Volume 13, Number 11 · December 18, 1969
How's your Gestalt?
By D.W. Harding
The Task of Gestalt Psyhology
by Wolfgang Köhler, with an Introduction by Carroll C. Pratt
Princeton University Press, 172 pp., $6.50
Even now when people speak of 'psychology' in its bearing on human life and civilized interests they mean, nine times out of ten, psychoanalysis. For two generations of educated non-specialists this has been the psychology that counts. Over against it are the vaguely pictured ranks of behaviorists, preoccupied with rats and statistics, hostile to psychoanalysis, impinging on practical affairs only through programmed instruction, the exorcism of symptoms by behavior therapy, and the conditioning of dolphins for military exploits. Caricature though it is, this picture has served well enough while the implications of psychoanalysis were being assimilated into general thinking. Time was needed to adjust our sight to the light thrown by analysis on the deviousness of motive and the mechanisms by which the civilized masquerade is worked. Lust, anger, pride, envy, avarice, sloth, and gluttony—under other names—have been illuminated as never before, and their continuity with the bases of biological existence laid bare in a way that makes us ask whether avoiding the seven deadly sins may not be as sinful as committing them. The analysand threads his slow way through the labyrinth to find that the minotaur is himself and they had better come to terms.
Review, 3059 words
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