Wertheimer on Gestalt laws of Seeing and of Mental Health¹

Around 100 years ago, Max Wertheimer’s famous work “Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt II” was published, in which he first presented what has since been widely referred to as the “Gestalt laws” (albeit not always appropriately). What is less well known is that Wertheimer at the same time dictated the fundamental theses on the development and healing of mental disorders to the German psychiatrist Heinrich Schulte for an article that can be regarded as the cornerstone for Gestalt psychological psychopathology. A comparison of the two studies shows that Wertheimer pursued the same far-reaching project in both works, namely, to decipher the “inner structural laws” of Gestalten – in the first work for the area of simple instances of seeing, in the other for the area of community in human life and its role in mental health. This shows that Wertheimer’s project of exploring the “structural laws of Gestalt” had more and something different as its goal than the often-simplified understanding of the “Gestalt laws” in textbooks and on the Internet would suggest.