Gestalt Psychology and Expressive Language: Before Arnheim

While the Gestaltists worked on music perception, lack of attention to poetic language is striking. Indeed, there was no “gestalt linguistics” until the term began to be used in the 1990s (Petitot, Wildgen, Brandt). True, the Vienna psychologist Karl Bühler wrote on language. However, his orientation was opposed to Berlin in ways that actually divide along the question of the immediacy of images (Berlin) and the act of judgment of language (Vienna). One could make the larger point that the original Gestaltists never dealt with symbolism, signs and semiotics.

In the post-war years, Arnheim intended to write significantly on language but only produced his “Abstract Language and the Metaphor” (1948). Nevertheless, there was a good deal of analysis of language in poetry and literature such that one can say that a significant, in minor, bibliography exists on such media. This paper reviews discussions of language in the Gestalt school and the scattered observations on authors by figures like N. R. F. Maier, Fritz Heider, and others. The conclusion is that these psychologists specifically chose not to delve too much into the specificity of language, retrieving from poetic works general principles, perhaps in light of psychology as a “young science.”