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constitutes the “gestalt” of a given culture. Benedict (1934) argued that far from a catalogue of customs and traits, one must study the whole configuration or field of a culture, discerning patterns of relationships (p. 50). Mead introduced Koffka’s work to Edward Sapir, who indicated that Gestalt psychology “provides a background for a philosophy of culture . . . an echo telling me what my intuition never quite had the courage to say out loud” (King & Wertheimer, 2005, p. 300). Sapir (1929/1949) was a brilliant field researcher whose methods for investigating Native American dialects took into account the effect of the researcher on the subjects of study. He examined the relationships between verbal expression (phonemes), thinking and personality in constituting culture as a dynamic system, how language itself is an act of relatedness. His interest in how individuals change within their culture led him to interdisciplinary studies and to a collaboration and friendship with Harry Stack Sullivan beginning in 1926. Sullivan was already adept in his own field work with his Pilot Ward at Sheppard Hospital, but he lacked a larger theoretical context for his developing ideas. Sapir and his colleagues at the Chicago School provided such a context, helping him elaborate a critique of individualism and an integration of his psychiatric studies with the social sciences (Conci, 2010). George Herbert Mead had brought his colleague Sapir to the University of Chicago where John Dewey was well on the way to developing his pragmatic approach to psychological and social theory. Dewey (1896), a student of Josiah Royce and C. S. Peirce, had published “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” arguing against a linear stimulus-response understanding in favor of a “circular” description where the designation of a stimulus in relation to a response depends on the nature of the situation. Mead also had a strong pragmatic background from study with William James. These pragmatic thinkers, like the Gestaltists, rejected causal and reductionist explanations in favor of descriptions of actual experience, examining the development of self in the objectivity of the social world. For Mead (1982), “the individual mind can exist only in relation to other minds with shared meanings” (p. 5). Meaning is created through human action and interaction, where the self emerges through a social process. Harry Stack Sullivan ’s interpersonal field is significant in this rich context. The field for Sullivan is not a psychoanalytic concept but refers to the profound interdependence of individuals in an interpersonal situation, where the person is social, where self is found in the reflected appraisals of others. Given pragmatic influence, this is a field that can be observed, concerning what people do with each other, not what they fantasize (Levenson, 1981). Clearly, this rich context of thought informed his formulations regarding interdependence as a field concept. This was bedrock in his thinking providing the ground for interpersonal psychoanalysts leading to the relational turn, something to be discussed later in this entry. Although Gestalt principles were prominent throughout Europe in the first half of the 20th century, they took a central role in the work of an increasingly influential thinker in French philosophy. Maurice Merleau-Ponty , a close friend to Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, taught first at the Sorbonne and then was Chair of Philosophy at the College de France from 1952 until his untimely death in 1961. He was introduced to Gestalt thinking by
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