German: Gestalt |
Gestalt is a German word meaning an organized pattern or whole which has properties other than those of its components in isolation.
The experimental study of gestalts began in 1910 with the study of certain phenomena of perception, and led to a school of thought known as "gestalt psychology" which was based on a holistic concept of mind and body and which stressed the psychological importance of body presentation.
These ideas formed the basis of Gestalt therapy as developed by Paul Goodman, Fritz Perls and Ralph Hefferline.
When Lacan refers to the gestalt, he refers specifically to one kind of oganized pattern, namely the visual image of another member of the same species, which is perceived as a unified whole.
Such an image is a gestalt because it has an effect which none of its component parts have in isolation; this effect is to act as a "releasing mechanism" (French: déclencheur) which triggers certain instinctual responses, such as reproductive behavior.
In other words, when an animal perceives a unified image of another member of its species, it responds in certan instinctual ways.
Lacan gives many examples from ethology of such instinctual responses to images, but his main interest is in the way the gestalt functions in human beings.
For humans the body image is also a gestalt which produces instinctual responses, especially sexual ones, but the power of the image is also more than merely instinctual; it constitutes the essential captivating power of the specular image (see captation).
It is by identifying with the unified gestalt of the body image that the ego is constantly threatened by fears of disintegration, which manifest themselves in images of the fragmented body; these images represent the opposite of the unified gestalt of the body image.