Q.Describe the Gestalt school of psychology and explain how it differed from structuralism.

Gestalt psychology, which emerged in Germany in the early twentieth century, argued that perceptual experience is always more than the sum of its individual parts, directly rejecting structuralism's attempt to break the mind down into separate structural components. …

Gestalt psychology is a school of psychological thought that emerged in Germany in the early twentieth century, specifically as a reaction against the structuralism founded by Wilhelm Wundt. Structuralism, dominant from psychology's formal beginning in 1879, tried to understand the mind by using introspection -- asking trained subjects to describe their conscious experience in careful detail -- in order to identify and analyse the basic structural building blocks that made up that experience, treating the mind rather like a machine that could be taken apart into its component pieces.

Gestalt psychologists rejected this basic assumption. They argued that a person's perceptual experience of the world is always more than, and different from, the sum of the individual sensory components feeding into it -- in other words, experience cannot simply be broken down into separate structural parts and then reassembled, because the very act of perceiving organises those parts into something new. The chapter offers two clear illustrations of this idea. When light from a rapid series of separate, individually flashing bulbs falls on the retina, what a person actually experiences is not a sequence of discrete flashes but continuous movement of light. Likewise, when a person watches a movie, what is physically falling on their retina is really a fast-moving series of separate still photographs, yet what they experience is one smooth, ongoing, continuous scene. In both cases, the experienced whole is qualitatively different from -- and more than -- a simple sum of the separate physical inputs; this is exactly what is meant by describing perceptual experience as holistic, or as a Gestalt (an organised, meaningful whole). …