This school of thought was established in the year 1912 by three German psychologists Max Wertheimer (1880-1941) and his colleagues Kurt Koffka (1886-1941) and Wolfgang Kohler (1887- 1967).

The term Gestalt means ‘Form’ or ‘Configuration’. These psychologists opposed the atomistic or molecular approach to study behaviour. They said the mind is not made up of elements and hence it can be understood better only if we study it as a whole.

The main principle of Gestalt school is “whole is better than sum total of its parts”. According to it, the individual perceives a thing as a whole and not as a mere collection of elements. In the same way the sensation or perception will be experienced as a whole. For example, when we look at a wooden table, we do not look it as a bundle of different pieces, but as a whole, only then we perceive it as a meaningful object.

As a result, human behaviour is characterized as an intelligent behaviour, rather than a simple stimulus-response mechanism. In this way Gestalt psychology strongly opposed the points of view of other schools.

19. Define peculiarities of Z. Freud's psychoanalysis approach.

Psychology was mainly concentrating on the normal human psyche, until the arrival of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) who founded the school of Psychoanalysis. This theory emerged from the clinical background of mental patients.

Freud developed his theory based on unconscious motivation. It includes different concepts like conscious, sub-conscious, unconscious behaviour, structure of psyche, repression, catharsis, psycho-sexual development of child, libido, dream analysis, etc. which help to analyse the total human behaviour, particularly from the point of view of understanding abnormal behaviour.

With the opinion that, Freud has given excessive importance to sex, two of his followers got separated and established their own school of thought. Alfred Adler (1870-1937) started ‘Individual psychology’ in which he placed power motive in place of Freud’s sex and, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) started ‘Analytical Psychology’, which emphasises the development of individual personality from the “Collective Unconscious”.

Some other psychologists influenced by Freud who were known as Neo Freudians, also have contributed a lot to modern psychology. Some of the notable figures are Anna Freud (the daughter of Freud), Karen Horney, Sullivan, Eric Fromm, Erik Erickson, etc.

20. Reveal peculiar features of neo-behavioral psychology.

The second phase of behaviorism, neobehaviorism, was associated with Edward C. Tolman (1886–1959), Clark Hull (1884–1952), and B. F. Skinner (1904–1990). Like Thorndike, Watson, and Pavlov, the neobehaviorists believed that the study of learning and a focus on rigorously objective observational methods were the keys to a scientific psychology. Unlike their predecessors, however, the neobehaviorists were more self-consciously trying to formalize the laws of behavior. They were also influenced by the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, a group of philosophers led by Rudolph Carnap (1891–1970), Otto Neurath (1882–1945), and Herbert Feigl (1902–1988), who argued that meaningful statements about the world had to be cast as statements about physical observations. Anything else was metaphysics or nonsense, not science, and had to be rejected. Knowledge, according to the logical positivists, had to be built on an observational base, and could be verified to the extent that it was in keeping with observation.

A professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, Tolman focused his experimental work largely on white rats learning their way through mazes. He differed from his behaviorist predecessors by taking a more holistic approach to behavior than they had. Rather than talking in terms of atomistic, isolated stimuli and responses, Tolman emphasized their integration with the environment by referring to them as "stimulating agencies" and "behavior acts." In his 1932 Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men, Tolman argued that purpose and cognition were essential to behavior and should be Yvonne Skinner and daughter with experimental psychologist B. F. Skinner's invention, the "baby box," 1945. The "baby box" was a glassed-in playpen in which temperature and humidity were automatically controlled. Skinner's youngest daughter spent her infancy in one. Controversial and misunderstood by the general public, the box was intended by Skinner to serve in the same capacity as a crib, but with an enhanced environment to keep a child safe and healthy.

Of the three neobehaviorists, Hull was the most ambitious about constructing a formal theory of behavior. He believed he had found the fundamental law of learning or habit-formation—the law of stimulus generalization—and that this law not only underlay all behavior in animals and humans, but was a principle basic enough to unify all the social sciences.