martinelli, Savina Raynaud
Taking into account the places and infrastructures that shaped Carl Stumpf’s philosophical thinking, this paper examines how he maintained a balance between his epistemological programme and the experimental and material procedures that he considered from a phenomenological perspective. In pursuing a general theory of judgement and a comprehensive theory of knowledge integrating both the logical and perceptual dimensions of knowledge, he incorporated a wide range of phenomena into his work: sounds produced by musical instruments, speech and musical sounds transmitted through phonographs and telephones, and specially constructed large-scale experimental apparatuses—such as the interference system used to investigate vowel production and perception. He also conducted interactive interview and recording sessions on tonal consciousness with non-European musicians, using tonometers, indigenous and Western musical instruments, and phonographs. The variety of discourse networks—in Friedrich Kittler’s sense of “discourse networks”—and the associated practices of observation and research on which Stumpf drew is remarkable.
The paper argues that this orientation reflects the growing importance of experimental training among scientists in late nineteenth-century physiology and psychology and decisively shaped Stumpf’s philosophical position. It contributed substantially to the modernity of his production of knowledge. This was characterised by rigorous philosophical reflection—logic, metaphysics, eidology, phenomenology, and philosophy of science—combined with a programmatic openness towards all sites at which phenomena were produced, as exemplified by the establishment of research infrastructures such as the Berlin Phonogram Archive. This dual orientation enabled Stumpf to engage with phenomena such as Gestalts and complex impressions in a reflective and empirically grounded manner and to investigate them philosophically. This aspect deserves more attention than it has received to date.
In the concise preface to Sprachlaute (1926)—a work celebrating its centenary this year—Carl Stumpf highlights the central points of this comprehensive investigation, which had already begun in 1913. As Karl Bühler (1927) observed, Stumpf was inspired by the teaching of his first teacher, Brentano, according to whom sensory phenomena constitute merely the “outer layer” of mental life. Yet Stumpf devoted a large part of his research, especially his experimental work, precisely to the study of such phenomena—which may recall Simone Weil’s emphasis on the “roughness” of reality. His Tonpsychologie (1883/90) is a masterful testimony to this endeavour and an indispensable foundation of the psychology of sound and music. No less significant, however, is his work Sprachlaute, subtitled Experimental-Phonetic Investigations, which builds on the earlier work while opening up wider fields of research.
During the terrible years of the First World War, amid the surreal silence of his Berlin laboratory, Stumpf developed and refined countless observations in acoustics; he even succeeded in analysing the components of whispered sounds. In doing so, he advanced phonetic research in the tradition of Helmholtz, while drawing particular inspiration from Wolfgang Köhler’s studies of vowels. The theoretical core of the work is concerned not with the many possible technical applications—from medicine to engineering—but rather with the emergence of so-called “complex qualities”, whose most striking examples are timbres and vowels. On this basis, one may posit a desirable connection between language research and the theory of singing, although—as Stumpf notes—the interest of language theorists in such an unusual investigation cannot be taken for granted. In his Sprachtheorie (1934), Bühler regarded Sprachlaute as the mature masterpiece of the Berlin scholar, who reached the summit of phonetics but did not take the further step towards phonology proper. This contribution addresses these and other related aspects.
This contribution examines how Carl Stumpf incorporates musical composition into his thinking. Its starting point is an observation on melodic motion described in the second volume of his Tonpsychologie (1890). Under the heading “Qualitative Judgements on Composite Sounds”, Stumpf describes the impression that the sound image of various compositions by Beethoven and Schubert is perceived as moving, even though the individual parts in the score do not move. From this point of departure, I pursue three questions: (1) How does Stumpf discuss composite sounds in motion? (2) How does he integrate references to compositions elsewhere in his publications? And (3) how does he draw on his experience as an accomplished violinist? In this way, I hope to clarify, first, how his concept of composite sound relates to that of sonic motion; second, how his earlier observations on composite sounds in music relate to his later concept of complex qualities; and third, how Stumpf generates evidence. My thesis is that the references to Beethoven and Schubert in Tonpsychologie II form part of a development towards producing—rather than merely collecting—evidence.
Carl Stumpf’s intellectual profile has long been overshadowed by his association with Franz Brentano. A closer examination, however, reveals a thinker who drew on a wide range of influences—including Lotze, Ernst Heinrich Weber, and Gustav Theodor Fechner—and combined them into an independent and original philosophy. Among these influences, his relationship to Fechner has received the least attention in the scholarly literature. Stumpf acknowledged Fechner’s decisive role in renewing philosophy through empirical science, and his Tonpsychologie combines methodological elements derived from both Brentano and Fechner. At the same time, Stumpf rejected Fechner’s two-aspect theory of mind and body and criticised its metaphysical ambiguity. Crucially, both thinkers engaged intensively with Spinoza and arrived at related yet distinct interpretations: while Fechner modified Spinozist parallelism by allowing causal interaction between the two series, Stumpf reinterpreted Spinoza from the standpoint of intentionality and viewed the relation between mind and object as an alternative to parallelism. Despite their differences, Fechner and Stumpf thus agree in moving beyond psychophysical parallelism.
The topic of the present call and the venue in Berlin offered an opportunity to read Wilhelm von Humboldt, a renowned Berliner and founder of the host university, in order to highlight some of his fundamental contributions to the study of a living human capacity: language. This capacity shapes our linguistic creativity—particularly our onomatological and lexical creativity—and our interlinguistic competence in such diverse ways that it may be understood as “Gestalt-like”.
An initial contribution is due to the philosopher of language Anton Marty, a pupil of Franz Brentano, the author of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874).
We also recall Marty’s deep friendship and professional partnership with Carl Stumpf, especially in Prague in the early 1880s, a particularly fruitful and rewarding period for both: Marty as the author of Subjectless Sentences and Stumpf as the author of the first volume of Tonpsychologie (Fisette, 2018).
An empirical perspective marks an important shift in Marty’s work from his original intellectual approach towards one that is more sensory and experiential: from abstraction—the subject of his first unpublished essay of 1867—to imagination, and from conceptual selection to the comparison of sensory features, opening up diverse and stimulating paths towards linguistic symbolisation. [For example, compare the English word “different” with the German “verschieden”: two entirely different meanings for what “carries elsewhere” (Latin dis + fero) and what is “separated” (German ver + scheiden): destination versus origin.]
Following his initial Aristotelian formation, Marty worked in a multilingual environment, namely Prague, where Czech, a Slavic language, displaced the “imperial” German of the Habsburg monarchy—not to mention the metalinguistic engagement with the classical languages learned at school in Switzerland, Latin and Greek, and Swiss multilingualism itself. The theme of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s principal work, On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species (1836), points to different worldviews that foreground various simultaneously occurring features of the same object, event, relation, and so forth, as well as intersubjective communicative exchange.
If this feature—especially Marty’s figurative inner form of language—shapes the signifiers within every historical natural language, another approach contributes to modelling different epistemic paths to the same meaning.
To provide empirical support for the historiographical reconstruction of the theory, numerous structured language datasets, or corpora, will be referenced and presented.
Chairs: Prof. Dr. Herbert Fitzek / Prof. Dr. Marianne Soff
This panel focuses on the “Berlin School of Gestalt Theory” and its heyday at the Psychological Institute of Friedrich Wilhelm University between 1922 and 1935—from its rooms in the palace, the atmosphere and forms of collaboration at the time, to scientific developments and practice-oriented advances extending into the present day.
This lecture analyses the collaboration between Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Max Wertheimer as a constellation in the early history of Gestalt psychology that has so far received little attention. At its centre is their jointly published 1920 essay “On the Perception of Sound Direction”, which is usually read primarily as a contribution to early psychoacoustics or to military sound localisation during the First World War. By contrast, the lecture argues that the investigations of binaural hearing can be understood as a paradigmatic example of a genuinely Gestalt-psychological research logic. Starting from the scientific milieu of Carl Stumpf and the shared interests of Hornbostel and Wertheimer in music psychology—particularly Wertheimer’s studies of the music of the Vedda in Ceylon—it will be shown that central problems of later Gestalt theory had already been prepared within the context of tone psychology. The question of the unity of melody leads here to a more general investigation of relationally organised perception. Against this background, research on directional hearing appears not as a merely technical application of psychological findings, but as an experimental analysis of the conditions under which coherent spatial perceptual units arise from minimal temporal differences between the two ears. Particular attention is given to the so-called “time theory”, experimentally produced boundary phenomena, and the concept of “effective base length”, which points to the irreducibility of auditory perception to anatomical and physical conditions. Finally, the proximity of these investigations to Wertheimer’s analyses of the phi phenomenon will be highlighted in order to reveal the importance of the auditory field for a general theory of temporally organised Gestalt formation.
To this day, the central achievements of Gestalt psychology are traditionally located in the fields of perception and thought psychology and in the philosophy of science, as developed, among others, in the work of Alexius Meinong and Christian Ehrenfels in Graz and Vienna, and of Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler in Frankfurt and Berlin. Moving beyond the philosophical lecture room and the laboratory of perceptual psychology, this contribution turns to the lesser-known field of early applied Gestalt-psychological research in Germany and Austria during the First World War and the interwar period. Younger members of the Berlin institute, such as Hans Rupp, Erich von Hornbostel, and Kurt Lewin, built a bridge from the laboratory to practice, developed psychological measurement instruments for the military and industry, and thus created a productive connection between Gestalt psychology and applied psychology or psychotechnics. This development came to an abrupt end with the rise of National Socialism and was not resumed after the Second World War.
This contribution traces a line from the Berlin School of Gestalt Psychology to the beginnings of applied psychology in Zurich from the 1920s onwards, and from there addresses the question of its present-day significance. It begins with the observation that there was no direct institutional line of tradition between the two contexts. Whereas Berlin Gestalt psychology around Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka was established primarily as theoretically oriented basic research on perception, thinking, and psychological wholes, applied psychology in Zurich initially developed in the context of psychotechnics, vocational guidance, and aptitude assessment, responding to the practical demands of schools, public administration, and the world of work.
This initial difference, however, does not exclude early intellectual points of contact. The lecture shows that structural affinities can already be identified in the interwar period, for example in the critical stance towards atomistic models of explanation, the emphasis on situational conditions of psychological action, and a relational conception of the human being. To capture these connections, the notion of “elective affinities” is proposed as a heuristic perspective. It does not refer to a history of influence or reception, but to conceptual proximities that connect different disciplinary developments without necessarily linking them causally.
Such early elective affinities become particularly visible where Gestalt-psychological concepts—exemplified by Kurt Lewin’s field theory—were translated into questions of social, work, and organisational psychology, thereby becoming applicable to practical fields. Against the background of the political ruptures of the 1930s and the traditions interrupted by emigration, these indirect processes of continuation acquire additional significance. In Zurich, corresponding developments can be observed especially in the gradual theoretical expansion of applied psychology, for example in the work of Hans Biäsch, who advocated a systematic, theory-guided understanding of applied psychology extending beyond purely psychotechnical practice.
The lecture concludes by asking what remains significant today from Berlin Gestalt psychology for applied psychology in Zurich. It argues that its influence continues less through explicit teaching traditions than through fundamental assumptions. In this sense, Berlin Gestalt psychology continues to function as an effective—though mostly implicit—point of reference in the self-understanding of applied psychology in Zurich.
My teacher Wolfgang Metzger attended the Berlin School of Gestalt Theory, and through him I was able to gain some insight into its spirit.
Therefore, I ask today:
What remains of this spirit? I will attempt an answer through the following questions.
What remains of the charm of the Psychological Institute in Rosenstraße?
What remains of the passion for direct observation?
What remains of the pure and beautiful language?
What remains of the universal education and breadth of reading?
What remains of the scientific modesty?
What remains of the philosophical depth of the Berlin School?
What remains of the “special position” that psychopathology was meant to occupy?
What, then, remains of the good spirit of the Berlin School of Gestalt Theory?
Dr. Angelika Böhm / Prof. Dr. Herbert Fitzek / Dr. Thomas Fuchs / Jüly Incel / Julia Rohner / Uta Wedam / Pola Zügge
Among the concepts rooted in Gestalt psychology, the Berlin School of Gestalt Theory and Psychological Morphology are not only approaches that continue to be discussed and practised scientifically today. Both have also given rise to therapeutic approaches that are taught and applied in psychological counselling and treatment contexts. We are taking up a discussion that began almost 20 years ago in Miesenbach, Lower Austria, and that we would like to continue and keep alive within the framework of the GTA. For this panel, we would like to invite an open discussion with the audience about the conceptual foundations and lived practice of both approaches.
The subsequent discussions may be guided by the following shared points of orientation:
1) Practising phenomenology: jointly tracing sensory experiences; exploring inner spaces; allowing emerging images—on the part of clients and therapists—to arise; describing scenes; working with images; taking up and deepening these images; and pursuing their meaning and scope.
2) Keeping the Gestalt perspective in view: forming clear and meaningful configurations; understanding insight as an opportunity to gain clarity and overview; while at the same time allowing transformations to occur; asking what this implies, where it leads, and where something can be expanded, transformed, or varied; learning to shift perspectives.
3) Developing techniques: what this means for concrete therapeutic work; which structures or guidelines are introduced; how conversations are shaped; what is used as material; how framework conditions are handled; and what is contributed by clients and therapists.
4) Central to all of this: the therapeutic relationship, or the shared work, as the framework for all moments that arise during the course of therapy. What does this mean for shaping the therapeutic process and pursuing therapeutic goals?
These points are not intended to be addressed in a rigid order, but may serve as a broad orientation for the course of the discussion. The contributors see their role as providing examples from therapeutic practice that can be introduced as needed in relation to the individual points.
References:
Beneder, D. (2009). Von Goethes Morphologie zur Psychotherapie. Eine Begegnung mit der Analytischen Intensivbehandlung (AIB). Phänomenal 1/2009, 26–29.
Endres, N. & Salber, W. (2001). Analytische Intensivberatung. Gestalttherapie 15 (2), 59–81.
Stemberger, G. (ed.) (2024), Grundkonzepte der Gestalttheoretischen Psychotherapie. Der gestaltpsychologische Ansatz in der Psychotherapie. Vienna: Krammer.
“Come into the Open, Friends!”
The Free Spirit of the Romanisches Café
The 1920s were a period of flourishing in Berlin not only scientifically, but also culturally. Alongside political struggles, the crises of the young Weimar Republic, and bitter poverty, there was—for a few years—a new freedom of spirit following the end of the Wilhelmine era, an irrepressible zest for life, and a passion for entertainment and experimentation. The Romanisches Café became a centre and refuge for artists from the liberal and left-wing cultural scene of Berlin’s “New West”: Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Kästner, Mascha Kaléko, Else Lasker-Schüler, Ringelnatz, Bertolt Brecht, Irmgard Keun, Elias Canetti, Otto Dix, Alfred Döblin… The guest list reads like a who’s who of Berlin’s cultural life in the 1920s. And right in the middle of it all was Claire Waldoff, the “Berlin Sparrow”.
In our salon “Come into the Open, Friends!”, marking the conclusion of the GTA conference, we present cheeky chansons by Claire Waldoff alongside texts by legendary visitors to the café.
References:
Tuning the Mind: How Music Shapes Inner Mental Experience
Inner mental experiences during music listening, such as mind-wandering and mental imagery, have recently assumed a central role in music psychology. They are widespread among listeners, can enhance musical enjoyment, and may have positive effects on mental health. To date, most research has focused on how musical features, such as perceived or felt emotion and tempo, influence the phenomenology of listeners’ thoughts and imagery. However, several fundamental questions remain insufficiently explored: (i) the music-specific mechanisms through which music enables episodes of mind-wandering, including mental imagery; (ii) the neural correlates of these subjective experiences; and (iii) the potential benefits of such inner cognitions for mental health and creativity. In addition, this body of literature has incorporated only limited neurocognitive research on mind-wandering, resulting in a discrepancy in both theory and methodology.
In this lecture, I will provide an overview of my recent work on these topics, in which I use novel methods including data from listening experiments combined with psychometric network analysis and analyses of brain connectivity. I will highlight evidence showing that music uniquely shapes inner mental experiences and their underlying brain-network dynamics, that the mental space supported by music and sound promotes creative incubation, and that music-evoked imagery has powerful practical applications across a range of fields, including therapy and sport.
Gestalt between Science and Worldview:
The Ehrenfels–Wertheimer Correspondence (1914–1932)
This lecture offers a new reading of the emergence of Gestalt theory based on the previously unpublished correspondence between Christian von Ehrenfels and Max Wertheimer (1914–1932). Its central thesis is that the difference between the two should not be understood as a linear development, but rather as the expression of a fundamental tension between science and worldview, a tension that finds its conceptual locus in the notion of Gestalt itself. The correspondence provides privileged access to the constellations within which this paradigm emerged and, at the same time, sheds light on the academic milieu of early twentieth-century Prague, which was shaped by theoretical conflicts and institutional dynamics. Particularly visible are Wertheimer’s difficulties in establishing himself academically and the ambivalent role played by Ehrenfels. At the centre of the analysis lies the conceptual problem of Gestalt. Whereas Ehrenfels develops the concept of Gestalt within a cosmologically grounded horizon extending towards a comprehensive worldview, Wertheimer defines it as a strictly empirically oriented structural principle aimed at the unity of experience. The correspondence thus reveals not only a theoretical divergence, but also two different ways of determining the relationship between science and philosophy. The emergence of Gestalt theory consequently appears as the result of an epistemological tension whose significance extends into contemporary debates.
A Programme Between Two Worlds: Carl Stumpf and Berlin Gestalt Psychology
This contribution aims to highlight the distinctive features of Stumpf’s approach and its significance during his work in Berlin, culminating in his appointment as director of the “Institute of Experimental Psychology”. His approach was characterised by an emphasis on the fruitful interplay between philosophical reflection and empirical research. This was precisely the approach adopted by the representatives of Gestalt psychology, who further developed it during the years of the Weimar Republic. With regard to its reception within philosophy, however, this programme encountered considerable resistance. In the context of the Weimar Republic, the ideal of a “pure” philosophy increasingly gained ground—understood as a strictly philosophical theory of knowledge and as transcendental phenomenology, largely free from any substantial engagement with the empirical sciences. The contribution seeks to emphasise both the fruitfulness and the continuing relevance of this approach, as developed by the Berlin School of Gestalt Psychology in accordance with Stumpf’s model. Alongside this continuity, it will also draw attention to differences between Carl Stumpf and the Berlin Gestalt psychologists, with particular regard to questions of perception and the concept of sensation.
Carl Stumpf as an Epistemologist of Probability
Stumpf’s two essays on probability, published in 1892, are masterpieces of the philosophy of science, written by a major psychologist and philosopher. Johannes von Kries’s pioneering work on probability had just appeared. Stumpf develops a position situated between the perspectives of von Kries and Laplace and proposes an original view in which psychological aspects play an important role. His approach was later criticised by the frequentist Reichenbach, but it remains one of the most interesting positions in the philosophy of science to this day. Fedde Benediktus has defined it as a form of objective Bayesianism. This proposal is examined here.
Musical Groups as Social Gestalts
Collective music-making in groups is a powerful medium for non-verbal communication, social bonding, and cultural transmission. To fulfil these functions, participants generally strive to create coherent polyphonic sound structures in which individual instrumental or vocal parts interlock and jointly form audible Gestalts.
My research investigates how this process is enabled by so-called “ensemble skills”. These skills allow individuals to predict the sounds of others through anticipatory auditory imagery, to adapt continuously to variations in timing and intensity through automatic synchronisation and deliberate coordination, and at the same time to perceive their own actions and those of others in real time.
I will provide an overview of research examining these ensemble skills and show (1) how they can be investigated behaviourally using controlled laboratory paradigms and naturalistic musical tasks, (2) how their complex interplay can be captured through computational modelling, and (3) how neuroscientific methods can provide insights into the underlying brain processes.
Overall, this research shows how ensemble skills link basic sensorimotor processes with higher-order social-cognitive factors, such as personality, and enable interacting individuals to regulate the balance between psychological representations of “self” and “other”. Audible Gestalts in joint music-making can therefore be understood as expressions of social relationships. The concept of ensemble skills provides a mechanistic approach to these social Gestalts and makes it possible to analyse complex patterns of collective behaviour along a spectrum ranging from measurable sensorimotor processes to social processes.
Gestalt in Modern Music Research
In modern music research, Gestalts can be understood either as emergent outcomes of the interaction between individuals and their environment or as principles that guide our understanding of these interactions. In both cases, Gestalt refers to holistic phenomena whose properties cannot be reduced to their constituent parts. In this lecture, we relate such phenomena to action–perception coupling, prediction, and adaptation. Formal models are introduced as concrete theories for interpreting empirical data. In this way, holistic approaches become more tangible, dynamic, and empirically testable.
We first demonstrate this approach using a causal model of music preferences based on data from a large group of listeners. The model describes how listeners perceive musical features and connect them with embodiment, experience, and appreciation. Rather than considering these factors in isolation, the model shows how appreciation emerges from their interaction.
We then discuss dynamical-systems models based on nonlinear differential equations. These models describe how actions and perceptions continuously adapt to one another over time. A typical example is synchronisation: musicians unconsciously adjust their actions to perceived rhythms. In musical ensembles, this mutual adaptation promotes co-regulation and the emergence of a stable tempo. From a Gestalt-psychological perspective, the resulting performance cannot be understood merely as the sum of individual contributions. Rather, it emerges from the dynamics of the interacting system and illustrates how musical organisation arises through the relationships between musicians and their environment.
in alphabetical order
Baulot-Souckov, Clément
How does studying staged Bulgarian traditional dance and music as a whole choreomusical and audience reception endeavor can teach us a lot?
Parncutt, Richard
Fetal psychology and our continuing obsession with major and minor triads and scales
Scholla, Kilian
From the Melodic Germ Cell to Large-Scale Form: Gestalt Thinking and Electronic Sounds in the Work of York Höller
Yun, Shin-Hyang
From Auditory Memory to Action and Imagery: Strategy of Unified Perception in the Media Art of Nam June Paik.
Wöllner, Clemens
How Chopin imagined his music: Perceiving musical Gestalts in historically informed piano interpretations
in alphabetical order
Agostini, Tiziano, Walter Coppola
The Slalom Effect
Bianchi, Ivana
Perceptual Structure of Opposites across Sensory Modalities
Fornaciai, Michele
Structured wholes in numerosity perception: a review of how the Gestalt organizational principles modulate our sense of number
Lorber, Maurizio
Rudolf Arnheim versus Ernst Gombrich: Perspective Representation in Art. From Gestalt Theory to Cognitivism
Sinico, Michele
Re-evaluating the Contribution of Gestalt Psychology to Interaction with Objects
Verstegen, Ian
Back to Lewin: An Arnheimian Social Psychology of Art
Jasrotia, Meharr; Pranjal Nepalia and Nidhi Kalonia
Collective vs. individual music listening. Effects on Mental Imagery and Emotional Experience
Sneha, Jain: Patti Nijhuis and Joshua S. Bamford
Listen Closely, you might See Something!
Upadhyay, Durgesh K.
Gestalt–Imagery–Action Dynamics in Indian Music Therapy: An Empirical Study of Rāga Pilu
Wang, Carmen
Musical Imagery and Structured Wholes: A Gestalt Account of Mental Representation
in alphabetical order
Athanasopoulos, George
Representing Music Across Cultures: From Sound to Drawings
Jindal, Shailesh
The Effect of Background Music on Emotional Expression in Children During a ‘Paint Your Emotion’ Activity: A Gestalt-Based Study
Wedam, Ute
Psychotherapy in Times of Social Transformation
Zoeller, Matthias and Sebastian Klotz
Gestalt-Theoretical Aspects of Randomness and Noise
in alphabetical order
Beers, Jean
How Do We Experience While We Create?
Tracing Emergent Gestalten in Improvisation through Experience-Based Scoring between Imagery, Perception, and Action
Biliousis, Stefanos and Sofia Dahl
EDM Break Routines: grouping percept and action tendency
Brieden, Felix
Political Detours of Gestalt Theory in Werner Wolff and Frantz Fanon
Langemeyer, Ines
What are holistic explanations – advantages and critique
Pirchner, Andreas
Remoteness and Presence in Temporal Gestalt Formation.
Recent research on crossmodal correspondences has shown that listeners consistently associate musical sounds with visual, emotional, and semantic features across cultures and developmental stages. Drawing on studies of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals, as well as recent work on multisensory mappings of consonance and dissonance, this presentation examines how musical structure, timbre, and interval relations shape audiovisual and affective associations. I argue that these findings support the existence of robust multisensory organisations linking music perception, conceptual representations, and emotional meaning. At the same time, they raise further questions concerning the origins and mechanisms of musical semantics.
Systematic relationships between auditory properties and musical characteristics on the one hand, and qualities of other sensory domains on the other, may contribute to the formation of extra-musical meaning. Although this is a vibrant field of research within experimental psychology and neuroscience, many fundamental questions remain open. Can sensory interactions be identified in musical works, and if so, how can such practices be situated within their historical or cultural contexts? Could insights into crossmodal relationships foster musical creativity? And finally, would cross-sensory extensions be valued by listeners in physical or digital environments, and what role do congruence and incongruence play in the design of multisensory musical experiences?
Connecting Perception, Feeling, and Thought: A Bayesian Model of Crossmodal Correspondences with Music
Crossmodal correspondences with musical properties—both in isolation and in musical contexts—have been extensively investigated through behavioural experiments. These experiments have revealed robust relationships between properties such as pitch and vertical position, object size and sharpness, tension, brightness, speed, and other features. In addition, various origins of these associations have been identified.
In musical contexts, numerous factors influence the multimodal experiences of listeners or performers. As a result, the correspondences that become salient for a particular context and individual are probabilistic rather than deterministic. This contribution examines the probabilistic nature of crossmodal correspondences with music and uses Bayes’ rule to model such associations.
Bayes’ rule is applied to connect musical properties with corresponding crossmodal associations, taking into account the information content of a property, the probability of the correspondence, and the degree of evidence supporting it. The application of Bayes’ rule and its predictions are evaluated using a range of musical examples. This modelling raises new questions about multimodal musical experiences while also proposing a possible underlying mechanism.
The strength of this approach lies in its capacity to formally investigate the factors influencing multimodal musical experiences. Different models can generate different predictions, for example by emphasising emotions as a source of correspondences or by defining expectations in advance.
Auditory Morphodynamics: A Gestalt-Based Approach to Investigating Audiovisual Associations in Sound Art
Research on crossmodal associations—particularly between auditory and visual domains—has increased considerably in recent years. Such associations are based on numerous factors ranging from early perceptual processes to higher-order cognitive inferences, as well as emotional and environmental influences. The emerging concept of stimulus morphodynamics offers a new framework for investigating crossmodal correspondences by focusing on the evolving properties of a stimulus and on its qualitative and quantitative continuities and discontinuities. Depending on morphodynamic complexity, such associations may arise from different kinds of perceptual similarity, ranging from structural matches to conceptual analogies.
This contribution examines morphodynamics through a Gestalt-based paradigm that links perceptual experience both to the structural properties and to the phenomenal appearance of a stimulus. Morphodynamic patterns can convey complex information emerging from the temporal development of sensory stimuli. Building on the author’s empirical studies, the contribution investigates the ability of auditory stimuli to carry non-auditory information. The results show that participants consistently associate musical and specially prepared sound materials—that is, electronically synthesised abstract sounds—with mental images reflecting specific material properties such as viscosity or elasticity, as well as with visual representations of objects embodying these properties.
At the centre of this study is the assumption that non-referential abstract sounds can evoke representations of the real world solely through their morphodynamic development. This finding demonstrates that sound patterns can convey non-auditory information and reveals a perceptual mechanism that extends beyond referential meaning. Such a perspective opens new avenues for understanding aesthetic perception in sound art and suggests that certain musical genres and sound practices—particularly those that minimise references to physical causality and symbolic meaning—may be experienced as inherently meaningful because of their dynamic form.
The Meta-Schema: Between Gestalt Perception, Crossmodal Correspondences, and Multimodal Semantics
At the intersection of Gestalt perception, cognitive psychology, and linguistics, this contribution proposes a new construct underlying concept formation: the meta-schema.
The common denominator of Gestalt theory, research on crossmodal correspondences, and the study of image schemas in cognitive linguistics lies in their focus on the active construction of experience by the cognitive system. Gestalt perception, for example, motivates organised configurations from scattered patterns of light, such as “a jagged star”. Image schemas preserve such constructs as templates for forming metaphorical meanings, such as “a jagged memory”. Finally, crossmodal correspondences explain both how holistic perception extends from one modality to another—as above, from visual perception to language—and how an established connection naturally motivates further multimodal meanings, such as a “jagged” musical timbre.
The present approach takes a further step towards abstraction by arguing that several image schemas that appear culturally and linguistically distinct—such as VERTICALITY, EXTENSION, and SOURCE–PATH–GOAL—are in fact based on a single system of higher-order principles. Thus, pitches that “go up” in some languages but “shrink”, “move in a circle”, become “smaller”, or become “lighter” in others are all based on an ordered system of primitive concepts: typically, an object that moves or transforms from point A to point B, the force required to set it in motion, the energy needed to sustain the direction of movement, and division into “units” marking the stages of that movement.
In the presentation, I will illustrate how this “meta-schema of pitch development” can be identified through perceptual experiments, historical texts, anthropological findings, and multimodal materials such as opera performances or album covers.
Chairs: Prof. Dr. Herbert Fitzek / Prof. Dr. Marianne Soff
This panel focuses on the “Berlin School of Gestalt Theory” and its heyday at the Psychological Institute of Friedrich Wilhelm University between 1922 and 1935—from its rooms in the palace, the atmosphere and forms of collaboration at the time, to scientific developments and practice-oriented advances extending into the present day.
Following the collapse of the German Empire, science also made a fresh start in the Weimar Republic. Gestalt theory found particularly favourable conditions in the rooms of the Psychological Institute of Friedrich Wilhelm University in the former Hohenzollern Palace. We aim to reconstruct how the institute established itself in the palace: How did Köhler, Wertheimer, and Lewin live, work, and conduct research? Which rooms did they occupy? What were their main areas of work? Who collaborated with them? Which doctoral students carried out research there? Who, apart from the representatives of Gestalt theory, belonged to the institute? And what was happening around the palace? How did Gestalt theory fit into the culture of 1920s Berlin?
In this introductory contribution to the panel, we provide an overview of the research and working conditions of those involved in Gestalt theory in 1920s Berlin, offering a concrete virtual glimpse into their place of work in the former Hohenzollern Palace.
Lewin was one of the central figures at the Berlin Institute of Gestalt Psychology. In 1928, he delivered a lecture entitled “The Development of Experimental Psychology of Will and Psychotherapy” at the Third General Medical Congress for Psychotherapy in Baden-Baden. In his lecture, Lewin demonstrated to the medical audience that experimentally oriented research conducted under real-life conditions could also provide a meaningful way of examining psychodynamic relationships. Almost 100 years later, the findings from research on action and affect psychology—also known as the “Berlin Experiments”—remain highly relevant.
Gestalt-Theoretical Psychotherapy (GTP), which places itself in the tradition of Gestalt psychology, has taken up key findings from this systematically structured experimental programme and transferred them to the field of psychotherapy. The following topics, each of major importance in psychotherapy, will be discussed by way of example:
Laboratory and online studies have shown that music influences mental imagery and guides imaginative experience. Natural language processing (NLP) methods have proved useful for investigating the content of such imagery. These studies have shown that listeners within a shared cultural context tend to converge on common ideas when interpreting musical excerpts narratively (Margulis et al., 2022). However, NLP approaches have not yet been applied to imagery elicited by live music—that is, in situations where audience demographics vary more widely and the musical stimuli are considerably longer than the 30–90-second excerpts typically used in laboratory-based NLP paradigms.
This presentation analyses freely formulated imagery elicited during a live chamber music concert. The concert formed part of a professionally organised subscription series and included works by Beethoven, Brahms, and Stephen Hough. Audience members completed a written questionnaire in which they described autobiographical memories and fictional stories associated with particular musical movements. Importantly, participants were not recruited in advance; they were invited on site to complete the questionnaire, allowing a real concert-going population to be studied. In total, 447 narratives were collected from 167 individuals.
Analyses using sentence embeddings (SBERT) and word embeddings (word2vec) showed that the imagery was guided by the musical content. Within individual movements, participants’ imagery was significantly more similar to the average of all other semantic embeddings for the same movement—the group “consensus”—than to the average embeddings of other movements. Specifically, mixed-effects modelling revealed a significant main effect for the comparison between within-movement and between-movement similarity (SBERT: β = 0.06, SE = 0.01, t = 9.75, p < .001; word2vec: β = 0.04, SE = 0.01, t = 6.65, p < .001). The semantic content at the level of individual musical movements will also be discussed.
The findings extend previous research to a naturalistic paradigm using complete musical works and show that, even in real-world contexts, individual imagery is shaped by musical features and can at the same time be shared to a high degree.
Recent research shows that spontaneous thoughts during music listening can include vivid autobiographical memories and fictional imagery. People experience their imagery as idiosyncratic and personal, yet analyses of free descriptions show that such imagery is in fact widely shared within a culture—even when it is elicited by new and unfamiliar musical excerpts. In addition to shared content, these imaginative experiences also unfold according to a shared temporal structure. Theoretical and methodological advances in the study of spontaneous thought during music listening therefore offer a unique perspective on involuntary mental imagery that is subjectively experienced while also being structurally linked to the musical stimulus.
My contribution focuses on bodily movement gestalts as the basis of mental images of musical sound—in what I have referred to as sound-motion objects. A closer examination of the properties of sound-producing movements can provide a broader ecological basis for understanding Gestalt formation in musical imagery.
It can be shown that fundamental movement principles such as frequency, amplitude, and quantity, together with their derivatives such as velocity, acceleration, jerk, and snap, may be present in sound-producing movements. Principles of motor control, including coarticulation and phase transitions, may likewise be involved. It may therefore be assumed that all of these aspects—to varying degrees—form integral components of musical imagery, in what I have called motor-mimetic imagery.
My central point is that these movement-related properties are real insofar as they belong to actual musical performances. At the same time, however, they often elude more conventional, note-centred Western conceptions of musical imagery.
Clients with schizoid personality organisation often present a particular challenge in verbal psychotherapy because of their tendency towards emotional withdrawal, dissociation, and intellectualisation. Although they frequently possess strong capacities for reflection, establishing emotional contact within approaches such as Gestalt psychotherapy can be difficult and may lead to therapeutic stagnation.
This presentation examines how Guided Imagery and Music (GIM) can support therapeutic work with schizoid-structured clients by making emotional and symbolic material accessible that cannot be reached through verbal interaction alone. GIM uses music to foster altered states of consciousness and spontaneous imagery, enabling clients to explore their inner experiences through images, metaphors, and narrative processes.
People with schizoid personality organisation often have a rich inner fantasy life that should not be understood solely as a defence mechanism, but can also be used as a therapeutic resource. GIM provides direct access to this imaginal world, where clients can encounter emotionally significant content and relational themes in a less threatening, non-verbal form.
The presentation shows how GIM can be integrated within a Gestalt-therapeutic framework and can support the transition from imaginal experience to relational processing. Clinical insights illustrate how music and imagery can foster emotional access, symbolic expression, and greater integration by bridging the gap between cognitive insight and lived emotional experience.
Developed by Wilhelm Salber in the second half of the twentieth century, Psychological Morphology forms the basis of psychological teaching and research at the BSP Business & Law School in Berlin and Hamburg. Drawing on depth psychology and Gestalt psychology, it developed into an approach that takes the formations of everyday life and culture as its starting point and investigates, in particular, phenomena in business, media, and sport from a psychological perspective. Examples from morphological research illustrate how this approach is applied in practice.
Prof. Dr. Dirk Blothner: Practising Psychology with a Drawing Pen – Wilhelm Salber’s Psychological Sketches
Prof. Dr. Björn Zwingmann: Morphological Film Analysis of Air (Ben Affleck, 2023)
Prof. Dr. Johanna Hodde: Between Anarchy and Dictatorship: The Experience of Art as a Cultural Parameter, Illustrated by Arnold Böcklin’s Painting The Sacred Grove (1882)
Dr. Sven Giebel: Pre-Gestalt Analysis and Advertising Impact
Prof. Dr. Andreas Marlovits: Forms of Play – A Morphological Analysis of Football Matches
in alphabetical order
Deniz Duma, Deniz, Daniel Turner, Dana Schwarbrick, Andrew Danso, Margarida Baltazar
Altered Attention States During Musical Engagement: Affective, Bodily, and Social Experiences
Gur, Amit
Form and Material in Visual and Auditory Perception
Pibert, Johann
AI and Vitality: Vitality Forms as Affective Gestalts in Film Psychology
Sunar, Neesa
A Theoretical Synthesis of 20th Century Perspectives on Musical Inner Hearing by Edwin E. Gordon and Paul Hindemith