The German word gestalt was first introduced to me in my Psych 101 college freshman class many, many years ago. Since then, and during my wartime Navy experiences and following 40-year career of writing advertising and sales promotion material for our company’s 50,000 insurance agents, the word never came up once. Neither did the use of calculus and plane geometry, which I also just barely passed in college.
Just to jog my memory, I recently looked up the definition gestalt in the dictionary. According to history, it was first thought up by Max Wertheimer, one of those gritty, guttural German psych guys who dominated the mental health business and all the words they created in the last century. Loosely described, gestalt concerns an entity, physical, biological, psychological or imaginary. It is so constructed that each individual part of it is not as powerful or important that the combination of all.
In literal terms that I can understand, an example would be a lone sailor couldn’t operate a battleship by himself. However, a thousand of us working together would have the gestalt to turn it into a powerful weapon. To put it another way, once you put the pieces together of whatever you’re building in your basement or brain, the whole megillah is bigger and better than all the individual stuff that went into building it up into a great idea or mental case. OK, now you understand the word as well as I do. Expect a surprise quiz in class tomorrow.
My favorite example of the fun gestalt can be if it really wants to was put forth by a Broadway critic a couple of years ago. He was talking about my favorite movie of all time, “The Producers”, which had just been declared a great hit on Broadway. To summarize, he said the dialogue was silly and the words were shouted out by the hyperactive actors running around the stage like a burlesque routine.
He added that the dance numbers were as corny and predictable as the early MGM movie musicals. He commented that the only reason the inept songs worked were that they seemed to be placed in the right spots to move the play along. Did he have the nerve to trash what I considered the greatest show ever to hit Broadway and the movie theaters?
Then the critic reached back into Herr Wertheimer’s brain and my heart, and declared that the sum of all those not-so-great parts … songs, dances, dialog … all added up to a smash Broadway hit. Now, that’s the kind of gestalt I can understand!
