Gestalt psychology

Gestalt psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology, and a theory of perception, that emphasizes psychologically processing entire patterns (and "configurations"), not merely individual components of situations or events separately. It emerged in the early twentieth century in Germany and Austria as a rejection of basic principles of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward Titchener's elementalist and structuralist psychology.

Gestalt psychology is often associated with the idea that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. In Gestalt theory, information is perceived as wholes rather than disparate parts which are then processed summatively. As used in Gestalt psychology, the German word Gestalt ( ; German:; meaning "form") is interpreted as "pattern" or "configuration".

It differs from Gestalt therapy, which is only peripherally linked to Gestalt psychology.