No place could be better suited than Vienna for reflecting on connections between
psychoanalysis and Gestalt theory. Vienna is the spiritual birthplace of both schools
of thought. Moreover, Vienna was the site of a personal exchange of ideas between
the founders of these schools of thought, Sigmund FREUD and Christian von EHRENFELS.
Certainly their exchange of views at the time focussed exclusively on the engagement
of Christian von EHRENFELS in the field of sexual reforms and did not include his
theoretical Gestalt studies of which FREUD was not aware. Had FREUD been aware of
these ideas of von EHRENFELS, he would have, in all likelyhood, been struck by the
correspondance between some of his own ideas and the principles of Gestalt theory.
For example, there is a distinct relationship between FREUDs concept of over-determination
of psychic processes and the Gestalt principle of over-summativity.
In his essay "Die Gestalttheorie", published in 1934, psychologist and
psychoanalyst Siegfried BERNFELD finally elaborated the numerous correspondancies
between FREUDs writings and principles of Gestalt theory. He arrived at the hypothesis
that Gestalt psychology's findings on the psychology of perception could complement
and corroborate psychoanalytic assumptions about infantile development. He attributed
to the infant complex and differentiated abilities of perception. During the last
thirty years of baby research it has been possible to corroborate these assumptions
empirically.
From the first days of life, infants actively perceive their environment and can,
in part at least, integrate these very complicated perceptual attainments into holistic
representations. They especially have the ability to take the stimuli from various
sense modalities and integrate them into a unified perception. This intermodal coordination
is analogous to the transposability principle in Gestalt theory. Further principles
of Gestalt are apparent already in infants: for example, the principal of proximity,
the principle of similarity and the principle of good Gestalt. Furthermore, small
children are capable of rather precise time and intensity perceptions. This makes
it possible for them to represent courses of intensity (Intensitätsverläufe)
and developmental Gestalten (Verlaufsgestalten).
The perception of courses of intensity and developmental Gestalten opens up certain
experiential qualities which have been designated vitality affects by the developmental
psychologist Daniel STERN. Of interest are dynamic developmental qualities such
as quick, sudden, flowing, fluctuating, and crescendo-decrescendo. These dynamic
qualities have been described by METZGER as character properties (Wesenseigenschaften);
in his opinion, they are dominant in the experiential world of the infant. These
temporal feeling forms make the earliest representations of interactive affective
experience possible. Such representation of interactive experience produce the precursor
for subsequent relationship representations (Beziehungsrepräsentationen), and,
accordingly, take their place at the earliest stages of the development of the inner
world. In psychoanalysis the inner world is understood to mean the network of relational
representations, which come from internalized experiences of relationships and have
the status of schemes in the sense of un-experiental psychic organizational structures.
The earliest proto-representations of concrete interaction experiences are then
successively integrated into generalized interaction representations. This integration
takes place in the memory and is, once again, enabled by the ability of amodal Gestalt
representation.
This ability provides even infants with the possibility of an affective, intersubjective
exchange. For example, as a mother perceives the expressive behaviour of the baby
and answers with the same emotive pattern in a different modality, the infant is
able to recognize that his or her subjective experience is shared by the mother.
Daniel STERN designates this preverbal inter-subjective exchange "affect attunement",
others speak of "matching".
In the process of affect attunement expressive behaviour functions as a sign of
the emotive state. Thereby the phenomenal world is transformed into a sign world
of the developing inner world. This semiotic developmental process creates an intensive
knit of the inner world and the phenomenal world. The construction of the phenomenal
world is now subject to the provision that it is compatible with an emotional balance
of the inner world. In the case that the phenomenal world contains indications of
very painful or threatening interaction representations, the corresponding perceived
contents will be blocked out or reconstructed.
This has been systematically described under the psychoanalitical concept of defense.
Furthermore, the inner world actively begins to enact productions in the phenomenal
world, for example, in dreams and fantasies. Dreams and fantasies serve the function
of experientially acting out unconscious problem-solving-processes of the inner
world, and in this way testing and examining them.
In conclusion, it has been established that gestaltic, global and intermodal perception
is an essential organizer of the self and environmental experiences of an infant.
Perception structures not only the phenomenal worl of the nfant, but also establishes
the structure of the inner world. Thereby, the inner world emerges out of the phenomenal
world and already begins in the process of its composition to react upon the phenomenal
world.
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