Cultural–Historical Gestalt Theory and Beyond: “The Russians Are Coming!”

Abstract

In French, “Bande-annonce” means nothing else but a “trailer”: a short movie clip a few minutes long, created for promotional purposes to advertise for a new cinematographic piece to be shortly released on the screens of movie theaters. Yet, if read through the eyes of a German speaker, this very phrase—with certain liberty taken—can be interpreted as something like a classified advertisement (“Annonce”) for a new book, a volume (“Band”) to appear. And true, a new book is to come out in the more-or-less distant future. So, this article can be regarded as an announcement of a new book. In the meantime, let us have a closer look at the terminological monstrosity in the title: the “cultural–historical Gestalt psychology”. This phraseological creature hardly walks and will never fly: obscure, mysterious, and repulsive, it might weakly crawl at best, if only survives. The reader of these lines is pleaded to forgive me the irony of saying all this, but the phrase is really awkward and most likely confusing, indeed. And yet, here it is: here, it stands as the subject matter of this very paper, which not only presents an intellectual provocation (hopefully, in the positive meaning of the word, like in the expression “thought-provoking”) but also offers – what I believe – is a really new and exciting pathway in this science of humans.