On the Position of Salber’s Cultivation Spiral in Psychological Morphology

Gestalt was a central concept in Wilhelm Salber’s Psychological Morphology from the very beginning. By applying this to complex life histories and social contexts, he asked himself how constant change and the development of such complex structures can be theoretically understood. In the model of the “Cultivation Spiral”, Salber found a theoretical-methodological approach in the last years of his work to analyse the struggle for survival of psychic gestalten, which is challenging to constant transformation. Even though this model was never presented in detail by Salber himself, it paints a picture of the human mind that can be understood as a valuable contribution to psychological Gestalt theory.