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or directedness of consciousness. Brentano’s students, especially Christian von Ehrenfels, Carl Stumpf, and Edmund Husserl , integrated Act Psychology with Mach’s work on dynamics. Von Ehrenfels in particular elaborated Mach’s concept of form quality ( gestaltqualitäten ) addressing the ways in which form is automatically given in perception rather than being a causal result of sensory combinations (=associanism) (B. Smith, 1995). Stumpf and Husserl each elaborated a system of “phenomenology,” focusing on the first-person experience of intentionality. Husserl in particular initiated a radical challenge to dualistic thinking that influenced much of later Continental philosophy. The distinction between intentionality and other scientific explanations has roots in a differentiation between causal and teleological explanations as discussed in ancient Greek philosophy but was taken up by 19th- and 20th-century thinkers to differentiate positivist and descriptive orientations in the physical and social sciences. (See Dilthey (1883/1967), Lewin (1935), and Wright (1971) for expositions on these traditions of thought.) Three of Stumpf’s students ( Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler ) began a series of studies evolving from Stumpf’s assertion that the whole is different than the sum of its parts. Although Gestalt psychology began with studies of perceptual organization, the three thinkers, along with their most prominent students, Kurt Lewin and Kurt Goldstein , gradually elaborated general principles of the dynamics of behavior and experience applicable to learning, cognition, creativity, motivation, group dynamics, and other social phenomena. It is through the integrations of Gestalt principles that the concept of the field came to prominence in relation to psychological processes. The first implicit use of the field concept was made in the examination of visual-perceptual phenomena. Drawing from the work of von Ehrenfels, Wertheimer (1925/1938) demonstrated that elementary inputs and processes of perception are organized into meaningful wholes that are being experienced prior to the elements that constituted the whole. In addition, he showed how the nature of the whole or form is determined by the inter-relationship of its parts, and by the context in which the form is found. This is to say that every figure has its background or field; that a figure never exists in isolation without a field. The characteristics of the ground reciprocally determine the characteristics of the form in meaningful configurations. Further, forms (gestalts) are created in the act of perception, not simply at the level of brain activity. They are the outcome of the complex whole of the perceptual process. This early use of the field concept, emphasizing contextualization and interdependence in perception, was generalized to other kinds of phenomena. For example, a seemingly simple motor reflex changes significantly in different fields. If one’s foot gets caught behind a root when hiking, the flexor muscles of the foot suddenly relax to prevent a fall. But if one mis-steps when descending a steep hill, the flexor muscles contract. Rather than understand these reflexes as elementary stimulus-reaction associations, they are seen as holistic reactions where “the stimuli appear in different total situations, or to put it differently, when they have different meanings for the organism” (Goldstein, 1939, p. 166). Each reflex, although stimulated similarly, takes place in a different field as a “total situation” (p. 166), and thus is organized differently. Put another way, the particular kind of engagement and meaning of experience takes shape in contexts.
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