The Expressive Self: Gestalt Psychology, Art and

Personality

Aesthetics in the 18th century

• Aesthetics: study of perception, sensory experience as opposed to conceptual thought.

• About human perception of artistic form:Edmund Burke, Baumgarten, Kant, Shaftesbury

• Eventually also came to encompass notion of the beautiful

Gustav Fechner (1801-1887)1860: Elements of Psychophysics1876: Vorschule der Aesthetik

Weber/Fechner’s Law: intensity of a sensation increases as the log of the stimulus (S = k log R)

Conducted Studies on the Golden Ratio/Golden Section: Ratio of AC to CB is the same as AC to AB (1: 1.618)

Robert Vischer (1873)“Über das optische Formgefühl” (On the Optical Sense of Form)

Einfühlung (“feeling into”) becamepopular in German psychological aesthetics beginning in the 1870s

History of “Empathy” as “Einfühlung”German Psychological Aesthetics

From: Dekorative Kunst: Illustrierte Zeitschrift fuer Angewandte Kunst, Band 1, (Munich: H.Bruckman & Paris, J. Meier-Graefe, 1898) p. 76

Credited with the translation of Einfühlung

as “empathy” “Not only do I see gravity and modesty and pride and courtesy and stateliness, but I feel or act them in the mind’s muscles. This is, I suppose, a simple case of empathy, if we may coin that term as a rendering of Einfühlung” (1909; 21).

Edward Bradford Titchener(1867-1927)

“With an image of a bunch of grapes the observer spoke of “a cool, juicy feeling all over:” with a parrot, of “a feeling of smoothness and softness all over me: not tactual [i.e. not cutaneous];” with a fish, of “cool, pleasant sensations all up my arms; slippery feeling in my throat; coolness in my eyes. The object spreads all over me and I over it; it is not referred to me but I belong to it.”

From: C. Perky “An Experimental Study of Imagination” American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Jul. 1910), 448

June Etta Downey (1875-1932)Studied at University Chicago

Professor of PhilosophyHead of Philosophy/Psych. Dept

At University of WyomingWrote Creative Imagination (1929)

Herbert Sydney Langfeld (1879-1959)Studied with Stumpf, University of BerlinProfessor, Harvard 1910 -1924Head of Psychology Laboratory, PrincetonThe Aesthetic Attitude (1920)

From Keat’s Hyperion:

“Upon the sodden groundHis old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,

Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;While his bowed head seem’d list’ning to the Earth,

His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.”

Subject D: “Perfectly clear-cut visual image of the old

man in the posture described. Tactual and kinaesthetic feeling of the sodden ground. Feeling of weight and relaxation

in right hand. Kinaesthetic feeling of bowed head and of closed yes. Auditory attention, with strain in ear”

Subject 2 ”Put self into the old man and slight tendency to get outside and

see old man.” (CI, 188).

Subject 3“As Observer I am north-east of visualized self and of old man.

Visual self about one hundred feet off, looking at old man who is twenty feet farther off.

No imitation of old man’s posture.”

Downey, 1912, p. 308

Wheeled clouds, which as they roll

Over the grass, and flowers, and waves, wake sounds,Sweet as a singing rain of silver dew.”

Shelley

Subject M: “Movement in chest; spreading forward of hands in

space. Feet not on ground. Become the cloud; feel of the cloud. The cloud, if conscious, would feel thus.”

(Downey, CI, 189)

Entombment, by Raphael (Villa Borghese, Rome)

Pietà , Perugino(Academy, Florence)

The Dream of St. Ursula, Vittorio Carpaccio, 1495

Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Botticelli, Portrait of a Young Woman (Berlin)

Kurt Koffka

Max Wertheimer

Wolfgang Köhler

Kurt Lewin

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGISTS

Examples of the Phi PhenomenonMax Wertheimer, 1912

“Gestalt” = Form, Configuration

Figure-Ground Gestalt Images

Study of the Regular Division of the Plane with Horsemen , By Dutch artist M.C. Escher (1898-1972)

Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007) Gestalt Psychologist of Art

Art and Visual Perception (1954)Towards a Psychology of Art (1966)

Visual Thinking (1969)

But if I sit in front of a fireplace and watch the flames, I do not normally register certain shades of red, various degrees of brightness, geometrically defined shapes moving at such and such a speed. I see the graceful play of aggressive tongues, flexible striving, lively color. The face of a person is more readily perceived and remembered as being alert, tense, concentrated rather than being triangularly shaped, having slanted eyebrows, straight lips, and so on.

(Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 1954, 430)

Herman Rorschach1884-1922

“Experiencing Types”

Common response: bat, butterfly or moth

Common response—two humans

Common Response:.pink animal

Common response—blue crab, lobster, spider

Rorschach Testing, c.1930

The Psychological Corporation 1921

• J. McKeen Cattell, President• Approximately 20 psychologists as directors.• Guaranteed training and standards of its

members (compiled a “black list of charlatans and ignoramuses” to be avoided).

• Aims: construct standardized tests; vocational guidance; job analysis; efficiency engineering; research for business concerns; research on conduct and control.

Source: J. McKeen Cattell, “The Psychological Corporation” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Vol.110), Psychology in Business (Nov. 1923) 165-171

Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

• Henry Murray and Christina Morgan devised it in 1935.

• Evoke unconscious fantasies• Freudian bent to the interpretation• Subjects offered their own interpretations

of ambiguous social situations• Subjects would project their own

complexes onto images

From TAT

From TAT

Myers-Briggs Personality Test

Check out the website:humanmetrics.comto take your own personality test witha version of the Myers-Briggs

“There are hours when I go out from myself and live in a plant, when I feel myself as the grass, as bird, as tree-top, clouds—hours when I run, fly, swim, when I unfold myself in the sun, when I sleep under leaves, when I float with the larks or creep with the lizards, when I shine in the stars and fire-flies, when, in short, I live in every object which affords an extension of my existence.”

George Sand, as quoted in Downey, Creative Imagination, 1929