Cultural Patterns and Constructive Psychology

Psychologists very often have felt that the psychic life is more or less mechanical and automatic. An autonomous psychic life has not been acknowledged by them. However, there exists a psychology, gestalt psychology, which holds the belief that psychological reactions are definite patterns dependent upon the total situation. Such definite patterns are called configurations or gestalten. These units of experience are reached in a process of development which depends on the organization of the perceptual field and of the processes in the organism. In this psychology, the past experience, purpose and intention, and the dynamics of the total personality, are not sufficiently stressed. The inner forces of organization and development are put into the foreground and no great importance is ascribed to the continuous experimentation by which human beings try to reach their goal. I am of the opinion that we reach the units of perception as well as any unit in psychic life by trial and error. Errors lead to incomplete experiences; the incompleteness is felt and corrective processes take place. We have reached the goal when a unit of perception or action is reached in which the parts fit the whole. If one says that the goal is reached when there is satisfaction, one stresses too much the subjective side of experience and forgets that human beings are genuinely in the world.

Such a trial and error method is also at play when we attain our basic insight into the appearance of the human body. Everybody thinks he knows what the human body is like and what his own body is like. We are all too much inclined to think that this image is an entity given us at birth with nothing added. However, when one studies the body image, one realizes that the body image is not given to us as a definite gestalt but is attained by constant experimentation. The child does not have any reliable knowledge